A View From The Left-For the Decriminalization of Drugs!-Capitalist Misery and Heroin Addiction

Frank Jackman comment: Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one such time, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.      Workers Vanguard No. 1089

6 May 2016

For the Decriminalization of Drugs!-Capitalist Misery and Heroin Addiction

Barely a day goes by without a new report on the growing opioid addiction crisis—a level of heroin use and overdose unseen for three decades. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 2006 and 2013 the number of first-time heroin users nearly doubled, from 90,000 to 169,000. Over half a million Americans used heroin in 2013—a nearly 150 percent increase since 2007—and opioids played a part in a record 28,648 deaths in the U.S. in 2014. The racist capitalist ruling class, which spent decades locking up people, disproportionately black and Latino, under the “war on drugs,” is now wringing its hands over the heroin “epidemic” because the increased addiction and death rates are affecting a growing number of whites, including in the suburbs.

The anti-drug hysteria of the 1980s and ’90s was based on the fiction that an entire generation of black youth was driven to crazed violence by the use of crack cocaine. These youth were labeled superpredators to justify their mass incarceration. Sentences for possession of crack were 100 times more severe than for powder cocaine, typically associated with white users. Today, increased heroin use has permeated all levels of society, black and white. It can be found in the enclaves of the wealthy, in the deteriorating towns and small cities where industry once existed, in the ramshackle hovels and trailer parks throughout rural America and in the ghetto slums.

The biggest surge in heroin use today is among whites between the ages of 18 and 25 and with household incomes below $20,000, who are suffering much of the same economic desperation that has marked black life for generations. These conditions have also spurred a dramatic increase in suicide rates, especially among middle-aged white men. Drug overdoses, suicide and liver disease caused white life expectancy to fall in 2014 (though it is still three years higher than for black people). These social conditions—joblessness, poverty, and hopelessness—are a result of the decimation of unionized industrial jobs over the past few decades. As we noted in “Lockdown U.S.A.” (WV No. 618, 10 March 1995): “Over a million manufacturing jobs were lost in the U.S. in the 1980s, on top of the wholesale destruction of whole swaths of Midwest industry the decade before. For every place lost on the assembly lines, one has been added in the prisons.” Since the early 1990s, another five million jobs in manufacturing have been eliminated, while benefits and real wages have declined in the remaining ones. In this context, and with little class or social struggle, many see drugs and alcohol as a means to escape from the hell of everyday life.

In response to the heroin crisis, on March 10, the normally gridlocked Senate was nearly unanimous in passing the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act aimed at reducing opioid “abuse,” expanding treatment programs and preventing overdose deaths. However, the Republican majority refused to provide funding for the act. On March 29, President Obama stated, “If there’s a market for heroin in an inner city in Baltimore, it’s not going to take that long before those drugs find their way to a wealthy suburb outside Baltimore.”

Expressions of compassion for heroin addicts have come from what would seem to be the most unlikely sources. Hillary Clinton, first lady of mass incarceration, has proposed $7.5 billion in federal funding for state treatment programs. On the campaign trail, the evangelical nut job Ted Cruz makes a point of tearfully recounting the drug overdose death of his half-sister Miriam. Suddenly treatment is all the rage. White House press secretary Josh Earnest claimed that Obama is shifting the focus from purely law enforcement to medical treatment. But as long as drugs remain criminalized, state repression will be the main response to drug users.

The deterioration exhibited by those who are driven by addiction to devote all their energies and resources to the pursuit of their next high and the anguish this causes to family and friends can be truly excruciating. However, the bulk of the damage to individuals and communities attributed to narcotics is not intrinsic to the drugs themselves but to the fact they are illegal. The government has no business criminalizing the personal use of any drug, regardless of its particular risks or effects.

The only rational way to address the question of drug use is by removing all prohibitions on it. As communists, we demand an end to all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as gambling, prostitution, drug use, pornography and all consensual sex. Those who have an addiction and want treatment should be able to get it—as part of quality health care for all, free at the point of delivery. Decriminalization would reduce the crime and other social pathology associated with the drug trade by taking the superprofits out of it.

The current explosion of heroin use, as well as that of the cheaper, more potent synthetic opioid fentanyl, is also related to the expansion and subsequent crackdown on prescription opioids like OxyContin (oxycodone). Originally (and falsely) marketed as a non-addictive painkiller in 1995, oxy became regularly prescribed for severe pain. A few years later, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) began to monitor, harass and threaten doctors who prescribed the drug with loss of their medical licenses and prosecution. The patients who had their prescriptions cut off, along with their teenage children who raided the family medicine cabinet, turned to the streets for heroin as a substitute, which was in any case more easily available and cheaper. The Obama administration’s remedy has been to declare a further crackdown on opioid prescriptions.

