[Imc-dc-editorial] Ellsberg Feature

[Mike Flugennock]

At 00:16 -0500 03.12.2003, NShia@aol.com wrote:
>My memory of the Pentagon Papers and Ellsberg is different too.  I got photos 
>of Ellsberg and Joan Baez in Lafayette Park at one of the many continuing 
>demonstrations against the war in Vietnam in 1974 or 5, I think 75.  So the 
>dissent against the war never stopped until the war ended.  In fact, I got 
>Pete Seeger singing the LAST demonstration against the war in vietnam on the 
>steps of the capitol in 1975, with the South Vietnamese demonstrating on the 
>steps on the House side.

Wow, that takes me back. That was the year I graduated high school; strange somehow to find out that the last antiwar protests of the Vietnam era took place the same year that the first disco record came out. Yeesh.

At the age of fifteen, in 1971, way before the "too young to vote but not too young to give a damn" school of activism was officially hip, a bunch of us helped sticker our school for the "Nixon Eviction" demonstration in 1971 or '72. I never actually made it to the demo -- at that age, there was no way Mom&Dad were letting me go downtown to a demonstration, in a car, with 17 and 18-year-olds; hell, it took enough cajoling and wheedling to get out to a rock&roll show.

Interesting to hear stuff went on for that long; I had the impression that things had begun to mellow out around early '73 or so, after the "official" cease-fire agreement had been signed, though obviously that shit didn't really "end" until the last chopper beat it out of Saigon. Of course, a lot of the dissident action I saw around me had begun shifting to the alleged "energy crisis" and the attendant oil gouging, as well as Watergate, Nixon's whoring for ITT and such.

>
>The game of counting the number of demonstrators is way overrated.  You gotta 
>look to what the antiwar movement was doing to stop the war.  From my 
>perspective, we were striking in colleges to get all war research off our 
>campuses.  Stuff like that.   Before Vietnam was over, the focus was moving 
>to South and Central America, where there governments were disappearing their 
>people for leftists beliefs, the antiwar movement was always living, just a 
>lot of people left it to go raise families and work straight jobs.
>
>I'd bet most of the people demonstrating in the 60s&70s  are coming back 
>these days.  Who else could all those boomers at the demonstrations be?

Well, that's nice as hell to hear. I was honestly giving up hope that any of them at all hadn't dropped out and gotten a haircut and a job like their Moms and Dads wanted them to all along.

"All over, people changing their roles,
 along with their overcoats;
 if Adolf Hitler flew in today,
 they'd send a limousine anyway!"         --the clash.
_______________________________________________________________
Mike Flugennock, the Sinkers, flugennock at sinkers dot org
Mike Flugennock's Mikey'zine, http://www.sinkers.org