Tag: Dissent
That was then, this is now

That was then, this is now

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is largely a personal account tracing my experience with events and dissent over the past 54 years, beginning with opposition to the Vietnam War and culminating with today’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic demonstrations sweeping the country. I don’t pretend that it is a comprehensive view or account, which could easily take multiple book-length volumes. But it does give my perspective of the transition of attitudes and beliefs and ways of expressing dissent over those years until now.

I don’t think I’m in that photo above, but I could be. That was the line of protestors marching by the Executive Office Building in Washington on the night of Friday, November 14, 1969, in what was called the Death March, the prelude to the largest anti-war protest in U.S. history. Holding signs bearing the names of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam, it was a somber but dramatic demonstration of the reality of the war going on on the other side of the globe.

It was a cold and windy night, and we struggled to keep the candles we also bore, in little paper protective cones, from being blown out in the persistent breeze. The march began across the Potomac, near Arlington National Cemetery, and wound its way in single file across Memorial Bridge, past the Lincoln Memorial, along the National Mall, up 17th St. NW, past the Executive Office Building to Pennsylvania Ave., and then along the fence past the White House. We wondered whether President Richard Nixon was watching from an upstairs window in the White House as FBI or Secret Service agents made no effort to hide themselves as they shot photos of the demonstrators filing by.

It wasn’t our first brush with the FBI. Earlier that day, on the charter bus down from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, people — young people, not unlike us, claiming to be with the march organizers — came aboard at the toll booth on the Delaware Turnpike and told us there was no room in D.C. and we should turn back. We had a quick consultation and decided these were government agents trying to dissuade protestors from making their way to the capital and we should go on. And we did. And they were.

People had come from all over the country to make their voices heard. That was the night, waiting in the dark across the Potomac for the march to start, that I met Sally, still a friend today, and Anne, to become one of the loves of my life, and later their friend Norman, who with some other classmates had come from St. Louis to participate. The next day, filling the National Mall and spreading out beyond it, a mass of humanity — officially set at a half million people, but by our count closer to a million — protested the war. Peacefully. With decorum. With hope and determination. With a presence that could not be ignored. Though Nixon said he watched sports on television as the demonstration unfolded.

Later in the day, when the crowd had broken up and people began fading back into the fabric of the country from which they had come, there were a relative few demonstrators who resorted to violent protest and drew tear gas from the police. But as The New York Times reported, “The predominant event of the day was that of a great and peaceful army of dissent moving through the city.”

Non-violence in protection of an ROTC building

In March of the following year I drove out to St. Louis with a friend to visit Anne and Sally. Arriving late at night with a wounded car, we were greeted by scores of people running over a hill at Washington University shouting, “They’re beating heads! They’re beating heads!” It was a tense time, the anti-war sentiment running high, and in the coming days we got caught up in the swirling events that seized the campus. Along with listening to open-air speeches by leftist professors — to dispel any idea that leftism on college campuses is just a recent development, it was alive and spreading even in 1970 — we also found ourselves in nighttime demonstrations.

Anne and Sally were committed to non-violence, which coincided with my own beliefs while further reinforcing them. One night during our visit I found myself with my friends in a line of non-violent people standing between other demonstrators of a violent persuasion and the Air Force ROTC building they were intent on burning down. We succeeded in holding our line and saving the building, but all the time I wondered why I was putting my life at risk to save an ROTC building. Violence just seemed to me, as it still does, the wrong way to go about things.

The result of our efforts were short-lived and the building was burned a couple of months later, on May 5, 1970. Earlier, on the preceding Dec. 9, an attempt had been made to burn down the Army ROTC building on my own campus. And a more successful attempt at burning it down occurred a year after my graduation from Rutgers, on April 25, 1972.

I’m not going to pretend that all was peace and light at that time. Those were, indeed, exciting and dramatic times, even at my own college. And across the nation, there was the Weather Underground, with its Marxist orientation and goal of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, and other radical groups committed to violence and domestic terrorism. Years later, Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn — indicted, and in Dohrn’s case convicted, for inciting riot and bombing government buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol — intersected with Barack Obama, who in 1995 launched his first Illinois state senatorial race at the Ayers-Dohrn home. Obama’s association with Ayers stretched over several years, and should tell you a lot of what you need to know about Obama.

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” an unrepentant Ayers told The New York Times in 2001, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

“The traitor is dead!”

In the early 1980s I was in graduate school at the University of Florida. In my second year I was selected for a federal grant to study Africa, especially North Africa, and the Middle East, and also to study Arabic. Our Arabic instructor, whose name was Ilham, was Palestinian. On the day following the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, as we settled into our seats in the classroom, we saw what Ilham had written in big chalk letters on the board: “Great news! The traitor is dead!”