As a forensic pathologist wrote to the New York Times (26 March), the CDC’s new guidelines “are unrealistic for patients who have done well (sometimes for years) on carefully monitored opioid doses under continuing medical care.” The doctor added that if acetaminophen or ibuprofen “worked for severe pain, no legitimate patient would be taking opioids.” In some cases, patients suffering from chronic pain may benefit from physical therapy. However, this treatment is more expensive and is often not covered by insurance.

Down With the War on Drugs!

Today’s plethora of drug laws is an outgrowth of the state repression under the “war on crime” kicked off by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 “Safe Streets Act” and President Richard Nixon’s 1970 “Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act.” In a 1994 interview, John Ehrlichman, former domestic policy adviser to Nixon, described how Nixon’s anti-drug laws aimed to disrupt both the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.... We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The war on drugs was escalated under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Along with attacks on consensual sex, abortion and teaching evolution in public schools, it was intended to ideologically regiment the population as Cold War II against the Soviet Union heated up. Key to this crusade was the hysteria whipped up against black people over so-called “crack babies,” which was a lie. Much of crack’s importation into Los Angeles was facilitated by the CIA to fund the right-wing contra guerrillas fighting the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

Democrats played a leading role in the “war on drugs.” New York governor Mario Cuomo called for life sentences for pushers while NYC mayor Ed Koch demanded concentration camps for “drug abusers.” Black Democrats led by Jesse Jackson were among the loudest voices. Al Sharpton whipped up a chauvinist frenzy against Arab storekeepers selling rolling papers and pipes, while targeting black “crack houses.” Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill expanded the federal death penalty, financed 100,000 cops to hit the streets and allocated nearly $10 billion for more prison construction.

Largely out of budgetary concerns, there has in recent years been some reconsideration of the disproportionate sentences for possession of crack. In 2010 the sentencing disparity for crack compared to powder coke was reduced to 18-to-1. Much has been made of Obama’s promise to consider commuting overly harsh sentences of low-level, non-violent drug offenders. He has granted clemency to 248 federal prisoners, but that amounts to less than 2 percent of those who have petitioned the White House for relief. The U.S. still remains the world’s largest jailer, and over 50 percent of the more than two million behind bars are black and Latino.

Puritan Social Regimentation

Drugs, including alcohol and hallucinogens, have been enjoyed by homo sapiens since the origin of our species. Harpers Magazine contributor Dan Baum noted in a recent article: “Most of what we hate and fear about drugs—the violence, the overdoses, the criminality—derives from prohibition, not drugs” (“Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” April 2016). Noting that drug addiction is rare, Baum pointed out, “Lots of Americans drink, but relatively few become alcoholics. It’s hard to imagine people enjoying a little heroin now and then, or a hit of methamphetamine, without going off the deep end, but they do it all the time.”

Behind the proscription of recreational drugs is the intersection of the Puritan religiosity ingrained in this society and the racist oppression of black people, which is a bulwark of American capitalism. Deeming addiction to be a moral failing, many treatment programs are based on total abstinence. Heroin substitutes like methadone and buprenorphine, many of whose users are able to function quite well, are subject to strict limits. Methadone, which works by “occupying” the brain receptors affected by heroin and other opiates, can only be administered through specially licensed clinics, which in much of the country are few and far between. Doctors can prescribe buprenorphine, which helps reduce the physical and psychological craving for opiates, but the number of patients for whom any doctor can prescribe it is limited by federal regulations.

Much touted of late are diversion programs such as the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) initiated in Seattle in 2011 and taken up in some form by 20 other cities. LEAD allows the cops to refer drug users picked up on the street to social workers who, without requiring that their clients stop using, help them find shelter, work, medical care and drug treatment if they so desire. However, who gets diverted and who gets arrested is left entirely to the discretion of the racist cops on the beat. Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant, a member of Socialist Alternative, hails LEAD as “an innovative partnership between police officers, prosecutors, neighborhood leaders, and service providers.” Such illusions in the cops and prosecutors—key elements of the capitalist state which exists to repress workers and the oppressed—are par for the course for the reformists of Socialist Alternative who have long pushed the lie that cops are “workers in uniform.”

Another scheme promoted as an “alternative” to incarceration, and ardently championed by Obama, is the system of drug courts that began in 1989 and now numbers over 3,000. Their purpose was—and is—to clear the dockets of trial courts overwhelmed by drug prosecutions. After giving up the right to a trial, a drug court defendant must complete a program of treatment and drug testing—often including a period of going cold turkey behind bars. Those who fail to “graduate” face lengthy prison sentences.

