The 60s: Forty Years of Protests - And War Rages On

Let's go back 40 years:

On October 21, 1967, 70,000 demonstrators came to Washington, D.C. to "Confront the War Makers." This was the first of the biannual Anti-War demonstrations to fuse protest with the whimsicality of the counter culture and to take civil disobedience to new levels of confrontation. It would become the prototype for the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago -- except that the latter was marred by extensive police violence.

Initiated and organized by "the Mobe" (the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), a loose coalition of 150 groups, some of the events of the weekend were planned and some were not. They provided something for everyone, from committed pacifists to Vietcong sympathizers, united only by the common aim of ending the war.
--Jo Freeman

Then there's this famous picture to remind us of the day. According to The Human Flower Project,

"Marc Riboud took the picture outside the Pentagon during a demonstration protesting the U.S. war in Vietnam. How fresh, and necessary, it looks today.

Riboud was a member of Magnum, the French elite of documentary photography. The girl was 17 year old Jan Rose Kasmir, a foster child from Maryland who “just hopped on a D.C. transit bus and went down to join the revolution.”

Kasmir told Andrew Curry of Smithsonian magazine, “All of a sudden, I realized ‘them’ was that soldier in front of me—a human being I could just as easily have been going out on a date with. It wasn’t a war machine, it was just a bunch of guys with orders. Right then, it went from being a fun, hip trip to a painful reality.”

Sadly it continues to be a painful reality. The anti-war protests of The 60s died out long ago. The last big protest came along in April 1971 followed by the May Day protests a week or so later. Here from Wikipedia:

On Monday, May 3rd, 1971 one of the most disruptive actions of the Vietnam War era occurred in Washington, DC, when thousands of anti-war activists tried to shut down the Federal government in protest of the Vietnam War. The threat caused by the May Day Protests forced the Nixon Administration to create a virtual state of siege in the Nation’s Capital. Thousands of Federal and National Guard troops, along with local police, suppressed the disorder and by the time it was over several days later, over 10,000 would be arrested. It would be the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

I was there for the first part on the Saturday and Sunday. My girlfriend, later and still my wife, didn't want me to go, but it sounded like fun. Until Monday morning. I can still remember waking up in my car, sitting up and seeing the police lines in place for what would happen. It was no longer a Sunday in the park with the Beach Boys. I did not stay around. Getting arrested didn't seem like a good idea.

It was essentially over at that point. The war was "winding down" and the draft was all but gone. The Watergate break-in was a little less than a year away. The world was shifting, quickly. The 60s were over.

As a result of all that I personally wondered for years about those days. Were they simply a reflection of youthful energy and fear or was there something more? Was it truly a statement about war and peace, or was it some fun and games and then we moved on to more serious things like making a living, having families, growing older?

Perhaps an answer can be found in this picture. It was also taken by Marc Riboud, this time in London in 2003 or 2004. It was an anti-Iraq war protest and there is that famous picture of 17-year old Jan Rose Kasmir. Holding the poster is an adult Jan Rose Kasmir. No, under it all, behind all the verbosity of the protests, behind the self-serving fear of the draft, behind even what may have been manipulation by forces we didn't understand or even agree with, there was a strong sense that something was deeply wrong with the whole idea of war.

Vietnam woke many people up from the WW II-narrowed vision of the potential rightness of war. It may be that WW II was one of the few wars of history that may have had a noble cause. I can't get away from that thought as a child of a veteran of that war. Since then (and probably before as well) most wars are based on failures and self-serving interests. Yes, WW II had that, but it is most certainly nerve-shattering to think what the world would have been like if Hitler had been victorious.

Which inevitably brings us to now. That naive young girl at the Pentagon, hopefully holding out a flower to the pointed bayonets, is now an adult holding out the same hope. She has to. To do otherwise is to allow evil and hatred and violence and mass death to win. To give up is to admit that war - and warmongering behavior- are acceptable. To give up is to forget to choose life.

But I can be a realist like Niebuhr who saw the realism of WW II as necessary but evil. I am aware that we will never eradicate war. Neither will we ever eradicate addiction but that doesn't stop me from going to work each day to do my part to help people overcome it. And when war becomes the only hammer we use, the club to get conformity to our way of life, it has become dangerous.

I'm not sure protests work. They are great PR machines that work both for and against your cause. Perhaps a Blog Action Day against war like we did about the environment is a way. I'm not sure incendiary ads like General Betray-Us help. They polarize. We are already polarized enough. We need to be brought together. To be awakened again to the hope that voices of peace can be heard in the land.