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kent state
On Kent State Massacre Anniversary, Progressives Decry Repression of Student Protests
"The militarized repression of young people speaking out against a terrible war was shameful then and it's shameful now," said one state lawmaker.
May 04, 2024
As U.S. Republicans push for the deployment of National Guard troops to quell nationwide student demonstrations against the Gaza genocide, progressive lawmakers marked the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State Massacre by condemning police repression of peaceful protesters and reaffirming the power of dissent.
"On the 54th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, students across our country are being brutalized for standing up to endless war," Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said on social media. "Our country must learn to actually uphold the rights of free speech and assembly upon which it was founded."
Fellow "Squad" member Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said that "54 years ago, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State."
"Students have a right to speak out, organize, and protest systemic wrongs," she added. "We can't silence those expressing dissent, no matter how uncomfortable their protests may be to those in power."
On May 4, 1970, 28 Ohio National Guard troops fired 67 live rounds into a crowd of unarmed Kent State students rallying against the expansion of the U.S.-led war in Vietnam into Cambodia. They murdered students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder—all aged 19 or 20. Nine other students were wounded, including one who was permanently paralyzed.
"The militarized repression of young people speaking out against a terrible war was shameful then and it's shameful now," New York state Assemblywoman Emily Gallagher (D-50) said on Saturday.
Protests against Israel's assault on Gaza—which according to Palestinian and international officials has killed, maimed, or left missing more than 123,000 Gazans—have spread to dozens of campuses across the U.S. and around the world. Police have been called in to break up protest encampments at numerous schools. Hundreds of students, faculty, and journalists have been arrested, sometimes violently.
At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), police stood by this week as a pro-Israel mob attacked a campus protest encampment before officers arrested peaceful protesters and supporters.
As law enforcement officials have tried to justify the crackdown by claiming "outside agitators" are behind the protests, some observers noted historical parallels.
"Watching what is happening at UCLA," Virginia state Sen. Mamie Locke (D-2) said on social media. "Old enough to remember Kent State, Jackson State, South Carolina State, and the dog whistles of 'law and order,' 'outside agitators.' So reminiscent of 1968."
On February 8, 1968, police shot 31 students—most of them in the back—at a protest against Jim Crow segregation at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, murdering three young Black men: Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith.
Eleven days after Kent State, police opened fire on a crowd of Black students protesting the bombing of Cambodia at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, killing Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green and injuring 12 others.
"Our institutions must learn from these past mistakes to not use militarized responses against unarmed, peaceful student protesters by calling in the National Guard, bringing in state troopers, or deploying police in riot gear," Laurel Krause, the sister of slain Kent State protester Allison Krause, said in a statement marking the ignominious anniversary.
"We must not repeat the horrors of Kent State 54 years later," she added.
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Joe Scarborough’s Condescending, Irresponsible, and Ignorant Rant on Students Protesting Gaza War
The characterizations by politicians and cable TV personalities of the so-labeled pro-Palestinian protests by college students are over the top—and dangerous.
May 01, 2024
Sometimes in the morning with a cup of coffee I watch some of Morning Joe on MSNBC. I did on Monday (April 29) hearing Joe Scarborough’s condescending rant on college protests. On those today opposing Israel’s actions in the Gaza war, and on those earlier opposing the Vietnam war.
“Where are the adults!?” Scarborough asked after saying “it makes as much sense in 2024 having 18- and 19-year-olds running college campuses as in 1968, which is to say it doesn’t make any sense at all.” Any 18- and 19-year-olds protesting in 1968 and 2024 are not “adults” according to Scarborough, even though in 1968 they could be killed in Vietnam.
'Where are the adults?' Joe on continuing campus protests
Scarborough went on in his diatribe characterizing all so-labeled pro-Palestinian protestors as Jew-haters. His own brand of fearmongering as he blamed college administrators for, and I quote:
...letting their students and outside agitators run across the campus, shut down debate, scream whenever anybody tries to talk, reason to them, shout genocidal chants, hold up signs pointing to Jews saying Hamas’s next victims. Holding up signs talking about the “Final Solution.” Chanting constantly: “From the river to the sea”…Most of the students chanting it don’t understand that they are chanting genocidal comments.
Clearly Scarborough hasn’t read, or ignored, the article the day before in the Sunday Washington Post (available even earlier online) describing the experience of college students, in their own words, regarding today’s protests.
A 24-year-old Jewish student who talked to The Post reporters supported the protest at his school, UC-Berkeley, but with juggling two part-time jobs and coursework hadn’t joined the protest encampment there. But he said, his words, “things need to change in this drastic way to keep our eyes from averting away from what’s going on in Gaza” adding the “best way to do that is to mess up the status quo.” He rejected being a Jew meant automatic support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Of course, he doesn’t “want people to be hostages, either,” those taken by Hamas militants on October 7. But the children in Gaza also “don’t have any say in the fight,” so he has donated to funds supporting these Palestinian children.
