Not Your Mother and Father’s Peace Movement
It was far from the New Jersey border with Delaware that I lost my faith in anything resembling a vibrant peace movement. I think it dropped away bit by bit, much like the wearing away of mountains or the slow melt of ice and snow in a New England winter (even in this age of global warming). It has progressed for years, accelerating after the anti-nuclear (nuclear freeze) movement of the early 1980s. Somewhat like the aging process, it’s not noticed at first, but follows an inexorable and irreversible course. Being a war resister from the Vietnam era, I retained the ideal of holding onto ideals longer than most.
I hadn’t noticed that people I knew from the 60s had ensconced themselves in academia, becoming careerists while I put in thirty years in public schools then worked with students at community colleges with reading and writing skills. Careerism meant nothing to me. Working was a way to pay bills and help support a family. When the late activist Abbie Hoffman spoke to students in the late 1980s and commented how few would remain activists, I foolishly believed that at least a small number of those he addressed would hold onto youthful ideals and actually try to change the world.
Back to the New Jersey Turnpike. I read the announcement on the website of The World Can’t Wait during the early summer, about a demonstration that was planned in Washington, D.C. for October 5, 2009. The demonstration would involve civil disobedience at the White House against the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq. I began readying myself to be arrested after a hiatus of thirty-six years. I contacted the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance through a link at The World Can’t Wait website. I even forgot, momentarily, the sense of isolation that comes with following Left principles: how often it is either difficult or impossible to connect with people with whom to travel with to demonstrations. Even though busloads of people still traveled to demonstrations when Bush was inaugurated and when his administration launched the Iraq War, I often felt alone as I headed for these events. By that time, much of the antiwar movement was composed of the remnants of the Vietnam antiwar movement and others committed to activism by way of religious convictions. But just as Abbie Hoffman knew it (a reader could sense it in his later essays): I knew it. When the 1960s and early 1970s ended, something untouchable had changed. The close camaraderie of that period disappeared after the shock of Kent State and the subsequent end of the Vietnam War.
As this past summer ended, I began writing to The World Can’t Wait asking that they put me in touch with other activists from Western Massachusetts who might have expressed an interest in traveling to the demonstration. E-mails to both Veterans for Peace and Code Pink for leads to others who would travel to the demonstration went unanswered. I contacted a few people with whom I had vigiled against war in the town where I live, but there was no interest in going to D.C. Eventually, both The World Can’t Wait and the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance came through and I began writing to find out if I could link up with these organizations and travel with others. But somehow schedules never could be coordinated. One person wanted to leave in the middle of the night, which I was not willing to do. Another expressed apprehension about traveling with someone she did not know (understandable), and in any case, did not plan to return to New England before later in the week when I would have had to be at work. And the wished–for busloads of demonstrators would never materialize, as much an indication of a weak “movement” as to the demonstration’s scheduling on a workday on the eighth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Afghanistan.
In the coffeehouse where I am writing, a poster of Barack Obama hangs that simply reads “Hope.” I’m writing on the day when I would have been arrested for civil disobedience had I continued on my trip to D.C. The red, black, white, and blue of the poster is quite attractive. It is set against the beauty of an early-fall New England midday with cloudy skies, still vibrant green grass, and the red, brown, yellow, and orange of swamp maples already changed. Just last week, as General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Commander of military forces in Afghanistan, requested an additional 40,000 troops for Afghanistan from Obama, and the Right began banging the bellicose drums of war. In a recent interview, the writer Gore Vidal predicts that the U.S. will move toward fascism in the near future (“We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US” Times Online, September 30, 2009).
