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before ( and learned only much later that he had not only refused to support the CIA plan to invade Cuba, he had signed an Executive Order withdrawing U.S. military 'advisers' from Vietnam just before he was killed); we had lost Martin Luther King in March 1968, to assassination, then Robert Kennedy, on the night he won the California primary. RFK was a changed man by the time he ran for president. Originally, he was a typical 'Cold Warrior,' and even worked for Joe McCarthy (the infamous 'anti-communist') in the '50s. He initially supported the war in Vietnam, but I believe that the Catholic antiwar movement--people like Fr. Dan Berrigan--may have influenced him; also, Martin Luther King (who had come out against the war publicly the previous year). He may also have been influenced by the trauma of his brother's death. I don't think it was a cynical political move on RFK's part, coming out against the war. He was a genuinely transformed person--rather like Al Gore is now. Both speak from some deep place inside of them, where head and heart have come together.
I didn't vote for Bobbie that day. I voted for Eugene McCarthy--the first presidential candidate to disavow the war. But I knew Bobby was going to win, and cheered him when he won that night in California. We couldn't have had a stronger presidential candidate and advocate for peace.
JFK--beloved by so many, and we didn't know all of what he had done, to maintain the peace. RFK, a man who not only engineered the Civil Rights Act, but who turned against LBJ's dreadful war. Martin Luther King.
Bang, bang, shoot, shoot. The latter two, in the midst of the presidential campaign of 1968.
And in 1968, we were right in the midst of the slaughter of upwards of TWO MILLION PEOPLE in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. The horror of those times is difficult to adequately describe.
And when the people tried to speak and be heard at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968, a police riot was unleashed upon us, and many people were brutally beaten, and jailed, and inflicted with lengthy trials.
Not one word would Hubert Humphrey say against the horrific, on-going slaughter in Vietnam. Not one word. Not one gesture toward the many thousands of people who were crying out against that terrible war within earshot of the Democratic Convention--nor the slightest hint of sympathy for the brutality unleashed upon us, and the far worse brutality unleashed upon the people of Southeast Asia.
It was too much to bear. JFK. RFK. MLK. Within the space of five years. OUR representatives were being picked off, one by one. We were being brutally deprived of our leaders--three of the greatest men this country has ever produced. Men with vision. Men with true courage. JFK THWARTED the CIA on the Cuba invasion, and turned down all their nefarious schemes to create a Vietnam right off the coast of Florida. And RFK had the courage to CHANGE, to go deeper, to re-evaluate the Cold War and kneejerk anti-communism. He, a rich man's son, became an advocate for the poor and the black and the brown. His love of people was palpable. And Martin Luther King, what can I say? We were blest with Gandhi reborn, right amongst us, in the United States of America. He drew me out of my lily-white privileged life in California, down to Alabama in the summer of 1965, to register black citizens to vote. I purposely went there to broaden the target (three civil rights workers had been murdered in Mississippi the previous summer). Not in THIS country would they dare kill civil rights workers again!
And then they did. They killed HIM.
Oh, God! I can't tell you how awful it was. And it wasn't for civil rights. It was for Vietnam. I'm convinced about that now. It was his speech on the Vietnam War, which enraged the war profiteers. Same with JFK. Same with RFK. It was all about the war.
We forced LBJ to withdraw from the race, and denied him a second term. Then the bad guys found a way to have LBJ by another name: Hubert Humphrey. They killed Martin Luther King. They killed Bobby. And then gave us THEIR Democratic candidate to "choose" --LBJ's VICE PRESIDENT, who would not speak one word against the napalming of Vietnamese children and the fire-bombing of villages, and the bombing of Hanoi, which had no air force, and the slaughter...the slaughter.
I could not vote for him. My heart was broken. I simply couldn't do it. I could not vote for any man who could not speak against that slaughter, and who bargained for the nomination with lives of Vietnamese children and freedom fighters. That's who the Viet Cong were--people fighting for their freedom. And we were smashing and killing and burning them alive, as if they were insects, as if they were vermin.
1964 had been my first vote for president. I had been too young to vote for JFK in 1960. And in my first vote for president, I voted for the peace candidate. That's how they advertised LBJ. The peace candidate. Four years later, in 1968, something like half a million people were dead, bombed, burned, shot, by LBJ's orders. I was not about to be fooled again.