As it is, Scarborough attributed antisemitism the dominant motive across today’s protest. His evidence? The fact protesters haven’t appeared concerned with known atrocities in other countries, mimicking Bill Maher’s related punchlines on Maher’s HBO show on April 26, Scarborough even showing a video clip where Maher asks why those protesting civilian deaths and starvation in Gaza today, in his words,
care so much about this particular cause? North Korea starves its people. China puts them in concentration camps. Myanmar brutalizes the Rohingya. Boko Haram kidnaps whole villages of women. The president of Burundi says Gays should be stoned to death because they, quote, ‘deserve it.’
On CNN’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria on April 28, Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins had an answer for Maher (and Scarborough), saying:
I don't think that people think that Israel is unique example of evil in the world. I think what's special about it is it couldn't do what it's doing without the support of the United States. So students in the United States think we have a responsibility…I mean, the United States is not supporting North Korea…not supporting Syria...What's being done [in Gaza] is being done in my name as an American and…as a Jew.
Professor Robbins also said this about the phrase “From the river to the sea”:
So as I understand “From the river to the sea,” it means equal rights for all the people living between the river and the sea.
The role of the U.S. underlies protests today on the Gaza war as it motivated protests on the Vietnam war we participated in over 50 years ago. It was the U.S. engaged in the Vietnam carnage and drafting 18-year-old men to die there for a cause even their presidents knew privately was a losing cause. To needlessly die in Vietnam as civilians are needlessly dying in Gaza from bombings and starvation.
Here's how Professor Robbins characterized earlier pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in the discussion on CNN:
[Students] at Columbia, they have not shouted out slogans, chanted slogans in support of Hamas or the wanton destruction of civilian lives on October 7th…It's a little upsetting I think to everybody at Columbia that the mainstream media, as well as the politicians, have confused things that are chanted outside Columbia's gates with things that the Columbia protesters are saying…I haven't heard anything even remotely like that…that are being chanted outside the gates.
In her statement on April 29, Columbia University president Nemat “Minouche ”Shafik also said this: “External actors have contributed to creating a hostile environment…especially around our gates, that is unsafe for everyone.” Even Scarborough in his rant mentioned “outside agitators.”
In Vietnam anti-war protests there were isolated incidents of violence, but those didn’t represent the vast majority of protests. Similarly, in pro-Palestinian protests there may have been incidents of antisemitic remarks, and even occupying an administrative building as protestors did April 30 at Columbia University, but it’s an exaggeration (unfortunately, often purposefully so) to paint the majority of these protestors with that same brush.
Hyperbole concluding antisemitism is THE defining characteristic of students in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Now, on the other hand, antisemitism was quite evident in Charlottesville in 2017 when white supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us.“
Perhaps President Joe Biden could help end the pro-Palestinian demonstrations if he took a firmer stand against the genocidal conduct of the war in Gaza under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direction. Stopping delivery of U.S. military aid to Israel until Netanyahu changes course, for instance.
Instead of conditioning military aid, House Speaker Mike Johnson in his speech at Columbia University April 24, aside from speciously attributing all protesting students antisemitic, said if the protests could not be “contained quickly…there is an appropriate time for the National Guard…to bring order to these campuses.”
Remember Kent State? When National Guard killed four students on May 4, 1970 as students gathered to protest President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, expanding the Vietnam war. Kent State University’s professors Jerry Lewis and Thomas Hensley provide a detailed account of events leading up to, during, and after the Guard opened fire with life rounds. Here is a segment of their account:
Four Kent State students died as a result of the firing by the Guard. The closest student was Jeffrey Miller, who was shot in the mouth while standing in an access road leading into the Prentice Hall parking lot, a distance of approximately 270 feet from the Guard. Allison Krause was in the Prentice Hall parking lot; she was 330 feet from the Guardsmen and was shot in the left side of her body. William Schroeder was 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when he was shot in the left side of his back. Sandra Scheuer was also about 390 feet from the Guard in the Prentice Hall parking lot when a bullet pierced the left front side of her neck.
You’re reading right. The Guard killed students more than a football field away.
After Kent State, demonstrations exploded across campuses leading to hundreds of colleges to temporary close.
Now think about the Guard being called in to break up the crowded close quarters of encampments pro-Palestinian protesters constructed on campuses across the country. What could possibly go wrong? A lot.
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Recalling the Bloodshed of 1970
The memory of the martyrs of Kent, Augusta and Jackson cries out for us to continue the struggle for which they died - to demand money for jobs and education, not for war. For an end to racist violence.