Reuters reports in “Antiwar Protesters Turns Their Sights on Obama (October 5, 2009), that about 200 people were at the demonstration and sixty-one were arrested for committing civil disobedience. The World Can’t Wait website (October 6, 2009) reports that 500 people attended the demonstration. CBS Evening News began a series “Afghanistan: The Road Ahead” on the same day as the demonstration, which could have been produced as an infomercial for the Pentagon, not questioning the continued open-ended commitment to that country. Lately, no one in a decision-making position in the government brings up the name of Osama bin Laden and the foiled attempt to capture him while he was still in Afghanistan. The newly released movie Rethink Afghanistan, by Robert Greenwald, which is available on You Tube, raises the real issue of the civilian toll that the war is taking and the inhospitable terrain of Afghanistan, that will wreak havoc on any major U.S. escalation of the war.
I think there are many, many signs that fascism may come to this country. Wars without end, an economy that does not provide for the needs of all of its people—while the well off are always taken care of—a global economy that’s increasingly centralized and unanswerable to any criticism or control, a dying ecological system, and the movement in the U.S. by the Right (both religious and secular) that reared its ugly head just recently during the national “town meetings” concerning health-care reform, all point to a system out of control. Many of the historical markers of movement to the far Right are indeed here and the president seems to want to give in to the rants of the Right at every opportunity. Such issues as The Geneva Conventions and the rule of law in war are off the table and will not be considered.
This time I just ran out of steam, at least temporarily, as I approached Delaware, perhaps as much from a lack of sleep the previous night as from anticipation of the demonstration. But as a diehard Leftist, I will put this personal debacle behind me and live to fight another day.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Autumn Meditation
Autumn Meditation
The old man asked for help
Searching among the shelves of the co-op
For green tea, honey, and ginger
A conclusion of his meditation
He was so calm, resolute, and congenial
The surrounding hills were fired in autumn multicolored hues
The sky a steel gray.
The old man asked for help
Searching among the shelves of the co-op
For green tea, honey, and ginger
A conclusion of his meditation
He was so calm, resolute, and congenial
The surrounding hills were fired in autumn multicolored hues
The sky a steel gray.
Senator Kennedy, Liberalism and the Left
Senator Kennedy, Liberalism and the Left
My wife and I traveled across Massachusetts on Friday, August 28, to be part of the public wake for Senator Edward Kennedy. Though much of the summer has been a washout in the Northeast, this morning proved worthy of a late-summer New England day with wispy curls of high cirrus clouds in a sparkling blue sky above Dorchester Bay. A fresh wind rose from the sea to the south and east and onto the peninsula that makes up the landform where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum are located. Jets and propeller-driven planes swooped down out of the west and glided effortlessly over the high roof of the library, then across the bay as their landing gears lowered with the certain prospect of momentarily disappearing over the tree line to land at Logan Airport.
Getting to the library just before 11:00 A.M., we joined the line of thousands of other mourners who had come to pay tribute to the senior senator from Massachusetts, but what also brought us to this place on a day that could easily have been made for leisurely summer sailing was the fact that a great epoch in U.S. history had come to a close.
John F. Kennedy’s life, a president of only mildly liberal politics and Cold warrior, left an indelible mark on the American psyche. No one who remembers that era can forget the wrenching grief of that day on which the young president was assassinated, and the days to follow, in November 1963. A person knows exactly where he or she was when Walter Cronkite announced the news of the president’s death. It was as if that day, forty-six years ago, had just happened. It was as if the nation, like Cronkite, would forever be brushing aside a tear of grief.
Only five years later, in an era so different from his brother’s, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in California after winning the presidential primary and almost certainly assuring himself a place on the national Democratic ticket and a probable win. How different the world would have been! Senator Kennedy had transformed himself from a member of his brother’s cabinet to a bona fide liberal. He had been touched in a positive way by the societal upheavals of the late 1960s and was genuinely antiwar as the all-important California primary drew to an end.
