“Come
senators, congressmen, please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway don’t
block up the hall / For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled / There’s
a battle outside and it is ragin’ / It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle
your walls / For the times they are a-changin’” –
Bob Dylan
I remember the first time I heard that
song, way back in ’64. I was just a kid at the time; girls, shaving and puberty
were still years distant. I had heard the word “politics,” but had no idea what
it meant. Even so, that song spoke to me on a level I couldn’t begin to
understand.
The years sped by beneath the nightly
televised specter of Vietnam as I edged ever closer to the age when I, too,
would be required to register for the draft.
Was I scared? Hell, yes, I was scared. I
did not want to return home in one of those flag-draped caskets I saw on TV
every night. I did not want to die for a cause that made no sense to me.
Neither did a lot of young men; some died
anyway, including some I called friends. Others protested, raising their voices
against a war they saw as senseless. Because of their voices – in part, at
least – the war in Vietnam wound down just as I was reaching draft age. I registered
but was never inducted.
I later joined up on my own. I liked the
military but was never particularly good at being a soldier. I just wanted to
serve my country, like my old man, my Uncle Ray, my grandfather, my
great-grandfather; all served at one time or another.
But even during my time in uniform I
remained thankful to those protestors. The kids gunned down at Kent State, the
100,000 who filled the streets of Washington, D.C. in ’67, the millions more
who gathered across the nation … it’s possible I – and a lot of other guys my
age – are alive today because those protestors made their voices heard in a way
that would not be silenced.
Don’t get me wrong, I never sided with
the idiots who spit on our returning troops or screamed “baby killer” from the cozy
safety of the sidelines. Too many of my friends and relatives were among those
in uniform and I knew them to be good people.
To this day, our Vietnam vets don’t get
the respect they earned and deserve, though things are improving. Still, too
little, too late, in my opinion.
And now this country is swept up in
another polarizing storm. This time the war’s in our own backyard, in our
schoolyards, classrooms, hallways. Though the venue has changed, the body bags
remain the same. The tears, the televised sobs of parents who will never again
see a son, a daughter; the ineffectual, corrupt politicians who extend hopes
and prayers rather than meaningful legislation.
For those of us who lived through the
Vietnam era, it’s all eerily familiar.
The kind of folks who mistake Facebook
memes for wisdom claim that out of every bad thing a good thing comes. I’m not
sure that’s true. All the protests over Vietnam, the war itself, the civil
rights movement that was happening at the same time; it could be argued they
helped birth a better nation than the one we had before; more tolerant,
enlightened, equal.
But it was a painful, bloody birth. Was
it all worth it? Historians may know; I do not.
I just know it did my heart good to see
the recent news photos of those young protestors in Washington and around the
country. They’re mad as hell and they should be. To borrow from Yeats, there’s
a rough beast running loose in this country and for too long nobody’s done a
thing to stop it. Maybe this is the start. Maybe this is the loosened pebble
that will grow into an avalanche.
Again, I don’t know. You could fit all
the wisdom I possess into a thimble and still have room for your thumb. I don’t
know any more about politics now than I did back when Dylan wrote that song.
I own guns myself and not the sort one
uses for hunting. But just like in the sixties, I’m sick of seeing body bags. Something’s
got to change.
If our leaders lack the courage to make
a stand, maybe it’s time history repeats itself. For the first time in a long
time I think I feel the ground beginning to swell beneath me.
A change is coming.
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