May 02, 2021
May 4, 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of the massacre at Kent State University (KSU) in Ohio, that left four students dead and nine wounded. Like many events of the past year, it was overshadowed by news of the pandemic.
The Kent Massacre was a seminal event in violent times, as Washington continued to press on with an untenable war effort in Southeast Asia. For those that lived through those turbulent times, the bloodshed at home and abroad was indelibly stamped on our consciousness.
At KSU, we were peacefully protesting the US invasion of Cambodia, a major escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, when we were met by a barrage of bullets from the Ohio National Guard.
Ten days later came more shootings at Jackson State in Mississippi, which left another two dead and an unknown number of wounded. Jackson was a predominately Black school and received less attention than Kent.
But the campus shootings sandwiched an even more horrific yet largely hidden historical event.
Three days prior to the shootings at Jackson, in Augusta, Georgia, the burned and mutilated body of an incarcerated 16-year-old mentally-challenged Black youth, Charles Oatman, was dumped by his jailers at a local hospital.
After decades of racist abuse, the torture and murder of Oatman set off an angry rebellion.
In response, white police officers went on a shooting rampage that left six Black men dead - all shot in the back. Another 60 were wounded - mostly from indiscriminate shotgun fire.
Such violence directed at Black working people received sparse attention.
- - - -
The invasion of Cambodia and domestic shootings sparked massive protests and a national student strike. Over 400 campuses were shut down and occupied. Millions of people joined street demonstrations demanding an end to the war.
It became increasingly clear to the majority of active-duty GIs that Washington had sent them to die in an unwinnable war. Our movement reached deep into the army, extending solidarity with antiwar soldiers. The global antiwar movement became so massive that the US was forced to withdraw from Southeast Asia.
It was a historic victory for peace and justice.
- - - -
For over 50 years, the federal, state and local governments, along with the KSU administration, has attempted to rewrite the history of the antiwar movement and possible government involvement in the massacre.
On May 4, 1970, an armed FBI informant, Terry Norman, was in the crowd - photos document the police taking his gun after the shootings. And, in the intervening years there have been numerous revelations about FBI/CIA covert programs to disrupt the antiwar movement. Yet neither Norman nor his FBI handlers has ever had to face public scrutiny.
For 2020, in an astonishing insult to May 4 victims, KSU President Todd Diacon tapped a former top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ) official, Stephanie Danes Smith, to head the 50-year commemoration Advisory Committee.
Smith directed the largest section of the CIA, working directly with then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, at a time when Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft were using CIA facilities to conduct the systemic torture of civilians at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other black-op sites around the world. Their policies included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, sexual assault and numerous other loathsome tortures.
Smith's motto was, "Get there first and clean up your roadkill later!"
Following public outrage, Smith stepped down as the titular head of the committee. However, she and her most ardent supporters, including a handful of former members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), remain as the central planners and official spokespeople for the commemoration.
Before the planned events of last May were cancelled, KSU squeezed in an official tribute honoring the members of the 1970 Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). ROTC was the US military presence on campus. "ROTC off campus" was a central demand of the student antiwar movement.
- - --
58,220 US soldiers died in Vietnam and more than 300,000 were wounded.
Over 2,000,000 Vietnamese, Laotians and Kampucheans died under 15,500,000 tons of bombs and millions of gallons of defoliants that devastated an entire area of the planet.
KSU's attempts to hide the truth about the carnage abroad and government disruption of the antiwar and anti-racist movements at home are carried out under the rubric of an abstract "remembrance" - presenting the massacre as a lamentable failure to communicate.
This sanitization of the killings prompted a "Letter of Dissent," demanding an antiwar commemoration, initiated by 50+ leaders of the antiwar movement and signed by over 1000 antiwar activists of several generations - repudiating KSU's policies and spokespeople.
We oppose the secrecy surrounding the planning and financing of the yearly commemorations. We reject the honoring of the ROTC instead of the antiwar GIs. We demand an end to the coverup of government involvement in the shootings.
Washington and KSU want to bury our history. They want us to look away from the current US wars. Away from the permanent low-intensity warfare of drones, sanctions, embargoes and unending occupations. Away from the daily suicides of veterans.
But we cannot afford to look away. Today we face an unprecedented medical, ecological, social and economic crisis. We cannot continue to pour trillions of dollars into an insatiable war machine while the world goes begging for vaccines, or while young people drown in college debt, or while millions lack healthcare.
The resources of society must be changed to go towards healing our planet and ourselves. With permanent global warfare, suppression of liberation struggles, massacres of protesters, unending police executions of African Americans - is it really surprising that the US has created a culture that prompts alienated individuals to ape the use of armed violence?