Back to the Dorchester of the present. Remarkably, though visibly in mourning, members of the Kennedy, Smith, and Reggie families pass down the line of mourners greeting everyone who has come to pay respects to either their father, or uncle, or grandfather, or stepfather. The news media does not interfere with these personal and heartfelt interchanges, and instead interviews a few people from the line of mourners as it approaches the entrance to the library. One man quite inappropriately drones on endlessly to anyone who will listen about spirituality, interrupts an interview in progress, as is soon quieted by others who stand in line quietly waiting their turns to pass the senator’s coffin.
In an article in the Socialist Worker, “Myth of the Liberal Lion” (August 28, 2009), Lance Selfa criticizes Kennedy for selling out on the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and eventually supporting regressive bills such as the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, incremental improvements in healthcare legislations verses a single-payer plan (which Kennedy did champion in the early 1970s), budget balancing legislation, and the No Child Left Behind education act.
Senator Kennedy was indeed an effective dealmaker who could forge relationships, both personal and political, with those in the juggernaut of regressive politics that took shape with the ascendancy to the presidency of the far-right former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was not so much that Kennedy abandoned his liberalism, as much as the voters in the U.S. jettisoned those values as the economy became less and less egalitarian and their representatives in Congress followed suit. Kennedy’s very real triumphs included legislation in the areas of women’s rights, the rights of those with disabilities, civil rights, health care for children, and the admittedly flawed prescription drug plan now a part of Medicare. Though originally a supporter of the Vietnam War, Kennedy came to strongly oppose that war and the current war in Iraq. He stopped the nomination of the far-right jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He worked tirelessly for his constituents and was an accessible senator to them.
Senator Kennedy was most certainly a flawed individual and came from a family of enormous wealth, but he also witnessed much personal tragedy not of his making and went on to fight the fights in which he believed he could be most effective. After witnessing the vicious assassinations of two brothers, losing one brother to war, and dealing with disease and addiction, he could have easily sat on the sidelines, but he did not.
Liaisons with liberals have always borne the brunt of criticism from the left. But it was just that ability to make working connections with those whom he had nothing in common with politically that makes Senator Kennedy an outstanding person. The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs picks fun at liberals in his humorous parody on liberalism “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” written in the 60s when liberalism and liberals were easy targets. After associating with leftists for all of my adult life, and in many cases with less than rewarding results, it seems that being able to relate to others the way Senator Kennedy did is a most enviable, ennobling, and human trait.
Over the past several years, since the demise of both the anti-globalization and antiwar movements, what remains of the left is hard-pressed in making an argument that connections to political liberals weakens the left in any material way. What indeed is left to weaken?
During the 1980s, while living in Rhode Island, I organized a meeting between the late Senator Claiborne Pell and a group opposed to U.S. interventions in Central America, and in particular in Nicaragua. Senator Pell, a liberal, had lost his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Ronald Reagan was elected president. After several individuals had spoken to the senator in his Providence, Rhode Island office, the senator observed that in order for him to take a more visible role against U.S. intervention in Central America he would need a vibrant anti-interventionist movement from which to draw energy. In other words, the senator knew that in order for him to effectively make the case against intervention there would have to be an increased level of activism among members of the group meeting with him. Several members of the group expressed their dissatisfaction with the senator following the meeting, but Senator Pell had made a keen observation about the political system: it never changes unless pressure is placed on it through outside forces.
That the left has been so weakened in recent years is not due to magical or mysterious forces operating in and outside of the political system, but rather comes directly from the fact that the left is no longer the attractive force for change that it once was in the U.S. The latter is of grave concern for leftists, a problem of organizing real people, and not a problem created solely by liberals! That the left cannot mount an effective campaign of opposition in the face of multiple wars, an economy that meets the needs of fewer people, and a largely failed environmental policy tells more about the left in a complacent society than it does about liberals.
A commentator on one of the major news networks observed how respectful the public outpouring was during the days of mourning for Senator Kennedy. It was indeed respectful, but of greater worry to anyone left or liberal are the continuing vicious expressions by the right against Senator Kennedy’s signature legislation, health-care reform.
