John Clark writing what is the most difficult post since the one about my personal experience with abortion.

My involvement with the anti-war movement began after I wrote a research paper in the spring semester back in 1967 when I was a freshman at Arizona State University. I chose to explore the economics of the air war in Viet Nam. The deeper I dug, the more uneasy I felt. It was clear purely from an economic standpoint, that our involvement was a disaster from day one. However, there was no way to research the war without realizing the historical futility of foreign involvement in the country, the degradation of the environment (can you say Agent Orange?), and the horrific casualties inflicted by both sides.

It didn’t take long to find other students equally concerned about the war. Two were also from Maine, George Peter Clark (who went on to law school) and Hank Benoit. The number of students against the war grew steadily and we formed our own campus group called the Student Power Coalition, many of us, myself included, running for student government. We performed guerrilla theater on the campus mall, complete with Feeling Like I’m Fixing To Die Rag as our soundtrack, held signs at antiwar rallies, and clashed with the Young Americans For Freedom.

As my college career progressed, so did an increase in my sense of dismay at our involvement in the war. Like many of my fellow anti-war friends, my anger wasn’t at our military, but at our government, and the ever growing revelation of lying coming from congress and the Pentagon to justify what many knew was an unwinnable war. In April, 1969, a bunch of us went to San Francisco and marched in the huge anti-war demonstration over Easter weekend.

On May 4^th, 1970, not long before graduation, the entire country was jolted out of what complacency remained when four students were killed by national guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio, followed shortly by two more at Jackson State on May 15th. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings When awareness of this horrific event spread across the ASU campus, shock and outrage were so strong as to seem like a physical force. Students and faculty cried, walked around looking like ghosts, and were asking each other how could something like this happen in America.

The number of protesters skyrocketed to a point where, feeling a sense of urgency to let the world know we were upset and in solidarity with other protests stemming from this massacre, several thousand people staged a sit in, stopping traffic on Route 60 coming into Phoenix from the east. I remember fondly, the way director of campus security, Mr. John Duffy, a retired FBI agent, realized what was happening was too big and powerful to control, so he, campus security, and local law enforcement let things play out.

*****

2024: The world has deteriorated greatly since 1970. Four people killed in a shooting barely makes the evening news now. We’ve seen the environment degrade ever more quickly while those in office are hell bent upon eroding rights of the LBGTQI, Black, and female populations. Nasty is almost normal in politics, We’ve seen wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and on the streets of many large U.S. cities. School kids have learned to shelter in place. Social media (which thankfully wasn’t even a thing when I was in college) bombards almost everyone with ‘stuff’. Information is a fragile commodity, news is frequently biased, and the need for shock value to keep people’s attention is over the top desperate.

The current wave of protests against the massacre in Gaza and Israel has many critics and detractors. The immediacy of video and social media makes measured judgment challenging at best, and I suspect most people barely make it past headlines, let alone take time to read articles about what’s really happening in the middle east, or on college campuses. It’s easy to play cards like antisemitism and outside agitators unless you’re fully engaged with what’s happening. Remember Nixon’s infamous ‘silent majority?’ It was a catchphrase for a shitload of apathetic Americans.

Anyone who thinks kids go to college without being exposed to new opinions and aren’t challenged to think about how world events affect their lives, probably owns stock in a recently debuted company created by the orange haired idiot.

Students face a whole different world than I did. The future of the planet is iffy as hell, they’re as likely to be shot as buy a winning lottery ticket, politics has a level of viciousness never seen before, knocking on the wrong door can get you shot (think about how that affects people who want to help elect good candidates), the weather acts like a character from Nightmare on Elm Street, and they’re probably going to graduate with enough debt to sink them for years. (I owed $750 when I graduated)

All this has been written so I can make one final statement. I admire the hell out of students protesting what’s happening in Israel and Palestine, and hope they have more, or quicker success than we did.