The memory of the martyrs of Kent, Augusta and Jackson cries out for us to continue the struggle for which they died - to demand money for jobs and education, not for war. For an end to racist violence.
The martyrs of Kent - Sandy Scheuer, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller and Bill Schroeder - can best be honored by renewing the struggle to end to all US wars and occupations.
- - - -
Open Letter Calling for an ANTI-WAR COMMEMORATION of the KENT MASSACRE, May 4, 2020
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What the Class of '70's Old New Left Might Have Talked About at Their Canceled Reunions
There'll be no fiftieth reunions for the class of '70, it seems. Abruptly thrust out into the world in the uproar following the National Guard's killing of four students at a Kent State University antiwar demonstration, the class now find their return just as abruptly canceled by Covid-19. A scriptwriter could hardly have done the irony any better, but the more interesting set of bookends to the group's half-century in the sun might be their first and last (so far, that is) presidential elections, specifically the campaigns of George McGovern and Bernie Sanders.
May 23, 2020
There'll be no fiftieth reunions for the class of '70, it seems. Abruptly thrust out into the world in the uproar following the National Guard's killing of four students at a Kent State University antiwar demonstration, the class now find their return just as abruptly canceled by Covid-19. A scriptwriter could hardly have done the irony any better, but the more interesting set of bookends to the group's half-century in the sun might be their first and last (so far, that is) presidential elections, specifically the campaigns of George McGovern and Bernie Sanders. The contrast might have made for interesting talk in some corners of the room at some of those reunions that are not to be.
The immediate response to the May 4, 1970 shootings was massive: perhaps four out of five colleges and an unknown number of high schools saw some type of anti-war protest; as many as a fifth of colleges canceled the remainder of their semesters; and numerous on-campus Reserve Officers Training Corps offices were destroyed in one fashion or another. No subsequent academic year would come to such an unexpected end - until this one. Widespread as they were, however, the 1970 protests did not carry the day, as Richard Nixon remained in the White House unmoved. They did intensify the fervor for evicting him in 1972, though.
The class of '70 would not carry the day in the '72 presidential election either. The anti-Vietnam War movement seems to be rather like what they say about the French Resistance - significantly larger in memory than it actually was at the time. While polls suggested that the newest, youngest voters (including 18-20 year-olds given the vote in a presidential election for the first time) did indeed support the antiwar McGovern, Nixon would actually win the overall under-30 vote by a 52-46% margin, according to the election day exit polls employed for the first time that year. (Still, the McGovern campaign qualified as a youth movement in that his over-sixty vote share was 16% lower than his under-thirty vote, an age gap not surpassed until Barack Obama in 2008.)
History's judgment appears to have been kinder. If the class of 70 didn't carry the day, it did carry the era: Twenty years later, a Gallup poll showed 74% of Americans considering the Vietnam War a mistake, and there's been little subsequent indication of a reversal of that sentiment. As for Nixon-McGovern, by August 1973, an NBC post-Watergate Hearing poll showed McGovern winning a hypothetical re-run, and here again, continued revelations seem to have pretty well cast the verdict in concrete.
Since McGovern fared so poorly in the election, when his campaign is recalled at all it is pretty much remembered as an antiwar candidacy and little more. Actually, there was a lot more. The 1972 party platform supported "universal National Health Insurance," deplored "the increasing concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands," and concluded that a "Democratic Administration should pledge itself to combat factors which tend to concentrate wealth." In short, it sounded a lot like the Bernie Sanders campaign, even going it one better in stating that "Full employment--a guaranteed job for all--is the primary economic objective of the Democratic Party." (Full employment and national health insurance actually survived in the next two platforms, until Ronald Reagan's election convinced the Party that it needed to tack right in 1984.)
Today, Sanders has also failed to carry the day electorally, not even advancing to the nomination. Yet he is already widely acknowledged to have permanently altered the era's politics in his 2016 campaign, to the point where four years later he faced multiple candidates backing positions he had introduced to the political mainstream. The country's growing gap in wealth and power he brought to the fore was now widely understood as a problem to be confronted, rather than a fact to be celebrated. Even on health care, where the other candidates almost all did not agree with him, all had to define their position in relation to the Medicare for All proposal that he brought to the presidential debate table. All of this shift accomplished on the strength of a support base skewed toward youth to a degree far surpassing McGovern's (or Obama's): On Super Tuesday, he took 58 percent of under-thirty vote and only15 percent of the over-sixty-five.
In other words, the age cohort of voters that includes the class of '70 - high school and college - once the youthful base of George McGovern's support, has grown up to be the group that stymied Bernie Sanders. Might anyone at those not-to-be reunions have mused that if only everyone in their age group still remembered now what they used to know then, Sanders would be the nominee? Would any have asked how so many could forget so much - learned at such great cost - about disastrous foreign invasions launched under false pretenses, that the Democrats would be on the verge of choosing a Senator who had voted for the Iraq invasion as their nominee for the third time?
