PittsburghThoughts

AlterNet: Americans in the Opinion Polls, Not in the Streets  

Since war protest has been the primary subject of these blogs and comments lately, I thought someone else's take on war protest might help codify what we, the people who do attend protests, think.

The author, Tom Englehardt, shines his light onto the dark recesses of our collective consciousness. After some history and analysis, he laments the changes that have occurred in our national psyche since the Vietnam era (protests) and today's, providing this interesting account:

" ...why were antiwar Americans so mobilized in the Vietnam era and why are they so relatively demobilized now? (And don't think, by the way, that the Vietnam-era mobilization in the streets, with all its wildness and excesses, made no difference. Seymour Hersh, for example, points out in The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House that President Nixon was considering a major escalation of the war in 1969 when vast crowds of demonstrators descended on the capital. "Those Americans who marched in Washington on October 15 to protest the war," Hersh wrote, "had no idea of their impact; they were protesting the policies already adopted by the Nixon administration and not those under consideration. Nixon came out of the crisis convinced that the protesters had forced him to back down [from his secret plans to escalate the war]. The protestors thought the Moratorium had been largely a failure.")"

On the draft and how it effected the Vietnam war protests: 

"The draft made the war, and anger about it, real in a mobilizing way as nothing has done today."

He, then, attributes our complacency today, to a loss of hope: 

"When they [young people] look to Washington, what they see is fraud, dysfunction, conspiracy, cronyism, cabal, influence-peddling, corruption, fear -- in short, a system, a world, beyond response, possibly beyond repair, and utterly alien to their lives. In such a situation, despair or apathy tends to replace anger and hope."

His conclusion is as unsettling as the subject itself. While the political system:

"... has increasingly been subcontracted out, with malice aforethought, to thieves, looters, cronies, and absolute dopes. Little wonder that Americans, living through the Age of Enron, scanning the horizon from Iraq to New Orleans to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and watching Halliburton head for Dubai, generally believe their system no longer works; that those high-school civics texts are a raging joke (that, in fact, fierce joking, à la Jon Stewart, is the only reasonable response to the extreme, roiling absurdity of this administration as well as our world); and that, if you took to the streets of the capital, no one in either party would be paying the slightest attention."

We, have also have become outsourcers, outsourcing the political protests to the few who are willing and able to take up the charge.

He mentions Bush's "fumbled" response to a question asked by Jim Lehrer; why he hadn't ask the American people, other than the military, to sacrifice more. (Possibly, by actually paying for the war?)

"Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night. I mean, we've got a fantastic economy here in the United States, but yet, when you think about the psychology of the country, it is somewhat down because of this war."

Bush, makes an unsubstantiated claim, plugs his wonderful economy and then, like the true benevolent dictator he dreams he is, admits that we are "somewhat down" as a nation.

There is no answer to be found, no way to reconcile our grievous mistakes and continuing behavior. Their is only this war, staring us in the face, and us, glancing around uncomfortably, pretending that our hands aren't dripping with blood.    Gene