My wife and I traveled across Massachusetts on Friday, August 28, to be part of the public wake for Senator Edward Kennedy. Though much of the summer has been a washout in the Northeast, this morning proved worthy of a late-summer New England day with wispy curls of high cirrus clouds in a sparkling blue sky above Dorchester Bay. A fresh wind rose from the sea to the south and east and onto the peninsula that makes up the landform where the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum are located. Jets and propeller-driven planes swooped down out of the west and glided effortlessly over the high roof of the library, then across the bay as their landing gears lowered with the certain prospect of momentarily disappearing over the tree line to land at Logan Airport.
Getting to the library just before 11:00 A.M., we joined the line of thousands of other mourners who had come to pay tribute to the senior senator from Massachusetts, but what also brought us to this place on a day that could easily have been made for leisurely summer sailing was the fact that a great epoch in U.S. history had come to a close.
John F. Kennedy’s life, a president of only mildly liberal politics and Cold warrior, left an indelible mark on the American psyche. No one who remembers that era can forget the wrenching grief of that day on which the young president was assassinated, and the days to follow, in November 1963. A person knows exactly where he or she was when Walter Cronkite announced the news of the president’s death. It was as if that day, forty-six years ago, had just happened. It was as if the nation, like Cronkite, would forever be brushing aside a tear of grief.
Only five years later, in an era so different from his brother’s, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in California after winning the presidential primary and almost certainly assuring himself a place on the national Democratic ticket and a probable win. How different the world would have been! Senator Kennedy had transformed himself from a member of his brother’s cabinet to a bona fide liberal. He had been touched in a positive way by the societal upheavals of the late 1960s and was genuinely antiwar as the all-important California primary drew to an end.
Back to the Dorchester of the present. Remarkably, though visibly in mourning, members of the Kennedy, Smith, and Reggie families pass down the line of mourners greeting everyone who has come to pay respects to either their father, or uncle, or grandfather, or stepfather. The news media does not interfere with these personal and heartfelt interchanges, and instead interviews a few people from the line of mourners as it approaches the entrance to the library. One man quite inappropriately drones on endlessly to anyone who will listen about spirituality, interrupts an interview in progress, as is soon quieted by others who stand in line quietly waiting their turns to pass the senator’s coffin.
In an article in the Socialist Worker, “Myth of the Liberal Lion” (August 28, 2009), Lance Selfa criticizes Kennedy for selling out on the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and eventually supporting regressive bills such as the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, incremental improvements in healthcare legislations verses a single-payer plan (which Kennedy did champion in the early 1970s), budget balancing legislation, and the No Child Left Behind education act.
Senator Kennedy was indeed an effective dealmaker who could forge relationships, both personal and political, with those in the juggernaut of regressive politics that took shape with the ascendancy to the presidency of the far-right former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. It was not so much that Kennedy abandoned his liberalism, as much as the voters in the U.S. jettisoned those values as the economy became less and less egalitarian and their representatives in Congress followed suit. Kennedy’s very real triumphs included legislation in the areas of women’s rights, the rights of those with disabilities, civil rights, health care for children, and the admittedly flawed prescription drug plan now a part of Medicare. Though originally a supporter of the Vietnam War, Kennedy came to strongly oppose that war and the current war in Iraq. He stopped the nomination of the far-right jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. He worked tirelessly for his constituents and was an accessible senator to them.
Senator Kennedy was most certainly a flawed individual and came from a family of enormous wealth, but he also witnessed much personal tragedy not of his making and went on to fight the fights in which he believed he could be most effective. After witnessing the vicious assassinations of two brothers, losing one brother to war, and dealing with disease and addiction, he could have easily sat on the sidelines, but he did not.
Liaisons with liberals have always borne the brunt of criticism from the left. But it was just that ability to make working connections with those whom he had nothing in common with politically that makes Senator Kennedy an outstanding person. The late singer-songwriter Phil Ochs picks fun at liberals in his humorous parody on liberalism “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” written in the 60s when liberalism and liberals were easy targets. After associating with leftists for all of my adult life, and in many cases with less than rewarding results, it seems that being able to relate to others the way Senator Kennedy did is a most enviable, ennobling, and human trait.
