Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Published at CounterPunch September 13, 2024
The New York Times/Sienna poll (New York Times, September 8, 2024) brought back the same sickening sense of doom that I felt in both 1969 and 1971. George McGovern’s defeat in the 1972 presidential campaign nailed down the lid on the coffin of anything that seemed even close to sanity to me in those years during the Vietnam War. McGovern’s trouncing by the warmonger Nixon sent a message clearer than had it been written by a skywriter. The Democrats had not learned how to stand against the war in 1968 and we paid a price for Humphrey’s candidacy.
We occupy a landscape so different from 1969, 1971, and 1973, another year of spectacular change for me and the end of official US fighting in Vietnam, that I sometimes feel as if I’m living in some different and parallel universe. The world around me seems like an endless episode of the Twilight Zone. All of the questions and policies have moved so far to the right that reality often feels like a fiction. War rages on seemingly unstoppable, one a genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, the so-called social safety net is laughable, and the environment is in a perhaps unending slide toward doom. The Ukraine war is, in addition to a propaganda opportunity for endless war, a weapons’ bazaar for enormous war profiteering. The wealthiest society for some at the top thrives for the elite who don’t have to worry about food, shelter, and education, among other issues, while poverty remains an ever-present reality for millions. Millions more are locked away in dungeons, and hate often seems like a value many espouse. Ordinary people cannot begin to think of owning a home.
I face similar issues as I did in both 1969 and 1971 when the Vietnam War came home for me. In ’69, I had been accepted to McGill University in Montreal to study the social sciences at the graduate level, yet I resisted leaving the US because of a relationship and a measure of fear and uncertainty kept me here. In ’71, I had a similar opportunity to leave, then on the cusp of full resistance to the war, but again a nagging fear and uncertainty, along with connections here kept me from making a demonstrative decision.
My fate was sealed in 1973 when I said no to the government by way of full-blown war resistance. I thought that the nightmare of retribution for my resistance would end with Jimmy Carter’s amnesty, but it took more than three decades more to get the government off of my back and the record has still not been corrected in a public way. Talk about vindictiveness!
I recently stood on a high point on the terrain near Berlin, Vermont. The mountains around me and below, a few thousand feet down of cascading land is the land I fell in love with in the middle of the decade of the 1970s. It is possible to love a place and not the government. I have climbed the mountains and hills here for a very long time and I feel at home on these trails. I found these mountains at a time when my head began to clear from resistance to the Vietnam War. Here connections to nature are much like the Transcendentalists of the 19th century and particularly Emerson and Thoreau. Nature for them was the connection to the larger universe and for Thoreau a connection, or perhaps a respite, to civil disobedience and war resistance.
Just outside of Berlin, and a bit north of the area I describe above, the GPS on our phones and our phone connections went out. I missed a turn to head back to the highway, and by luck I was able to get directions from a young man outside of a convenience store with whom I had a conversation. He had lived all of his life in the surrounding area and said that the pulse of life was slower here and the din of life in a more heavily populated area was absent. His description of the area and his life fit with my attachments. Everything was pristine and a deck of low dark clouds and fog surrounded most mountain peaks in the distance.
With the presidential debate slated for the day on which I write, it may be instructive to recall Emma Goldman’s observation about elections being meaningless. The power elite may want voters to feel as if there’s a difference, but we eventually get the same results with income inequality, mass incarceration, environmental destruction, and the Bill of Rights chewed up into shreds while the war profiteering from endless wars goes on. Both the neoliberals in the person of Harris, and the extreme right in the person of Trump, will lead to the same dead end for our species and most other species. Third parties with good domestic and foreign policy platforms have the right outlook, but without organizing against a police state domestically and endless wars, nothing gets better for most people. Disaster awaits without sweeping intervention. The neoliberals will usher in more rightward political, economic, and social movements. We occupy a national security state bristling with nuclear weapons and involvement in many wars.
*Yogi Berra
"Déjà vu all over again”*