As the night went on, might someone cite the irony of their peers supporting a presidential candidate who proposed universal national health insurance in 1972, but opposing the one who promoted Medicare for All in 2020? And what did anyone make of the "Old New Left" leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society pulling together a letter urging the left to back Joe Biden, but never having had anything to say about Sanders? Anyone wonder how many of the people involved in the first Earth Day in 1970 voted for the candidate who supported the Green New Deal in 2020? Might someone have eventually gotten to talkin' 'bout their generation and posing the question of just how well it had "kept the faith" - as it might have been said back then?
And by evening's end, would someone raise a toast to the class of 2020 - and all of today's younger voters - along with a wish that they be blessed with better memories than their elders?
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Fifty Years Later, the Gunfire at Kent State Still Echoes Through America
Today’s pandemic alters our tradition of protest and dissent.
May 04, 2020
There are certain events in the life of the nation we revisit whenever there's a significant anniversary. The assassination of President Kennedy, 9/11, the moon landing, even Woodstock--these are iconic milestones we think are worthy of remembrance and reflection--especially because so many of us experienced them together.
In 2025, assuming the world is still around, we'll be noting the fifth anniversary of COVID-19 in America, mourning the dead and recalling how so many of us pulled together in the face of adversity--despite the appalling and inhuman behavior of our pathetic president manque. Not only has he displayed a stupefying degree of ignorance and woeful governance, Trump has endorsed the defiant unthinking acts of those who would put the rest of us in jeopardy--all in the name of a twisted sense of freedom.
But this week, in the midst of a still burning pandemic and shrill demands for a return to normalcy, we mark the 50th anniversary of the killings at Kent State University in Ohio. Some of what you'll read below may seem familiar; I've written about this before. But in the spirit of something old, something new and certainly something borrowed here and there, bear with me:
I was a freshman at Georgetown University in Washington when it happened, half a century ago on May 4. Most of us didn't know what had taken place until late in the day. We were in class or studying for finals, so hours went by until my friends and I heard the news. On that warm spring Monday, the Ohio National Guard had opened fire on an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. In just thirteen seconds, 67 rounds of ammo left four students dead and nine others wounded.
It took a while to sink in. This was the sort of thing that happened in South American dictatorships--student protestors gunned down for speaking out against the government. Not here.
Then I remembered that some of my high school classmates were at Kent State, a campus fewer than 250 miles from my upstate New York hometown. But I had no phone numbers for them; there was no immediate way to find out if they were safe (they were).
In those faraway days before 24-hour cable news, Internet and social media, the details were hazy and slow in coming. That night, friends huddled around the tiny TV I had in my room--one of those early Sony tummy tubes with a fuzzy, black and white picture the size of your hand. With each sketchy report, anger and frustration grew but didn't start to boil over until, believe it or not, The Tonight Show came on after the 11 o'clock news.
Johnny Carson's guest was comedian Bob Hope, and when Hope, a staunch defender of the Vietnam war, launched into his standard routine those days--lots of jokes about long-haired hippies and smelly anti-war demonstrators--the half-dozen kids crowded into my tiny dorm space were furious. On this of all nights, how could he be so heavy-handed and clueless to trot out those tired one-liners about, well, us?
By the next morning, groups of students gathered around the campus talking about Kent State and the events leading up to the killings. A few days before, President Nixon had revealed the invasion of Cambodia, justifying the so-called "incursion" as necessary to protect our troops in Vietnam. Kent State had been just one of many schools where protests had erupted after his announcement. Now, after the deaths there, we wondered what would happen next.
A crowded meeting in the school's main assembly hall that night lasted well into the next day, filled with the earnest bombast of callow youth and plans of action that ranged from Do Nothing 101 to Advanced Anarchy. The bookstore's stock of Georgetown t-shirts sold out as kids scooped them up and stenciled defiant red fists on the backs.
By mid-week, two parallel strategies emerged: a national strike would shut down the country's colleges and universities--as a protest and to give students the freedom to devote all their time to mobilizing against the war. And there would be a massive rally in Washington, DC, on Saturday, May 9.
As did approximately 450 American schools, the Georgetown administration yielded to the strike. We were given the option to finish finals or take the grades we already had for the semester. We used the time going to Capitol Hill trying to see our hometown members of Congress to let our opposition to the war be known, then turned our attention to the big Saturday rally. Because we were already in DC, much of the logistics fell to us and the other colleges in town.