Over the past several years, since the demise of both the anti-globalization and antiwar movements, what remains of the left is hard-pressed in making an argument that connections to political liberals weakens the left in any material way. What indeed is left to weaken?
During the 1980s, while living in Rhode Island, I organized a meeting between the late Senator Claiborne Pell and a group opposed to U.S. interventions in Central America, and in particular in Nicaragua. Senator Pell, a liberal, had lost his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Ronald Reagan was elected president. After several individuals had spoken to the senator in his Providence, Rhode Island office, the senator observed that in order for him to take a more visible role against U.S. intervention in Central America he would need a vibrant anti-interventionist movement from which to draw energy. In other words, the senator knew that in order for him to effectively make the case against intervention there would have to be an increased level of activism among members of the group meeting with him. Several members of the group expressed their dissatisfaction with the senator following the meeting, but Senator Pell had made a keen observation about the political system: it never changes unless pressure is placed on it through outside forces.
That the left has been so weakened in recent years is not due to magical or mysterious forces operating in and outside of the political system, but rather comes directly from the fact that the left is no longer the attractive force for change that it once was in the U.S. The latter is of grave concern for leftists, a problem of organizing real people, and not a problem created solely by liberals! That the left cannot mount an effective campaign of opposition in the face of multiple wars, an economy that meets the needs of fewer people, and a largely failed environmental policy tells more about the left in a complacent society than it does about liberals.
A commentator on one of the major news networks observed how respectful the public outpouring was during the days of mourning for Senator Kennedy. It was indeed respectful, but of greater worry to anyone left or liberal are the continuing vicious expressions by the right against Senator Kennedy’s signature legislation, health-care reform.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Paris Recollections 2
Paris Recollections
Again, at Pere LaChaise
The azure sky
Of piercing clear
Parisian light amid cumulous clouds.
Here notoriety lies abandoned.
I search for Richard Wright
Among the walls of the columbarium.
Again, at Pere LaChaise
The azure sky
Of piercing clear
Parisian light amid cumulous clouds.
Here notoriety lies abandoned.
I search for Richard Wright
Among the walls of the columbarium.
Paris Recollections 1
Paris Recollections
On the Rue de Sommeraud
A child runs
Then spins widly
Laughing with abandon
In the pouring rain.
On the Rue de Sommeraud
A child runs
Then spins widly
Laughing with abandon
In the pouring rain.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Greenwich Village Street Scene 8/9/09
Greenwich Village Street Scene 8/9/09
Mountain ash muted in the mist and perspective of a Renaissance painting on MacDougal Street toward Bleecker where the proprietor of the leather shop says he knew Abbie and a 60’s writer complaining of the kids in his apartment building leaving garbage and subletting to friends with no consideration he says something has changed. Meanwhile, the lovers pass in front of Caffe Reggio, timeless in the lesser canyons of the Village among the motley shades of red brick in early August while a jazz trio plays to a sparse crowd in Washington Square Park.
Mountain ash muted in the mist and perspective of a Renaissance painting on MacDougal Street toward Bleecker where the proprietor of the leather shop says he knew Abbie and a 60’s writer complaining of the kids in his apartment building leaving garbage and subletting to friends with no consideration he says something has changed. Meanwhile, the lovers pass in front of Caffe Reggio, timeless in the lesser canyons of the Village among the motley shades of red brick in early August while a jazz trio plays to a sparse crowd in Washington Square Park.
