In the late 1960's the political scene was just so painful. The nightly news was also the nightly nightmare. My father had been in Vietnam in the early 1960's, and misunderstood the angry concern, that my brother and I felt about the war and what was happening to our country, and the Vietnamese country, person by person. We were, and are, proud of our father's commitment to defend this country we loved and the people of other countries, that are in need of our help. But the evening horror show of napalmed children and innocents, and the sight of perfectly wonderful young soldiers being killed and maimed, was too much for me.
I remember shouting matches erupting between my brother and my father. These were times when my brother's superior knowledge and eloquence made it rarely necessary for me to join in. I was just so sickened, disgusted and depressed by what I was seeing, and the war was going on and on, and for what? My father firmly believed in the domino theory of the spread of Communism and felt every disagreement was a personal attack on him and against our country. Calm discussions with him were (are) impossible. I realize his generation had been stunned by World War II, and he naturally had a strong dislike for Commies, Dictators, and little pups who thought they had a right to protest what they saw as a travesty, a tragedy, and an unwinable war.
My present husband's father was captured by the Nazis after they shot down the bomber he was on when he was 19 years old and spent the rest of the war in a P.O.W. Camp. It really doesn't matter which generation's war it is; it is that some wars seem so much more just than others.
Vietnam War protesters didn't hate the soldiers, we didn't want any more of them to die! There were no "outside agitators"! I was not known to join in public protests. I had no desire to get my head cracked open. When some of my friends went to the March On Washington D.C., I didn't go. After the Kent State murders, I stayed away from such rallies, and developed a temporary crowd phobia. (It's a good thing I didn't get it until after I had seen the Beatles three times. But that story is off topic for now.)
My trust in the truthfulness of our government was so damaged, that I was one of the ones that "tuned in, turned on, and dropped out". I've paid a dear price for some of the decisions I made back then. They were attempts to try to deal with my depression, and included dropping out of school and marrying husband #1. I finished my first dismal semester at one school, and did not go back due to severe depression. My parents had moved to Indiana, so I tried again there. If you just walk away mid-semester and don't formally drop out, you end up with some really pissed off parents and a transcript covered with F's. I knew I was never going back to school. But surprise, surprise, about six years later I did, as a single mother, waiting tables to support us and finished, at The University of Texas in Austin, with a major in Architecture.
I heard Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) speak on the Indiana University campus, before I left. For those of you don't know who he is, he was a Harvard professor and close colleague of Timothy Leary. They were the ones conducting the LSD experiments, perfectly legal then, that ended with them both getting fired by Harvard. Alpert went to India and met a holy-man there, and realized that what he had learned about the inner universe, by going in through the LSD door, was very similar to what the holy-man knew by going in through the meditation door. I'm condensing that story. Anyway, Alpert came back to the US and was known as Ram Dass after that. Being a teacher and a brilliant man, he began advocating for entering through the meditation door.
He spoke on campus, out doors, all day and into the night, with a constant stream of students coming and going, to listen. That was probably 1970, I wrote off to the Lama Foundation he was involved with then and they sent me a box that had homemade books in it, and a Tibetan prayer cloth; at least that's where I think I got the prayer cloth, don't hold me to it. I still have them. The biggest book was the first publishing of the book "Be Here Now", but it was called "From Bindu To Ojas" at that time. It looked like it was block printed on brown paper bag stock. It was bound together by brown hemp string pulled through a couple of holes punched through the pages. The cover picture was a beautiful colored mandala that was pasted on the book. Years later I got Ram Dass to autograph it for me. I still treasure it. I like hand made books.
To be continued....
LSD animation
ReplyDeletehttp://audium.blogspot.com/2005/09/lsd-animation.html
War is an exercise in futility, it always has been. I was convinced Reagan would draft me and send me...somewhere. That was when I was 18 and it got me to go to Friends Meeting where I met some delightful people. I was trying to establish a track record of being a Quaker to get CO status, but I was running scared. One of the members of the congregation served two years in prison rather than fight in World War II. That's bravery: he faced down more than the army and jail, he faced down a culture that thought it shameful to avoid going to war. Plus, if he had not ignored his draft card, he'd have probably got a 4F for a couple of congenital health problems, but he refused to even recognize their right to decide whether he was fit to kill other people. If only Hitler had to recruit an army of guys like this.
ReplyDeleteI went through a hawkish period fueled by the first Gulf War, where it appeared that the U.S. was not only in the right, but that we were unstoppable. We do spend (even before this unfortunate war) more on defense than all other countries on earth combined, and we spend it well in terms of sophisticated weapons and professional soldiers instead of crude weapons and disgruntled conscripts. But that doesn't mean we've advanced much from failing to see that a very real Communist Threat in Southeast Asia did not translate to a Communist Threat in Southern California. Well, there's the People's Republic of Berkeley, but I think that town would be hard-left no matter what.
So I gave war a chance, to use P.J. O'Rourke's term, and was actually in favor of the invasion of Iraq. The overthrow of the Taliban seemed a smart move (though if we hadn't armed the Muhujadeen against the Soviets, there would have been no such thing as the Taliban), and it was on first sight apparently an easy thing to do, toppling Saddam. Hell, we took chances that made the French at Waterloo look timid, and had apparently 'won.' But what had we won?
Iraqi 'freedom,' not really. Iraqi 'ambiguous possibility' doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? And we're trying to suppress an insurgency that cannot be fully suppressed. Hell, the Union has not fully pacified the Confederacy 150 years after the Civil War in America, and that was an internal struggle amongst people who have more in common with each other than Iraq’s Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites have with each other, let alone with the U.S. Marines.
But going back to the futility of war, this is the same song with a different band fronting it. From the Crusades to the French Revolution to the First World War, to today, all you can accomplish with military might is the spread of disease, poverty and lucrative construction contracts for a few opportunists. Oh, and military career highlights like Purple Hearts for people who participate and manage to come out alive.
I met a guy who was in the process of starving himself to keep from getting drafted to Vietnam. He would only drink grape juice. Aparently he had a target weight for someone of his height, that would earn him a 4F. Being skinny to begin with, this looked like the one for him and he suceeded!
ReplyDeleteLove your comments, and the pictures.