I volunteered to be a rally marshal, directing crowds and hoping to prevent violence. On the main campus lawn, we were given a crash medical course in how to cope with dehydration, tear gas attacks, broken bones and even gunshot wounds.
At breakfast early Saturday morning, with an overdose of macho-infected concern, we told our girlfriends to stay away from the rally. There might be trouble, we warned, acting as if we were about to join the Underground in occupied France. Instead, we suggested they go to the protest headquarters to help out. As it turned out, they wound up in greater danger than we were--a small group of neo-Nazis attacked the rally offices. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt.
As for me, I was issued a powder-blue cloth armband and stood with other marshals on the periphery of the 100,000-person rally, enjoying a lovely sunny day. For its protection, the White House nearby had been ringed with DC Transit buses parked nose to tail.
Nothing happened until late in the day, when an army water truck came barreling toward us and we linked hands, as if somehow that would ward it off. Luckily, the truck veered away just before it reached our paltry line of defense. The next day's paper reported that the vehicle had been hijacked by Yippies and was last seen barreling across a Potomac River bridge into the wilds of Virginia.
And then it was over. That night, rumors spread that police were going to clear out groups of out-of-town demonstrators camped out in Potomac Park near the monuments. We were told the protesters would flee to the college campuses. We stayed up all night waiting to take them in, but it never happened.
The following Friday, May 15, National Guardsmen and police fired more than 460 shots at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Two more students were killed and 12 wounded, but with nowhere near the attention Kent State received. The kids at Jackson State were black.
Sadly, the mobilization that was supposed to continue with the close of school fizzled out. Most Georgetown students took advantage of the early end of the semester to indulgently bask in the sun and play on the lawn, or simply go home.
A friend wrote an editorial in one of the campus newspapers headlined, "The Frisbee Revolution." Those of us trying to keep the protests alive were annoyed by his words mocking the abandonment of commitment, but in the end he was more right than wrong. Once the impetus of the big rally was over, motivation vanished except for those few who kept organizing and agitating. The other kids went back to being kids. The war retreated, out of sight, out of mind, especially for those with a draft lottery number sufficiently high to keep them from being shipped out to southeast Asia, even after their student deferments ended.
There would be other rallies and marches, countless petitions, even more violence. But the Vietnam war dragged on for another five bloody and futile years.
Now, as The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch observes, "[I]n many ways, the gunshots still echo in 2020. It's no accident that in the months immediately after Kent State, business leaders and other conservatives began looking for ways to quash liberal thinking on campus and counteract it with the conservative web of noise that became talk radio and Fox News. Right-wing pols cut funding for public universities like Kent State, helping to send tuition skyrocketing and making college more about careerism and less about such dangerous ideas. And a dog-eat-dog economy forced young America to comply with that.
"But the greatest impact was largely psychic--the shock and cynicism that the government was capable of gunning down its own youth. And that no one--not the Guardsman or their higher-ups--would ever be held to account for the massacre."
Because of the protests and student strike in 1970, that year there were far fewer college graduation ceremonies. Now, five decades later, because of the pandemic, hardly any commencement exercises will take place except online. The joyful ritual so sacred to the halls of ivy will have to be conveyed via YouTube and Zoom--unless you're one of the thousand cadets being dragged back to West Point for a combined quarantine and commencement so Donald Trump can address you in person and boost his ego and reelection campaign. Even a big concert and commemoration of the anniversary at Kent State have had to be reshaped for the new reality.
In fact, COVID-19 has forced the very nature of protest--which has exploded since Trump's inauguration in 2017-- to be reevaluated. Yes, some rightwing knuckleheads, many with firearms, are taking to the streets demanding businesses be reopened and insisting on a restoration of creature comforts they've been denied--exposing themselves and the rest of us to further sickness and death. But for the majority, marches and lobbying face-to-face for good causes just cannot safely take place.
"Traditional protests are now violations of stay-at-home orders," David Weigel noted in The Washington Post. "Politicians are quarantined. Legislative chambers are empty. That has sent organizers searching for new tactics and temporarily has deprived activists of their most powerful, visible tools -- right when state and federal governments are moving billions of dollars around."
Micah L. Sifry writes in The New Republic, "We are entering a new era, of politics without bodies, of empty auditoriums and virtual voting... Looking ahead, we need to think bigger about how we 'do' virtual politics together, beyond remapping old political functions onto digital formats."
Meanwhile, despite it all, this weekend in my West Village neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, too many young, well-off and entitled thought about none of this and celebrated the first warm sunny weekend of May by refusing to wear masks, crowding the sidewalks and parks, ignoring social distancing.
Talk to anybody who has really been slammed by this virus, anyone who has survived the horrific fever, debilitating pain and exhaustion, and they will tell you: the last thing you want is to have this highly infectious disease. Do whatever it takes to keep it from happening to you or anyone else.