Friday, July 10, 2009
The Fourth of July
The Fourth of July
July 4, 1971 promised to be my favorite July 4th ever! Three friends and I decided to leave New England and visit a family friend who had settled in rural Ontario, Canada. I looked forward to the visit, as it would not only be an adventure with friends, but also would take me outside of the United States during a so-called patriotic holiday. Expressions of national chauvinism during war have never enthralled me, and the U.S. has been at war for most of my life. By the time our group crossed over the border in upstate New York, I had long since become a resister to the military. I still had the option to return to either a National Guard or Reserve unit at the time of this summer trip, but the murderous viciousness of the Vietnam War, and its expansion into Laos and Cambodia, had set me on a collision course with the government of the U.S.
Just before we left the U.S., while still in upstate New York, my friends and I had a disquieting experience when we stopped at a small restaurant for dinner in a little, out of the way place just off of the Thruway. Both my friend Joe and I had long hair, and as we sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant with the women who had accompanied us, we were the targets of snarling derogatory remarks about our appearance by a few people who sat at the counter. I was mildly surprised by the behavior of these folks, as I thought that that kind of treatment of so-called “outsiders” was something reserved solely for the Deep South.
Driving into Renfrew, Ontario was nothing short of exhilarating. Don had settled there after traveling the world trying to find a haven outside of the U.S. Trips to other parts of the world had proven disappointing to him, and as I drove up the driveway to his partially completed home site he waved along with a crew of friends who had completed only the deck of the first floor of the home. Only the kitchen area provided any protection from the weather with its temporary roof.
Sleeping arrangements on the night of the 4th proved to quickly deteriorate, as the bug population rose exponentially while the sun set over a distant low mountain range. After a short time hopelessly swatting legions of biting insects, my friends and I sought refuge in an empty van that one of Don’s friends owned. It was in the middle of the night, as I would later learn, that my friend Joe assaulted the woman with whom I had traveled with when she got up during the night to use the outhouse. That knowledge would shake my naïve belief that leftists were any more reliable as friends than anyone else, regardless of personal politics! Narcissism is as infectious to leftists as it is to those on the right and to people with no politics at all. The twin of Narcissism, conformity, results in what Herbert Marcuse called the One-Dimensional Man [sic] (1964).
On July 5th, Don introduced me to a real estate agent who took us on a tour of local available home sites. For between five and six thousand dollars I would be able to buy a piece of land in the area and build a small A-frame on it. Since I had developed a serious relationship with the woman I was with, we carefully considered the option of returning to the area later in the summer and striking out on our own and thereby also avoiding any future entanglements with the military. The real estate agent had been a soldier in the German army during World War II and questioned me in his still distinct native accent about my reasons for considering immigrating to Canada. When I countered with a question about what it was like for him to be faced with the decision to fight as part of Hitler’s war machine, he said that he had “no choice.” I never traveled back to Ontario and Don left the area to return to the U.S. in the early 1980s.
July 4th, 2009. I stand in an antiwar vigil with two friends, Mickey and Bill, on the busy corner of a small town in western Massachusetts. Mickey has been coming out every Saturday since before the war began in Iraq to stand in witness against that war. I began joining him and Bill three years ago. Sometimes others join us, and the group of protesters “swells” to around five people. Now we protest more than one war. The vast majority who pass us by on foot and in cars are sympathetic to our antiwar message. A small number shout or display their middle fingers. How much has really changed from the Vietnam era to the present day? The U.S. is still involved in multiple wars, always with horrific effects on civilians, and the government still spies on its citizens. How strange this all seems to me, only a few miles distant from the Mass Pike where I drove west so many years ago on a quest to learn just what it would be like on July 4th in a much different and faraway place.
This July 4th ended at a popular cultural venue in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where I handed out programs to patrons as they entered the gates of this bucolic setting. I’m caught off guard as a handful of people out of the thousands who pass by wish me a happy Fourth. I return their greeting not knowing what else to say.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. His book Notes of a Military Resister is available at his website howielisnoff.com where he can also be contacted.