Recently, the mayor of Ithaca, New York, Svante Myrick, put forward a patently rational proposal for a “supervised injection facility” for drug users. Staffed with medical personnel, the center would provide clean needles and prevent overdoses. Starting in Switzerland 30 years ago, injection sites have been adopted in ten countries. Myrick’s plan was met with an immediate backlash. State senator Tom O’Mara called it “asinine” and Cornell law professor William Jacobson condemned it as a “government-run heroin shooting gallery.” Even the best-intentioned proposals highlight the irrationality of drug prohibition. Those stopped by the cops on their way to or from the injection site would still be arrested if carrying drugs.

Bourgeois Hypocrisy and Racism

Opium was first brought to the Americas by European colonists and was long one of the most effective painkillers. Founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were frequent users of laudanum (tincture of opium), and trade in opium made possible the fortunes of some of America’s most famous families. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather, Warren Delano, was a major player in the opium trade in China, as were many other affluent New Englanders. The Chinese government tried to suppress the opium trade, but Britain (whose Indian colony was the main producer of the drug) waged two wars in the mid 1800s to force open the Chinese market. Delano profited handsomely.

Substantial endowments to Harvard University came from the Cabot family, who in the 1700s hit it big importing opium and rum along with slaves. Yale University’s secretive Skull and Bones society (which counts among its former members both George Bushes) was funded by the Russell family, who grew rich smuggling opium from Turkey to China in the early 19th century. Others who prospered from the opium trade were the Boston Forbeses, whose descendants include current secretary of state John Forbes Kerry.

Every drug scare has been accompanied by racist fearmongering. The smoking of opium was introduced to the U.S. after the Civil War by Chinese laborers who built the railroads in the West under murderous conditions. Toward the end of the century, fears were whipped up over the mixing of white people, particularly women, with Chinese men in opium smoking parties. Laws were passed authorizing imprisonment for operating or patronizing an opium den. In 1909, Congress passed the Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, which banned its importation for non-medicinal purposes. As a result, opium smokers switched to either morphine or heroin, a form of morphine that was first introduced as a pain reliever and cough suppressant by Bayer in 1898. Criminalization forced these users underground and led to the creation of a thriving black market.

Black people in the South were introduced to cocaine towards the end of the 19th century when New Orleans stevedores began taking the drug (or had it pushed on them by their bosses) to help them endure long spells of loading and unloading steamboats—often laboring up to 70 hours at a stretch. From there it spread to cotton plantations, railroad camps and construction sites throughout the South.

The crusade for the Harrison Act of 1914, which banned non-medicinal use of opium, morphine and cocaine, featured a racist scare campaign that would be echoed 70 years later over crack. The New York Times (8 February 1914) ranted, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.” The Times claimed that cocaine use turned black men into deadly marksmen and made them immune to wounds that “would drop a sane man in his tracks.”

At the same time, state laws against marijuana were being adopted on the basis of a similar scare campaign directed against Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. By 1931, 29 states had outlawed marijuana and in 1937, Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act, modeled on the Harrison Act. The 1937 Act was opposed at the time by the American Medical Association, but it had the support of Henry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who ranted that reefer made blacks “think they’re as good as white men.” During World War II, Anslinger asserted that the Japanese were conspiring to spread narcotics to sap America’s will to fight. As the Cold War kicked off, he wielded the same assertion against Communists.

Heroin use, largely centered in New York City ghettos, surged after WWII, spreading through jazz clubs, bars, dance halls and hotels. A propaganda barrage portrayed white adolescents as the victims of heroin abuse forced on them by evil pushers. The intended audience was white suburbia, whose children were least likely to take heroin, but who were most likely to be enlisted in a moral panic over narcotics. This led to legislation that established increasingly stiff penalties for drug trafficking.

More than a century of prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens and (for a while) alcohol has done little but lock up millions of people, destroy families and neighborhoods. It has also served to regiment the population and drive a racial wedge deeper into the working class. At the same time, the prohibitions planted the soil for criminal syndicates, from the opium dealers at the end of the 19th century to the bootleggers (including the patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty) during Prohibition. Prominent among the latter were the Mafia, who acquired the experience and organization necessary to take over wholesale narcotics distribution after WWII.

The immiseration that besets the working class and oppressed, pushing some into addiction and alcoholism, must be combated through multiracial working-class struggle. America’s racist imperialist system will continue to chew up its oppressed masses until it is overthrown by a socialist revolution that places the working class in power and expropriates the capitalist class, establishing a collectivized, planned economy. The proletarian social order will abolish all crimes without victims and will move to provide treatment and medical care to all who need it. The prisons, jails and courts that today enforce the predatory rule of the bourgeoisie will be replaced with organs of proletarian justice based on principles of rehabilitation rather than retribution. These measures will be among the many taken to maximize humanity’s control over the conditions that besiege it. Then all will be free to realize their full potential as human beings.

Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied Bombings In Syria And Iraq

Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied  Bombings In Syria And Iraq

Stop The Damn American Killer Drone Attacks Everywhere- Stop The Saudi Bombing Decimation Of Yemen-Stop The American Military Aid To Israel- Hell, Just Stop The Madness In The Middle East  

 

Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19^th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).       

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 
Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on them.    

The biggest problem though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing, wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights out.

All in all though they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it. Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it. 

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Then the endless wars came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for “boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral damage.    

So the wars drove them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession (really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its head publically.

More troubling recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were nobody’s friends, should be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full force.  

Everywhere they went, to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam thought one time, maybe more than one time, that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could.

 

 

As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              

Here is what Ralph had to say recently on Fritz Jasper's blog about the endless wars of late:

If you look closely, hell, if you just look at the visual, an old “stick-on” button-Stop The Wars meaning this day Stop The F-----g Wars at the top of this post that I have been wearing for years, that accompanies this sketch you will notice that it is ragged with wear, has been through a lot of hard times over the past decade or so but the message still rings true, still needs to be proclaimed like never before. Today in April 2015 I add the now month long American-supported Saudi aerial decimation of Yemen as the latest installment on the war front, no war fronts, that I had initially written about in February 2015 when I argued against the very real likelihood that Obama (okay, okay I will be civil today since he and his ilk hold all the cards, ah, hold all the weapons, and call him President Obama but I do so holding my nose) would get a resolution through Congress to go full-bore on the ISIS front. He, the President, said at the time not including ground troops, or really no additional ground troops since he has snuck a couple of thousand in as “advisers” in Iraq and Syria who are holding his Iraqi and Syrian agents by the hand as they go into battle already but we should be very wary on that sneaky front since it looks like additional ground forces will be necessary as everybody now has a timetable of a decade of so more of off-hand fighting. AND included at the time some kind of stepped-up military engagement in Ukraine which is looking very much more likely than when I posited the idea in February.

As I said then as well this from a “peace” President (an oxymoron in the United States and a few other countries) who has actually won the Nobel Peace Prize if you can believe that by this unconventionally bellicose man. So you can image what the other guys, the Republicans are up to, are ready to go hammer and tong on (beside their bugaboo Obamacare obsession which really is played out).

So, yes, I am a non-partisan, I willingly go after both parties, on the issues of war and peace and have been doing so since I got “religion” after my own service during the Vietnam War, another war that proved nothing, that we were consciously lied to about, and one that almost tore the United States apart including a near mutiny in the Army by about 1969. Prior to that “religious” conversion, I had had harbored the same kind of bellicose thoughts about America’s enemies in the world, including the benighted Vietnamese as the next guy, excepting a quirky thing about abolishing nuclear weapon learned at the knew of my Catholic Worker-influenced grandmother. So I know both sides and know too the vehemence of my anti-war commitment, the kind of vehemence that is the special Provence of the converted.      

Make no mistake I hold, and those I know who I have worked with lately in Veterans For Peace and the umbrella nation organization United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC), an organization that long ago provided the stick-on button which has seen much wear, hold no truck with ISIS, none for those savages. Hold no truck with all the emerging swarms of religious fanatics from Christian fundamentalist climate nay-sayers to Islamist fundamentalists ready to carry one and all back to the 8^th century (including those advanced jet fighter Saudis who actually think they are running an 8^th century society otherwise) to Zionist irredentists going back to Biblical times for their authority. And you wonder why the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

But that, my friends, is a long way from assuming that the United States, which one way or another has “created” ISIS (and on the other “front” aided the fascist-supported coup in Ukraine which has exploded in its face), should be bombing and threatening ground troops in situations where who knows what the hell is going on. Off the recent track record in the failed state of Iraq, the failed state in Libya, the failed state of Yemen (if it ever really was a state but since everybody of late, every bourgeois academic from Henry Kissinger on down has been yakking about the inviolability of the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 I will let that argument pass) the nearly failed state in Syria (I am still looking for those “moderate” anti-ISIS forces that the United States is trying to supply in Syria) and the also nearly failed state in Ukraine all of which have the fingerprints of American involvement over them the beginning of wisdom is to oppose further military involvement. Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings and Drone Attacks! No Military Aid To Israel! No Military Aid to Ukraine….and that is just for starters.