Unfortunately, in my neighborhood, all too similar to those days not long after the tragedy of Kent State, self-indulgence once again reared its sleek and shiny head. The Frisbees were flying.
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Why 'Waging War' on Coronavirus Is a Dangerous Metaphor
Wars are used as excuses for dismissing concerns for justice or human rights, claiming that these concerns are distractions from the "real" mission.
Apr 03, 2020
"We're at war with the virus." (Pres. Candidate and Former Vice-Pres. Joe Biden)
"I view it--in a sense as a wartime president." (Pres. Donald Trump)
"The president said this is a war. I agree with that. This is a war." (Gov. Andrew Cuomo)
I have been feeling troubled by the use of war metaphors to describe how the United States is or should be responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Research by psychologists Paul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky helps explain why: Metaphors have the power to hint at patterns and evoke unconscious reactions that change the way we think.
It's hard to imagine a silver lining in the current horror, but perhaps such a monumental disaster--heavily driven by bad policies and leadership--can become an opportunity for fundamentally restructuring our society so that we will come together to build peace rather than wage wars.
Within my lifetime I have seen an initially well-intentioned war on poverty turn into a war on poor people in the rhetoric and policies of Presidents Reagan and Clinton. I also have seen the not-so-well-intentioned war on drugs become a war on drug users and communities of color, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world and disproportionate criminalization of African Americans. We have long known that crowded and unsanitary conditions in jails and prisons encourage the spread of disease. In the wake of COVID-19, states and counties now are forced to choose between allowing massive numbers of deaths inside these facilities or wholesale release of people who lack money, jobs, houses and health insurance into poorly-resourced communities on the outside.
Like any war, COVID-19 will disproportionately hurt those who are already vulnerable. People with pre-existing conditions may lose out in rationing protocols for ventilators. People living paycheck to paycheck are especially likely to lose their homes or go hungry during the crisis. The majority of health care workers endangered by prolonged physical contact with infected patients are low-paid aides, often women of color. And most of the workers in the "vital industries," who cannot protect themselves by working from home, are low-paid workers. Demographic data laying out the race and ethnicities of people hospitalized or who have died due to COVID-19 have not been made available by the government, but as of now it looks as if the highest death rates are in crowded urban centers with large numbers of people of color. It remains to be seen how the pandemic will play out in poor white communities in the South and Appalachia - regions with sparse medical resources and high rates of substance mis/use.
Metaphorical wars on disease easily turn into wars on those who are believed to embody the disease, as was the case in the early decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and now may be the case regarding people who "look" Chinese. In the United States we have a long history of declaring war on phenomena, ideas and behaviors that we dislike or deem morally unacceptable. These "wars" often conflate disease with moral vices ranging from alcoholism to obesity to lung cancer. We like to describe people experiencing disease as "fighters." Those who remain alive are praised as "survivors" or "victorious". Those who die have "lost their battle." Is the implication that the former somehow worked harder than the latter? That they were smarter or made better choices? This comes dangerously close to the rhetoric of the eugenics movement (developed in the United States and most famously and energetically adopted by the Nazis) - the idea that some people are inherently stronger, healthier and better than others (the winners) and that those people deserve social praise, resources, and encouragement to reproduce themselves. Losers, in contrast, should be discouraged from reproducing or even eliminated from the social body.
Americans, like people in many countries, hold onto oddly inaccurate nostalgia about how war brings us together as a nation. While that may have been the case in certain situations, I think more about how we locked up people of Japanese descent in internment camps during WWII and how the Vietnam War fractured the country and led to atrocities like the Kent State killings. This time around, according to the President, the enemy we need to fight is both foreign (the "Chinese virus") and invisible. In American culture, invisible enemies are portrayed as especially insidious, sneaky, and refusing to fight "fair and square" like proper, upstanding (European male) soldiers. I think here of 1950s McCarthy era "war on Communists" in which Americans were urged to seek out enemies who could be hiding anywhere - in your child's school, on the screen of your television; to be soldiers in a moral crusade even at the risk of undermining basic civil liberties.
Wars are used as excuses for dismissing concerns for justice or human rights, claiming that these concerns are distractions from the "real" mission (that happened repeatedly with movements for women's rights). I am struck by Joe Biden's adamant refusal to consider how our fragmented health care system that leaves millions of Americans without care might be relevant to our failure to respond quickly and competently to the current pandemic. During the last televised debate with Bernie Sanders, Biden declared with ill-concealed annoyance: "It has nothing to do with Medicare for All. That would not solve the problem at all. We're at war with the virus. We're at war with the virus. It has nothing to do with co-pays or anything.... People are looking for results, not a revolution." Dylan Scott and Ella Nilsin point out: "This argument was couched as common sense--deal with the problem in front of you--but it was the opposite. Rather than lay out an achievable but ambitious long-term goal to protect Americans, Biden is focused on an impossible and open-ended mission: victory over a virus. Affordable health care for all? There's no time for that malarkey now, jack. Haven't you noticed there's a war going on?"