July 4, 1971 promised to be my favorite July 4th ever! Three friends and I decided to leave New England and visit a family friend who had settled in rural Ontario, Canada. I looked forward to the visit, as it would not only be an adventure with friends, but also would take me outside of the United States during a so-called patriotic holiday. Expressions of national chauvinism during war have never enthralled me, and the U.S. has been at war for most of my life. By the time our group crossed over the border in upstate New York, I had long since become a resister to the military. I still had the option to return to either a National Guard or Reserve unit at the time of this summer trip, but the murderous viciousness of the Vietnam War, and its expansion into Laos and Cambodia, had set me on a collision course with the government of the U.S.
Just before we left the U.S., while still in upstate New York, my friends and I had a disquieting experience when we stopped at a small restaurant for dinner in a little, out of the way place just off of the Thruway. Both my friend Joe and I had long hair, and as we sat in a booth in the back of the restaurant with the women who had accompanied us, we were the targets of snarling derogatory remarks about our appearance by a few people who sat at the counter. I was mildly surprised by the behavior of these folks, as I thought that that kind of treatment of so-called “outsiders” was something reserved solely for the Deep South.
Driving into Renfrew, Ontario was nothing short of exhilarating. Don had settled there after traveling the world trying to find a haven outside of the U.S. Trips to other parts of the world had proven disappointing to him, and as I drove up the driveway to his partially completed home site he waved along with a crew of friends who had completed only the deck of the first floor of the home. Only the kitchen area provided any protection from the weather with its temporary roof.
Sleeping arrangements on the night of the 4th proved to quickly deteriorate, as the bug population rose exponentially while the sun set over a distant low mountain range. After a short time hopelessly swatting legions of biting insects, my friends and I sought refuge in an empty van that one of Don’s friends owned. It was in the middle of the night, as I would later learn, that my friend Joe assaulted the woman with whom I had traveled with when she got up during the night to use the outhouse. That knowledge would shake my naïve belief that leftists were any more reliable as friends than anyone else, regardless of personal politics! Narcissism is as infectious to leftists as it is to those on the right and to people with no politics at all. The twin of Narcissism, conformity, results in what Herbert Marcuse called the One-Dimensional Man [sic] (1964).
On July 5th, Don introduced me to a real estate agent who took us on a tour of local available home sites. For between five and six thousand dollars I would be able to buy a piece of land in the area and build a small A-frame on it. Since I had developed a serious relationship with the woman I was with, we carefully considered the option of returning to the area later in the summer and striking out on our own and thereby also avoiding any future entanglements with the military. The real estate agent had been a soldier in the German army during World War II and questioned me in his still distinct native accent about my reasons for considering immigrating to Canada. When I countered with a question about what it was like for him to be faced with the decision to fight as part of Hitler’s war machine, he said that he had “no choice.” I never traveled back to Ontario and Don left the area to return to the U.S. in the early 1980s.
July 4th, 2009. I stand in an antiwar vigil with two friends, Mickey and Bill, on the busy corner of a small town in western Massachusetts. Mickey has been coming out every Saturday since before the war began in Iraq to stand in witness against that war. I began joining him and Bill three years ago. Sometimes others join us, and the group of protesters “swells” to around five people. Now we protest more than one war. The vast majority who pass us by on foot and in cars are sympathetic to our antiwar message. A small number shout or display their middle fingers. How much has really changed from the Vietnam era to the present day? The U.S. is still involved in multiple wars, always with horrific effects on civilians, and the government still spies on its citizens. How strange this all seems to me, only a few miles distant from the Mass Pike where I drove west so many years ago on a quest to learn just what it would be like on July 4th in a much different and faraway place.
This July 4th ended at a popular cultural venue in the Berkshires in Massachusetts where I handed out programs to patrons as they entered the gates of this bucolic setting. I’m caught off guard as a handful of people out of the thousands who pass by wish me a happy Fourth. I return their greeting not knowing what else to say.
Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. His book Notes of a Military Resister is available at his website howielisnoff.com where he can also be contacted.
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