It’s Not Sexy Anymore

Photo by Simon Maage on Unsplash

It’s Not Sexy Anymore

Martin and I stood outside of a meeting place on the campus of the University of Rhode Island. The exact year is hard to determine all of these decades later, but it was during the Contra war against the Nicaraguan government sometime in the 1980s. The Contra war lasted from 1979 through 1990. The Contras were part of Ronald Reagan’s low-intensity warfare and they were murderous thugs and not the “moral equal of the Founding Fathers,” as Reagan said. It’s impossible to make stuff up like the latter. Recall the Monroe Doctrine and the anticommunist bent of the US government. The Vietnam Syndrome had to be overcome because we were an empire with the designs of an empire, but slowly, so low-intensity warfare was just the thing for the reactionaries in Washington, DC and the Contras in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra affair was all part of that. The Great Communicator, a bumbling incompetent, tried fairly successfully to put US wars back on the front burner after the Vietnam War.

Martin and I were part of a vibrant pro-Nicaraguan group, the Committee for Central America, in the geographical part of RI called South County. Martin traveled to Nicaragua to work a few times during that period and we also sent lots of medicine and medical supplies there during the Contra war. Martin was so adept at getting medical supplies that he was able to procure a dentist’s chair. We collected lots of medicines and sent them via ship to the beleaguered nation. A professor at URI called our group communistic, though we were hardly that. We wanted Nicaragua to have a fair shake at development after a long epoch of reactionary governments there. That’s all we wanted.

Martin remarked, following the meeting we had just emerged from, that the conservative environment that faced us made protesting and working for human rights “not sexy.” Martin was both a great organizer and committed. The sexy part of protest didn’t interest him in the least.

Back up at least a decade earlier to the protest movement against the wars in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos where millions would die in the US-led war. Protest then was very, very sexy because we were young and idealists. Being sexy through protest drew millions to the cause of peace, even if they would soon become careerists as soon as the draft and war ended. Also adding to the sexiness of the protest movement was our youth and the lack of serious commitments for many of us, and the coming of age of our cohort in the generation of baby boomers. A person could also take chances then because immersing yourself and your compatriots was an almost natural state of existence.

The activist/protester/theorist Abbie Hoffman had it right, and I paraphrase here, that it was like jumping on the Earth and the Earth bouncing back. But of course, sadly as Abbie learned, it would all come crashing down on us with reactionary social, political, and economic realities and one hell of a backlash that continues today.