I couldn't vote for Nixon. That's where the phrase "dirty tricks" came from, in politics. He was a dirty trickster and a "red baiter." I did hold the outside hope that he might be forced to the peace table by the rebellion of the American people against the war. As it turned out, he was only faking it. (He escalated the war--and, in the end, the Vietnamese--those little brown peasants in straw hats and sandals--beat the U.S. military and drove them out of Vietnam, as they had been driving the imperialist Chinese and everybody else out of Vietnam for five thousand years.)
But I realize now that I might as well have voted for Nixon. Mine was a wasted vote. (I voted for Pope John XXIII--the ecumenical pope.)
Would I do it again? Probably not. Humphrey was a pretty good guy, I now realize--and the argument that he was secretly against the war is quite possibly true. But how could I know that? And, further, I was not exactly in my right mind. How could anyone be, who was so passionately involved in politics, and suffered what I and other committed youngsters had suffered in those five years--the uttering shattering of all our hopes and dreams and ideals about this country.
I'm a lot older now. I see one gigantic mistake that the antiwar movement made, and it is this: not dismantling the U.S. war machine when it might have been possible, after Vietnam and after Watergate. We were all too young, I guess--and, when they ended the Draft, a lot of the immediacy of the problem went away. But that's what we should have done. We should have been relentless in doing it. We probably prevented Vietnam from being nuked, but we did not end the war, and we didn't follow through on what really needed to be done.
Some amazing things happened, as a result of the leftist movement of the '60s, including Congress forbidding a war on Nicaragua, improvements in the CIA/FBI culture, a greatly improved policy on Latin America, and, of course, the end of segregation, the enfranchisement of black citizens, and great advances for women and for gays and other minorities (all of which the Bush junta is trying to destroy).
The music was great, too. What a liberation THAT was! That's what guys are really made for, you know--not for killing, but for making music. Well, girls, too. But, at that time, it was the guys. It was that the guys REALIZED they were created to make music and not to kill, and it was such a revelation. The Beatles were the best at making that point. They were Druids and Wizards of the most powerful popular music ever created, and they grew more and more political, and more and more pointed about what men should be doing, with one fabulous album after another, each one better than the last. We still had the ugliness of Reaganism and the slaughters in Nicaragua and El Salvador to come, and one more assassination. But something deep had changed in American life, and in western civilization: The idea that our brothers and sons and lovers were born to be cannon fodder.
That was the profoundest change of all--and the most threatening to rightwingers, fascists and war profiteers.
But we never seriously addressed the problem of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned us against. How right he was!
We might have done--if they hadn't killed all our leaders.
Which brings me back to the present. John Kerry. Is he like Robert Kennedy? No. He is too much of a mandarin, who couldn't get his hands dirty bothering about Bushite corporations having gained control of the election system with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls. RFK would have been on that in a minute, way back when Tom Delay and Bob Ney did it, during the Anthrax Congress. RFK wouldn't have been intimidated by anthrax, or anything else. He would have busted their noses over 'trade secret' programming.
On the war, there is something of a parallel. Bobby CHANGED his position on the war. Kerry voted for the war--which is a huge black mark against him, especially AFTER Vietnam. Good God, couldn't he SEE what giving away war powers to George Bush would lead to? And if he changes his position NOW, and I don't mean merely calling for a more efficient war, as he did during the campaign, but has a genuine change of heart (which maybe...MAYBE his recent withdrawal plan might indicate), I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt. But I really don't trust him--the way one trusted Bobby. Kerry COULD be just another Middle East warrior who will permit some "Gulf of Tonkin" thing to happen, to widen the war, after he got into office. Dunno. I sense that he's a fairly decent guy. But he's not Bobby Kennedy. I don't believe that Bobby would have been capable of the kind of deception I've just described, and I think Kerry could be.
And that uncertainty about Kerry, by the way, makes him a bad candidate for president, because other people sense it, too. UNLESS he were to be combined with Al Gore, with Gore heading the ticket. THAT might work. The two men who were unfairly denied the office--the two men that most American voters voted for--running together, as the "poetic justice" ticket would be a winner. But Kerry alone would not be.
Is Hillary like Hubert Humphrey? To some extent, yes. They both sold their souls for the nomination. Humphrey, because the pro-war unions (some of them) and the war profiteers and the LBJ war faction would not let him have the nomination unless he shut his mouth about the slaughter in Vietnam. And Hillary--I think she's already made her deal with the devil. She WILL be the nominee. Diebold and ES&S can guarantee it.
But my perspective on this kind of corruption has changed. We have to face reality here. Our country and our democracy are in extremely great peril. In many ways, we don't have a democracy any more. In essence, we lost our sovereignty as a people, when the Bushite corporations took over the election system. Voting is how we exercise our sovereignty. It is our major power as citizens. Without it, the government ignores us--which is exactly what this illegitimate president and congress are doing.