I recall very well how shocked most of us were to see this on the board. Many of us exchanged uneasy glances around the room, unsure of how we should respond. If there was any enthusiasm for that shocking display of her views it was among the few Iranian students in the room. At the time I was mainly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but I also knew that assassination of Sadat, who had made peace with Israel and agreed to a framework both for peace in the region and resolution of the Palestinian issue, was not going to be positive for anyone. It also seemed outrageous that Ilham, a guest in our country, could make such a statement, with no attempt at discussion or persuasion. It was a pure statement of her hostility, even hatred, and prejudice, and in no way pedagogical.

I contrast our measured, and probably better informed, response then to the kind of mindless support for Hamas and hatred for Israel and Jews on campuses today, and I can see how both the realities and the nuances of one of history’s most complex conflicts have been lost on much of a generation that has simply lost both historical knowledge and perspective, as well as a moral compass.

Rejecting terrorism

Fast forward from 1981 to Sept. 11, 2001. The nation awoke to the biggest terrorist attack ever mounted on U.S. soil. It took just 19 terrorists to kill nearly 3,000 people in a few hours, bring down two of the country’s most iconic buildings and seriously damage a third, and reveal to the country both its vulnerability to terrorism and the ruthless and inhuman nature of those who choose terrorism as the means to making their point, whatever that point might be.

I was living in Greece at the time and word of the attacks came to me by way of a phone call from an Irish friend. My Algerian girlfriend at the time, later to become my wife, and I rushed upstairs to turn on the tube and watch, in horror, as the events of the day unfolded thousands of miles away. One thing that stuck in my mind was how Farida was as horrified as I was, and how she said, standing there staring at the screen, “If these are Muslims, I am no longer a Muslim.”

At the time I think most Americans, and probably most Muslims, shared a common abhorrence of terrorism and what it wreaked on Sept. 11. Probably more than we should have, as a country we were collectively willing to give up rights in a shared will to prevent further terrorist attacks. And as Spain and France and the U.K. and Jordan and Indonesia and other countries suffered attacks, we remained relatively unscathed in the decades that followed 9-11. But time, apparently, has a way of eroding memory, along with resolve.

On a personal note, with 9-11 receding into the rear view mirror, Farida — still a Muslim — later would ask me if I thought she was a terrorist since she would express support for the terrorist acts committed by Palestinians, of whose cause she was a huge supporter.

“No, I don’t think you’re a terrorist,” I’d tell her. “But you support what terrorists do.”

I think the same can be said for many of today’s demonstrators and others who openly express support for Hamas, one of the most ruthless terrorist organizations in the world, whose brutality is inflicted not just on Israelis but on its own people.

And this is now

I don’t claim that all college professors are as blatant in their anti-Semitic hatred and advocacy of violence as UC Davis’s Jemma Decristo is, but as recent events demonstrate, they’re more prevalent than one wants to think. And those professors, and in many cases administrators, have a major influence on the vulnerable and ill-informed young minds in their tutelage. And rather than adhering to the precepts of what education is supposed to be about — to “lead forth,” not to “cram down” — they exploit their positions of influence and trust to indoctrinate, not educate, their students.

I could excuse those students, but I don’t, and neither should you. Just as we, many of us, questioned the indoctrination that professors of earlier eras attempted on us, these students also can question that indoctrination today. As much as we might have been fond of Ilham and others like her, our values and knowledge transcended that affection to question when she attempted to cram down her particular view on us. This issue goes well beyond the instant issue of Israelis v. Palestinians, but reaches to the kinds of values these kids are taught at home, what they get from social media, the peer pressure they’re subject to, and a general lack of instruction in basic civic and social values. As I presented in my last piece, The ugly reality of American education, there is a pervasive crisis throughout the entire American educational system.

I’m sure growing up, as I did, imbued with the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, with half my extended family Jews who had experienced those horrors themselves, living in the New York Metropolitan Area and absorbing Jewish culture, I have a different view of anti-Semitism than many of these kids. But does one really have to have grown up with experiences such as mine to not know that prejudice and hatred of any sort is simply not acceptable? And what of adults who express the same kind of hatred? What can one say of them?

It was just 22 years ago that we recognized, on our own soil, the barbarity of terrorism and its infliction on innocent people. But somehow those sensibilities have been lost by many — even members of Congress — who now condone the murder and beheading of infants, the rape of girls and women, burning people alive, and kidnapping men, women, children, and even babies. What has short-circuited in these peoples’ brains? In their value systems? Is this the same process that took place in 1930s Germany, leading to the concentration camps and wholesale murder of millions, or in countless other societies, resulting in the most horrible barbarisms? Are we really at that point in contemporary America, or in numerous other countries formerly thought of as civilized around the globe?

