Photo credit: Library of Congress Mobilization Against the Vietnam War 1969
Standing Out for Peace
As the day past the middle of June moved on, it struck me that I have been protesting against war and for peace for over 57 years. That’s equal to the number of food products that Heinz once advertised. I didn’t advertise my intention to stand for peace in front of the town offices in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The level of hate and intolerance in the US informed my decision to stand alone. Five days earlier, I stood with over 2,000 people in the same spot for the “No Kings” rally. While enviable, that rally was easier to support than holding a sign that read: “No War With Iran.” As I write, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports on Substack that his sources tell him Trump, the imbecile, will attack Iran in “support” of Israel’s attacks by this coming weekend.
My first demonstration was sometime during my junior year in college, and I don’t remember the details. By the end of my senior year, the college peace group I belonged to had demonstrated against the Vietnam War during the ROTC commissioning ceremonies a few days before graduation. I had been in ROTC for the first two years of college, but that didn’t spare me from the rejection by friends with whom I had spent the past four years. I had crossed the line by protesting against militarism, or at least its iteration, on my conservative campus.
Saturday’s “No Kings” rally saw me going to a training session a few hours before, not connected to the demonstration, where I learned how to be a witness to ICE arrests of immigrants. The grandson of four immigrants, going to the training was an absolute.
Over decades, I’ve come to see the lack of impact of street demonstrations against the power elite. There is a general lack of conscience among the governing elite, if in fact they do continue to govern. It’s more authoritarianism than governing. It’s a one-party duopoly. There has to be a sense of morality, or an internal moral compass, among those in power, and that is sorely and dangerously lacking now. Over decades, the government has been transformed into mass policing domestically and fighting foreign wars, both overt and covert, as policy. Diplomacy, as seen in Israel’s wars in the Middle East, the Ukraine war, and especially the war in Iran, is not only missing in action, it doesn’t exist.
There’s a kind of detached loneliness standing out or up for peace now.