And, although the election reform movement is growing by leaps and bounds--and is very much succeeding in raising consciousness--I just don't see any significant restoration of election transparency before 2008. Maybe I will be surprised. But I don't think so. The election system corruption is very deep and it is bipartisan. We are often having to fight our own party on it (amazingly--you'd think the Democratic leadership would object to Bushites 'counting' all the votes behind a veil of secrecy, wouldn't you? Funny, that.)
Anyway, it appears to me that Diebold--which until recently was headed by a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and "Pioneer" fundraiser--and ES&S--a spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, also known for his million dollar donations to extremist 'christian' groups--will be choosing the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, as well as controlling all other elections this year, and then. They may back off a bit this year, and give us a few gains in Congress--but nothing near a majority--in order to deflect attention from their fraudulent election system. But, on the whole, their 5% to 10% thumb on the scales for Bushites and warmongers will rule the day, and it will most certainly be used to prevent any real antiwar candidate and/or genuine populist from gaining the presidential nomination of either party.
And, given this dire circumstance, we have to be very strategic in our thinking. Our first priority MUST BE restoring our right to vote. If we can get that done quickly on a national basis, by pressuring Hillary on this "good government" issue, perhaps we should support Hillary, when she is "nominated," and not fuss to much about her warmongering and her corporatism.
I really mean this. While we won't be permitted to choose our nominee, we do have power in the election itself. If the left defects from Hillary, she cannot win--even if Diebold and ES&S decide to put her in the White House (for their own reasons). She has to have a pretty solid base--a lot of leftist votes, and a lot of leftist donations--to even get into a position to be Diebolded into office. We can wreck that. The questions is, should we?
Maybe we should bargain for transparent elections instead. We MUST get back our right to vote, for any change to be feasible--on almost any issue (with the exception of women's issues, which she might trade upon).
It's a very risky strategy. For one thing, there is no guarantee that a Diebold-elected president and congress--even Democratic ones--won't do more harm to the election system, such as requiring electronic voting, with a weak "paper trail" and inadequate auditing, and failing to ban "trade secret" programming. It's a long shot. But, with so much at stake, it seems worth it. The alternative is a long, difficult struggle through every state/county jurisdiction in the country, trying to increase election transparency by increments.
So I guess I've grown up a lot, since 1968. I am, in fact, much more radical than I was then. I think we need to dismantle the war machine (at least a 90% cutback--down to a true defensive posture--no more president's choice war), and we have to start pulling the corporate charters of US-based global corporate predators, as well as busting the corporate news monopolies. But I am also more realistic, more strategy-minded, and, in a way, less dogmatic and more compassionate. I feel for Kerry. Also for Hillary. I even feel for Bush sometimes (the dimwitted, mean little sod!). We're all caught in the midst of a lot of greed and horror, and we're all killing our planet. I guess I feel for the human race. And I see that we must find our way back to our creative selves, and to our can-do spirit as a nation. We're doing 25% of the damage to the planet. And the nuke situation is scary as hell. This country can make or break the planet, and everything on it. We MUST get it back into the control of the American people, who are good people. I am convinced of that. They have resisted the Bushites' relentless propaganda and fearmongering. Give them half a chance--give them back the right to vote--and they will set things right. I'm sure of it.
I believed in individual struggles, when I was young, and in individual heroes. Now I believe in the peoples' struggle, and in the fundamental rightness of democracy. And I must say that I am heartened by the peaceful, democratic, leftist revolution that has swept South America over the last several years (and is occurring in Mexico as well), one of the keys to which is TRANSPARENT elections. I've learned more respect for lo-o-o-o-ong term struggles, for perseverance, for the less flashy kinds of courage. The new indigenous Indian president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has said this: "The time of the people has come." I feel that, too--despite how hopeless things may appear, from inside the U.S. right now. If the South Americans can do it--after all they've suffered--so can we. We can make a better country out this horrible mess that the warmongers have created. But we have to be patient, persistent, and relentless, the way Bobby Kennedy would have been. And we have to open ourselves up to the light of the universe, the way he was beginning to, in the last two years of his life.
Let that light live again--and pity the Hubert Humphreys who cannot see it, or cannot respond to it, because they are clouded by their ambition. Let that light live again, in all of us this time, as a collective realization that war and warmongering and war profiteering must be brought to an end.
"The time of the people has come."
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