I cannot know for sure what social, religious, economic and political threads came together to meld the anti-war phenomenon of the sixties and early seventies. I only think I know what my own pathway was. To wit...
By the time Selma cops were beating civil rights protesters on dinnertime television, I had already been disposed to disbelieve the American Dream crap. After all, they had drafted Elvis when he was at his energetic peak. And he missed his mother's death. This alone was enough to piss of this young American Catholic muller. Then JFK was shot, and no trial, no investigation followed. Greater disillusion. Then dogs, horses and firehoses attacking black people was a horrific dinner time sight. That summer I ran a turret lathe in a machine shop and my boss told me "You can't hurt a nigger by hitting him in the head." This didn't sit well with me. When a SNCC representative came to my Los Angeles college campus in 1963 to talk about the civil rights movement in the south, a good white friend of mine from Louisiana asked the man from SNCC, "Don't you think you're going too fast?" The SNCC guy snapped back, "The Emancipation Proclamation was issued a 100 years ago. Should we wait another 100 years?" I felt his point. The closest I came to participating in the civil rights movement was to attend a march at the Los Angeles Coliseum when Martin Luther King Jr. led it in 1964 or so. At the time I was unaware of the danger lurking around the corner that was the Vietnam War. My own issue at the time was probably more along the lines of allowing English in the Catholic mass and singing folk songs to guitar accompaniment at mass to the dismay of our right-wing Cardinal. But we felt a kinship with black people who were fighting to right wrongs in the streets of the south. By the time of the Watts riots in 1965 (I saw the smoke on my way home from meeting with the principal of the high school where I would teach English) I was a pissed-off, black sympathizer, saddened by the negativity generated among white people by the riots and so eagerly glommed onto by them to justify their racial hatreds. A year later I was asked to resign my teaching post. "You may be 10 years ahead of your time," I was told by the principal, a nun, "but there's no place here for your opinions." My opinion? -- the Warren Commission is a fraud; racism is American as apple pie and wrong; and the war in Vietnam is a national shame. By the end of the year, most of the teachers who remained were speaking the same truths. In other words, in a very short time, in my own journey, the war in Vietnam, including the draft, the Manpower Channelling of the Selective Service System, the telephone war tax, the racism that permeates the real estate and law enforcement agencies, the Warren Commission Report, Walter Cronkite's dismissal of the Commission critics on CBS, the failure of the press to tell the truth, the suppression of mass transit and alternative fuels, the poisoning of the food and water supplies, the gestapo techniques of the utility companies -- all of these came together in one amorphous entity in my mind: The Establishment. They were all connected; they fed on one another; they relied on one another. And there seemed to be another way. Political activism, peace and, yeah, love, love love. One aspect of the anti-war years that cannot by tallied on a spreadsheet is the mind-set that bubbled up from so many betrayals and fueled by increased education. The right wingers, starting with Reagan, really understood this. That's why they set out to destroy one of the world's great public university systems -- the University of California. Perhaps the element of the sixties that is the greatest loss in our own era is the idea, so often expressed in the sixties but rarely heard today, of "selling out." Selling Out was the biggest sin of them all. But I fear it's been replaced, across the board, by the "virtue" of Denial. And fear. Dan Scanlan