In closing, let me say I am not unaware of various policy choices and implications that have shaped events and life on the ground in the Middle East. These are things I’ve lived with for most of half a century. There are legitimate arguments that can be made for different courses of action. Injustices have been committed, by both sides. And indeed, resolving the differences — as implausible as it seems at this moment — that have divided the Palestinians and the Jews for centuries is a matter of critical concern, if peace is ever to come to the region. But as long as hate and prejudice and violence are allowed to exist and to perpetrate themselves, no policy will ever succeed.

Featured image: Death Marchers pass Executive Office Building, Nov. 14, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

National Moratorium, Washington, Nov. 15, 1969, from Flickr, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Assassination of Anwar Sadat, 1981, from rarehistoricalphotos.com, source unknown. Used under Fair Use.

Twin Towers Attacked, from the Los Angeles Times, Chao Soi Cheong, Associated Press. Used under Fair Use.

Hateful Tweet, from X, SRS-One. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Read, share, and subscribe here and there.

Shouting past each other
Shouting Past Each Other

Shouting Past Each Other

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For several years now, I have been in the habit of listening to the liberals in the morning and the conservatives in the afternoon. My rationale for this is that I want to hear both sides of various current arguments and issues. Not being an adherent to either political persuasion – I consider myself both a libertarian and independent – I find lots of cause for annoyance across the political spectrum, though in truth I find lots more grounds for annoyance originating from the left than from the right. It has been this way for some time, but the trend seems to be accelerating lately.

What has increasingly occurred to me is that there not only seem to be at least two entirely different conversations going on, with some sub-sets within each, but those conversations are based on entirely different sets of facts and, without doubt, vastly different world views. And as this trend continues and deepens, the conversations – again, especially on the liberal side – seem to be degrading into shouting matches.

I’ve always believed that we all can disagree, but that disagreement is based on the same sets of facts. Now, listening in to these two camps, one increasingly begins to wonder if there are even such things as facts any more, and what facts there might be seem to be mutable, with each side holding and citing two almost completely different sets of them. And that’s ostensibly on the news and news analysis side of things. In the realm of entertainment, the divisions appear to be even greater, and sub-sets of divisions, between the coasts and what is called fly-over country, between white and black, between younger and older, between cities and rural areas, and even schisms between and among residents of the same cities and the same states become ever more evident.

While I listen to these things daily, becoming somewhat inured to them, someone coasting in from out there somewhere and catching these battling views for the first time might be justified to conclude that we are going through a kind of societal crack up.

Without a basis in common facts, the arguments become self-justifying. Each side builds its logic like competing jenga towers teetering atop bases of illusory blocks, seemingly ignoring the laws of physics and the pull of reality. When things become too difficult to justify based on factuality, the next step is simply to raise the volume. Speech rises to shouting and shouting to screaming, as if decibels are a stand-in for rationality. See me, the shouters seem to say, I can yell louder than you so I must be right and you must be wrong.

We’ve seen this in street demonstrations, where one almost comes to expect such behavior. We’ve seen it on cable TV, with panelists shouting at each other to the point no one, least of all the viewers, can make out what is being said. And now we see it in Congressional hearings, where raising one’s voice and speaking over the subject of one’s disdain appears to be a substitute for actually seeking answers to questions. We saw this during Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, with Democrats like California’s Sen. Kamala Harris insistently speaking over Attorney General Jeff Sessions, her grandstanding meant to block out whatever Sessions might actually have to say and, ostensibly, to discredit him. And then Sessions is later heckled by the liberal media for becoming flustered and stymied by such obviously pre-planned tirades and Harris painted as some sort of victim because she’s a woman and black.

This dismissal of inconvenient facts seems to be a hallmark of the 21st Century in this country. If we come to realize that the Iraq War was a folly, we dismiss the fact that Hillary Clinton and other Democrats voted in support of it. If the IRS abuses its power in going after conservative groups, we look the other way and ignore it as if it never happened. If the Obama Administration failed to protect or attempt to rescue Americans under attack in Benghazi, we say there is no there there and don’t question why the Administration found it necessary to concoct and promulgate a lie about what actually happened. And if Hillary Clinton violated federal law and jeopardized the country’s security, we ignore it and her non-prosecution and justify voting for her anyway. And when facts turn out differently than we have been told they are, such as that there is no chance Donald Trump can ever be elected President, we throw a tantrum and question his legitimacy and hold his bloody head in our hands. How dare reality intrude on our manufactured view of how things should turn out?

Like I said, I find lots more to annoy me on the left than on the right, but the right is not without its own sets of facts and fictions. I think at this point there is little question but that Trump can be his own worst enemy, despite the efforts of many on the right to defend his every misstep, and even many of his supporters hope someone will take away his phone and throw it in the toilet. And while he gets no credit on the left for what he does right, there is little criticism from the right of what he does wrong. And let’s not forget that, despite years of bellyaching about the ills of Obamacare, the Republicans showed themselves utterly bereft of a viable alternative plan.

