When I was a young man I was involved with the Viet Nam Anti-War movement, living just outside of Washington, DC it was pretty easy to do, there seemed to be something going on every weekend. It was an exciting time being down on Constitution Ave among tens of thousands of fellow protesters and I always managed to run into friends. As the protests got larger so did the police presence and they were more than happy to engage in “crowd control”.
Over time I was tear gassed, maced, clubbed and arrested. Sometimes a few of the counter protesters liked to get involved as well, a fried of mine was hit in the head by a thrown beer bottle. People these days talk about how divided the country is now but forget how bad things were during that time. We on the left thought Richard Nixon was evil incarnate but compared to what we have now, Tricky Dick was a choir boy. He hated the hippies, we were all dope smoking commies but he never suggested that the police shoot anyone and to his credit, he onetime left the White House and engaged with protesters camped out on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial. In the end, he was a crook and had to resign rather than be impeached after he lost the support of his own party. Amazing to think that republicans actually had spines back then.
I took a couple of my kids to the protests during the Iraq War so they might get a sense of that engagement but they were pretty tame except when the Westboro Baptist Church showed up and there were some colorful exchanges. The energy though just wasn’t there, the all volunteer military took away the dreaded draft notices and the urgency. It’s hard to get worked up about a war when most of us have no one close to us serving.
When Donald Trump won in 2016, I was horrified but hoped he would grow into the job. That went out the window almost immediately with the insane claims that his inauguration crowd was the largest in history despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Then came the claims that he would have won the popular vote if there hadn’t been massive fraud in blue states. We heard about alternative facts, the Bowling Green Massacre, Muslims celebrating on 9/11 in Jersey City. The macho man who fired people via Twitter rather than looking them in the eye. His constant whining about how unfairly he is treated despite the fact that he was born rich and aside from a few summers picking up nails on his father’s construction site he never worked hard in his life.
Then came the 2020 election and his claims starting in 2018 that if he lost the election on 2020 it would be because it was rigged. After he did indeed lost but a pretty good margin, he did something no other losing candidate had ever done, he refused to concede thus setting off the events that led to January 6th 2021. I was off that day and watched in absolute horror as the Capital was stormed and then breached by a mob that had been whipped up by Trump before he went back to the White House and watched it all on TV while eating fast food and downing Diet Cokes.
When Joe Biden was sworn in, Trump broke yet another precedent by not attending and skulked off the Florida leaving the economy in shambles and thousands still diving every day from COVID that Trump still insisted wasn’t as bad as everyone thought and still insisting that he really had won.
Joe Biden dropped the ball by deciding to run again and not acknowledging that despite a strong economy average Americans were not doing as well as he thought. I read an article in Bloomberg News where the author said that whomever won the election was going to inherit one of the strongest economies in years. Unfortunately, many of the projects Biden and the Democrats got through Congress didn’t begin to bear fruit until after his administration was done. And surprise, Trump is taking credit for them.
One of the greatest shocks of my life was when the American people re-elected a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist for a second term because he promised to fix the economy and bring down the price of eggs on day one. Spoiler alert, he didn’t. Trump eked out a victory and then claimed he had won in a landslide and now had a mandate to fix America. Corporations, banks and universities all rolled over and Trump began the systematic destruction of the Federal Government while storing has cabinet with loonies and yes men most of them having no business going anywhere near the agencies they were tasked to run. A weekend tv host with no leadership experience runs the largest military on earth. A former heroin addict with no medical training runs our nation’s health services. A wrestling promoter runs the Education Department although her mandate is to destroy it. The DNI Director has no experience in that area and Elon Musk was brought in to run the new Department of Government Efficiency. In the end he ended up losing more money that we saved and thought it was a great idea to kill USAID and VOA which hands all that soft diplomacy to the Chinese and Russians. Don’t even get me started on Trump’s weird man crush on Putin and his apparent desire to destroy NATO and let Putin achieve his dream of rebuilding the Soviet Union.
Trump is fulfilling one of his campaign promises, mass deportations. He promised that he would target the worst of the worst, the violent criminals and gang members but instead he is targeting anyone who “looks” like an immigrant including US Citizens some who have been held for days before being turned loose. To further his tough guy image he first started deploying National Guard troops to LA and DC and then after getting the GOP led House to pass unprecedented funding for ICE they began hiring anyone with a pulse and a bad attitude. Give them a gun and a few weeks training and turn them loose on any Blue city that Trump has a grudge against. Tragically, two protesters, both American citizens were murdered, all caught on video by witnesses and that I believe is this eras Kent State.
On May 4, 1970 at Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard was sent in to quell student unrest after the invasion of Cambodia by US Forces. The Guard opened fire on the students, killing four and seriously wounding nine others. Campuses across the country exploded, I was in high school and helped organize a student strike. A few dozen of us walked out of class and held a small rally on one side of the football field. We were all suspended and when the school year ended a few weeks later I was called into the Principal’s office and told that I would not be welcomed back for the next year (that was the best thing that ever happened to me but that’s for another time).
Another thing that Kent State did was to cause a huge swing in public opinion against the war and I think the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have had a profound effect on public opinion about the Trump Administration and the daily cascade of anti democratic actions designed to keep him in power indefinitely.
I attended the No Kings demonstration in October with seven million of my fellow Americans and plan to attend again in March and I predict that the next one especially in light of what has happened will be even larger. My generation stopped a war and paved the way for things like marriage equality, racial inclusion and the Me Too movement. Hopefully we will come together again drive Trump and his ilk from power and continue to move the country forward. The way to do that is to VOTE, don’t think your vote doesn’t count, it does, now more than ever.
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Photo: iStock
