Photo credit: Clem Onoighuo, Unsplash
William Was Prescient
There were many things that I liked about William. He showed up at our door during the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the early 1980s. William was a handsome guy who had graduated from Harvard during the Vietnam era. Despite his activism in the Freeze, he said that he never took part in an anti-war rally or march during the Vietnam War. I’ve heard that admission a few times, but millions of people did take part in anti-war protests and actions. William carried a satchel of literature about nuclear weapons. It was more like a bag, but that is not an issue all of these decades later. He funded an anti-war group in the state, which was probably not hard for him since he came from money.
The meeting that I describe above stands out all of these decades later because of what William said during our discussion. He said that we needed to trade telephone numbers in case Reagan cracked down on protest. Reagan put militarism back on the front burner after a decade when most US interventions remained covert in answer to the Vietnam Syndrome, the hesitancy of the US to fight wars abroad. Reagan’s wars were low-intensity ones in places like Nicaragua. Reagan did negotiate nuclear weapons treaties, but he also escalated confrontation with the former Soviet Union.
Today, William’s words ring out louder than ever with the Trump regime’s total takeover of the federal government with the exception of some federal judges and a few politicians. Freedom of speech and assembly have gone the way of the Edsel, and that has been accelerated by the political violence of the last week. Immigrants have been criminalized, and many centers of higher learning have kowtowed to Trump’s right-wing dictates. The environment continues to tank, and who knows where the economy is going. It’s as if William is standing at my door again, this time symbolically all of these decades later.