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-19th 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 8th
century (including those advanced jet fighter Saudis who actually think they
are running an 8th 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.
