I skipped the No Kings protest today. I’d planned to go, like I did at the one last fall in Eugene. This time, after considerable internal debate, my exact words to myself were: fuck it! Instead, I stayed home and built a fenced-off area for our five new hens – now six weeks old and outgrowing their pine-shavings-clad stock tank in the garage.
I made the right decision – I didn’t think one time about our Orange Demented Lunatic. But later, the online coverage showed lots of creative signs from the marches. From the one I missed today:
The pic that really gave me pause, though, was an aerial shot of marchers today crossing the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. It carried me back to a life-changing march across that same bridge – 59 years ago. From a distance, it was like nothing had changed.
The Vietnam War affected everything for my generation. When
I hit the draftable age of 18, what was going on in Southeast Asia and
Washington, D.C., suddenly was of mortal interest. I didn't want to get shot,
especially for no good reason. I could find no justification for that war;
everything about it was obscene.
To actually commit to that belief, though -- to act on it --
meant defying parents, society, government, and laws in life-altering ways. My
college student draft deferment expired when I graduated from Michigan State
University at the end of 1967, a time when the war was killing guys just like
me at the rate of 1,000 every month. Thousands more maimed for life. I was
prime cannon fodder. What to do?
I had seen first-hand the growing anti-war sentiment when I
hitchhiked the prior year through San Francisco during the Summer of Love of
1967. That fall in Washington, D.C., at the March on the Pentagon, I resolved
that I would never let myself get drafted.
Four of us had driven to D.C. from Lansing -- me with Al,
Rob, and Crazy Rick (l. to r.):
We gathered on the National Mall, at least 50,000 of us
(mythology says 100,000), and listened to long-since-forgotten speeches and
music from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Overhead, noisy jets came and
went from the airport, just as they do today. The air was electrified --
October 21, 1967.
We marched two miles across the Potomac River to the
Pentagon, crossing the Memorial Bridge, behind a banner -- SUPPORT OUR G.I.s... BRING THEM HOME NOW! -- and chanting: Hey, hey,
LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
When our march reached the Pentagon, an exorcism was
performed, conceived in part by master, hippie, performance-art showman Abbie
Hoffman. I climbed a tree, watching demonstrators led by acid-tripping Abbie in
an Uncle Sam outfit, who were chanting ancient Aramaic exorcism rites to make
the Pentagon levitate 300 feet in the air and turn orange and vibrate, thereby
driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Vietnam. The fortress was
ringed with helmeted U.S. marshals and soldiers with bayonet-spiked rifles.
None of them smiled even when hippies stuck flowers in their gun barrels.
At dusk, little fires started -- flares in the up-raised
hands of boys who in ones and twos and threes lit their draft cards. Instant
felons. I didn't burn my draft card then, but after that day, I never could let
myself get sent to kill people in Vietnam. I experienced in that march the
collective power of a rightness that eventually would force an end to that
insane war. It was more than just an issue of fairness or patriotism or
legality or even morality. It was common sense. I knew that getting maimed or
killed in that war would have been stupid.
Abbie's exorcism of the Pentagon didn't work, a bunch of
protestors got beat up and arrested, and eventually everyone else got cold and
left.
Years later, I would meet Abbie and conspire with him, using
his skills and infamy to help protect the Great Lakes from some major
government mischief. Decades later, a plane would crash into the Pentagon not
far from where those boys burned their draft cards; I would be living with my
family and working just 20 miles away. One summer day, the war long past, sun
sparkling in my boat's wake, I would pull my kids waterskiing under that same
Potomac River bridge that we marched across in my lost, turbulent youth.
* * *
Never in my wildest fantasies could I have predicted how
life would turn out. That obscene war finally did end; LBJ never did quit
killing kids. It took that infernal crook, Nixon, to quiet Vietnam’s hellscape.
Before it ended, nearly 50,000 Americans were killed in combat. All told, more
than a million people died and lives were ruined for countless more.
Is that where we’re headed with Iran? Just like in 1967, there
seems to be no way to head off catastrophe. In fact, it took more than another
five years for that abominable war to end. (In fact, tomorrow, March 29, is the
56th anniversary of the official end of combat there.)
So are we headed for another Vietnam? Not likely. The first American
combat deaths in Vietnam were in 1959. That big protest march didn’t happen
until eight years later. In Iran, we’ve so far had (just) 13 soldiers
killed (plus several hundred wounded). Total deaths, so far, are around (just) 4,500.
Those are obscene numbers, to be sure, and certain to get way worse. But look at
today’s protest. It didn’t take years to come about. It’s been just one month
since Commander Cheeto started this.
Like so many others – the protest marchers and those who
root from the sidelines (or their chicken coops) – I grieve daily for what’s
become of our country. And I worry for our future. The Man-in-Charge is certifiably
demented. Lost in his lunacy. Surrounded by sycophants who are blinded by ignorance
and greed.
I’ve always believed that the Epstein scandal would be the
end of the Asshole. Unless, that is, he started an uncontrollable war of distraction. Now
that he’s done that, what’s next? So the war goes to Hell. So the economy follows. So the Dems sweep
the Fall elections. So the courts keep swatting him. So what? He's still the "King" for another two-plus years. More than a third of our neighbors still think he's doing a good job. Fuck.