While I can understand the urge to overcompensate on the right to counter the venom spewing like a volcano from the left and the anti-Trump crowd, there is truth in what many of us were taught as children, which is that two wrongs do not a right make.

But my assertion remains, which is that we’re not arguing over the same facts and realities, but over completely different sets of facts, completely different realities. And therein lies much of the problem.

How did this state come to be? I think there are a number of factors in play, some of which are the result of changes in technology and how we communicate, and some of which go back much further and are rooted in the same sources that have led to the general alienation and disconnectedness we have come to take for granted in our society, and to the coarsening and degradation of dialogue.

In past decades, as recently as the 1990s but going back well before that, we had a basis for a common dialogue. Not that everyone agreed, which they didn’t, but at least there was a common set of facts we could and would debate over. We had three primary television networks, three primary sets of national news reporting, and, in effect, three focal points for a national audience. Locally, we might have had one or two or three newspapers which, while they might have diverged somewhat in viewpoint, made an effort to at least deal in common facts. And one could make one’s views known through a letter to the editor which had a decent chance of showing up on the editorial page.

All that has changed in the past 20 years. While the three TV networks prevail, there is now cable television with new sources and new, and often radically divergent, views on the news. There is social media, like Facebook and Twitter. And there are hundreds and thousands of online so-called news sites and blogs (full disclosure: including this one), where there is no prevailing view or even any prevailing agreement on the facts. Daily newspaper readership has dwindled to the point that it’s not clear how long newspapers will even remain viable. Our news sources have become fractured almost beyond description, as has our national dialogue. Anyone can spout any sort of nonsense one wants, any sort of venom, any set of facts, real or fabricated, and there is a place for it on the Internet. Try to express one’s views, like one could before with a letter to the editor or even in some online forums, and there is a high likelihood it will be lost in a flood of conflicting and often nutty comments, and diluted by multiple places to even post one’s views. What if one doesn’t use Twitter? One’s views might never see light. And have you read much on Twitter? The same 140-character vision of reality (whatever that might be) repeated 100 times.

With all this fracturing of communication, there also is a tendency toward recycling. When I was trained as a journalist 30-some years ago, it was considered tacky, if not downright improper, for journalists to interview other journalists. It was expected that one would go out and find original sources for stories, or even commentary, and that one would at least make an effort at balancing one’s stories. Now journalists interview other journalists incessantly, with little or no effort at balance, and this incestuous relationship just builds on and furthers this tendency toward competing and non-overlapping conversations. So-and-so at the New York Times or the Washington Post reported this, so it must be correct, and I’ll base my reporting and blathering on those reports (which more often than not are based on anonymous sources readers or viewers or listeners have no means of vetting for themselves).

Going back further, we see how things like air conditioning in our homes and the rise of the automobile moved people indoors and off public transport, breeding the kind of alienation and social separation that has been with us and growing for many decades. Now we have people with their noses buried in their devices – it’s common to see even friends and lovers incommunicado with one another as they focus on their smart phones – and our interpersonal distance simply grows exponentially and, along with it, any sense of a common dialogue. The Culture of the Id seems to prevail over all.

While all this was going on, our dialogue also seems to have become coarsened. We no longer seem capable of conducting civil discussions with those with whom we disagree. Whether in Congress, or in the media, or in our personal interactions, it’s become acceptable to spout all sorts of untruths and distortions, to issue threats, and to cut off communication, simply because we might disagree. This seems to be mostly, if not exclusively, a tendency on the left, and I have had supposedly “liberal” friends going back half a century break off contact with me simply since I didn’t agree with everything that came out of their mouths or off their keyboards, no matter how logically flawed or factually incorrect it might be.

I like to see the bright side of things and a way out of dark places and times, but I confess I’m at a bit of a loss on this one. In some ways we appear to be on the verge of a Vietnam Era breakdown, and I guess the one bright side might be that our discourse has become so fragmented that even that kind of two-sided split may no longer be possible. But I think that is false optimism. We see battling demonstrations, people being gunned down for their perceived views, looting and lawlessness, widespread dissent across the political spectrum and, along with all these things, competing realities that make any common effort at resolution virtually impossible. Given current trends, I’m afraid I just see more of what we have, and that’s not positive.

I’ll probably continue to listen to the liberals in the morning and the conservatives in the afternoon, knowing that ultimately we all need to form our own judgments and, to the extent we can, protect ourselves from whatever the latest new cause either side might concoct that will come raining down on our heads.

I’d love to hear dissenting views and maybe some insights on ways forward. I’m open to having my mind changed, as challenging as that might be. But that’s how I see things from here.

 

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