"You bet your goddamn dollar I'm bitter. It's people like us who give up our sons for the country," said a firefighter whose son was killed in action. "Let's face it: if you have a lot of money, or if you have the right connections, you don't end up on a firing line over there. I think we ought to win that war or pull out. What the hell else should we do -- sit and bleed ourselves to death, year after year?" His wife jumps in to add, "My husband and I can't help but thinking that our son gave his life for nothing, nothing at all."
These may sound like voices from the present, perhaps from grieving parents who have taken up Cindy Sheehan's vigil in Crawford, Texas as she visits her ailing mother. Actually though, they come from 1970, and their lost son died in Vietnam. In recent weeks, as American casualties in Iraq continued to mount and opposition from military families has grown, as Ohio families mourned their dead and the Cindy Sheehan story would not go away, I kept remembering the many people I had interviewed about a similar moment during the Vietnam War, a time in 1968 when millions of Americans who had trusted their government to tell the truth about a distant war and believed it was every citizen's absolute duty to "fight for your country," began to turn, like a giant aircraft carrier slowly arcing in another direction, began to doubt, question, and finally oppose their nation's policies.
In the words of the Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, "Let's do the time warp again"! Besides the climate and the way that the information is gathered there are fewer and fewer differences separating these two wars everyday.
In the face of rising opposition, Presidents Johnson and Nixon sought to rally -- in Nixon's famous phrase -- the "silent majority" in support of the war, not by explaining the need for ever more sacrifice, but by demonizing critics who, it was said, threatened to turn America into a "pitiful, helpless giant." Though the Nixon administration, unlike the present one, did not have its own media machine constantly available to attack its enemies, Nixon often sent out his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, as an attack dog to vilify student protestors ("effete corps of impudent snobs") and the media ("nattering nabobs of negativism").
The similarity in how these two administrations manipulate the media and public opinion is becoming eerie.
As in 1968, so in 2005, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has pointed out, "The loudest of the hawks are the least likely to send their sons or daughters off" to war. George Bush continues to call the war a "noble cause" and "the central front in the Global War on Terrorism" even though 60% of Americans have come to believe that it has made them less safe. His five-week-long vacation is only the most obvious symbol of the obscene gulf in safety between the advocates of the war and its victims. That gulf is at the very heart of a growing disaffection in places like Ohio, where earlier this month 20 Marines from the same Reserve unit (3rd Battalion, 25th Marines) were killed in Iraq within 72 hours. That unit is headquartered in Brook Park, Ohio, a working-class suburb adjacent to Parma, and the losses included 14 men from Ohio, bringing the state's total fatalities to more than 90.
It is up to us to make this president hear our anger and the pain that these families are feeling, because right now he does not understand how his policies have damaged our country. He is an exceptionally slow learner and the only way that he will ever understand is to have our message screeamed at him over and over again.
Bring them home NOW!
Peace.