During wartime, people are encouraged, even required, to accept what leaders say without question or doubt for the sake of national security. As Adam Weinstein observes, Americans are, "already acting as conscripts in a mass battle of patience and attrition". Unfortunately, I am not surprised that in the past week some have been punished for the "treason" of speaking out against authority: Chris Smalls was smeared and fired for organizing a walkout protesting unsafe conditions for Amazon workers. Medical staffs at hospitals are being warned not to file complaints or speak to the media about lack of protective equipment.
Leading economists Andrew Sheng and Xiao Geng recently wrote, "Unlike a conventional war, the COVID-19 pandemic is not a choice or a competition. No ceasefire can be reached, no treaty signed. And, with no known vaccine or effective cure, the world has few weapons with which to fight it. The only way to restore peace - or, at the very least, stave off systemic failure until a more effective weapon is developed - is with a whole-of-government, whole-of-society, whole-of-world approach." In short, we cannot "defeat" coronavirus.
We can, however, strengthen ourselves - our personal and collective "immune" systems. This is the time to seriously consider why people are healthier and happier in countries such as Denmark that mandate living wages, have policies preventing large gaps in wealth, provide parental and sick leave, and fully fund health care and social safety nets for all. It's hard to imagine a silver lining in the current horror, but perhaps such a monumental disaster - heavily driven by bad policies and leadership - can become an opportunity for fundamentally restructuring our society so that we will come together to build peace rather than wage wars.
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Because Facial Recognition Makes Students and Faculty Less Safe, 40+ Rights Groups Call on Universities to Ban Technology
"This mass surveillance experiment does not belong in our public spaces, and certainly not in our schools."
Feb 12, 2020
Urging universities across the U.S. to reject sales pitches from technology companies that insist facial recognition technology makes campuses safer, digital rights group Fight for the Future on Thursday released a sign-on letter calling for a ban on the use of surveillance which the group says violates students' and faculty's civil liberties.
Fight for the Future (FFTF) was joined by more than 40 other rights organizations including the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center, and the National Center for Transgender Equality in warning that the use of the technology--which at least two large universities in the U.S. currently implement--puts not only privacy rights at risk but also racial justice and immigrants' rights.
"Just imagine you're in college--exploring new ideas, meeting new people, going to parties, dating, attending rallies. Now imagine doing all of that while under constant surveillance, not knowing who is watching you, what's happening to your biometric data, or what the implications of that may be."
--Evan Greer, FFTF
"Facial recognition technology isn't safe," reads the letter. "It's biased and is more likely to misidentify students of color, which can result in traumatic interactions with law enforcement, loss of class time, disciplinary action, and potentially a criminal record... Facial recognition is invasive, enabling anyone with access to the system to watch students' movements and analyze facial expressions, as well as monitor who they talk to, what they do outside of class, and every move they make."
Universities, the groups wrote, are ill-equipped to protect data collected by facial recognition surveillance from hackers, leaving images of students and faculty vulnerable to ending up in the hands of entities that might target and harm them.
On social media, FFTF called on college students to loudly oppose the use of the technology at their schools.
"With facial recognition your administration could track everywhere you go on campus--who you hang out with, what you believe, where you party, who you hook up with. They could even grade you based on what your face looks like and then store that info forever," the video's narration says.
"Just imagine you're in college--exploring new ideas, meeting new people, going to parties, dating, attending rallies," said Evan Greer, deputy director of FFTF. "Now imagine doing all of that while under constant surveillance, not knowing who is watching you, what's happening to your biometric data, or what the implications of that may be. There is no way to protect students' rights and ability to thrive at college when the school uses facial recognition technology."
FFTF also released a scorecard listing nearly 100 top colleges in the U.S. and detailing their commitments to banning facial recognition on campus--and the plans some schools have to use the technology.
While dozens of schools including Columbia University, Boston College, and Kent State University confirmed they have no plans to use the surveillance on campus, Tufts University and UCLA both have plans to introduce the technology.
Stanford and University of Southern California are both currently using facial recognition while several schools didn't confirm their plans. In addition to the letter and scorecard, FFTF announced this week it would lead a National Day of Action to Ban Facial Recognition from College Campuses on March 2, organizing public actions at schools around the country.
The group slammed "unscrupulous" companies for their claims that facial recognition surveillance will make schools safer.
As Fast Company reported last month, a company called FaceFirst is marketing "monitoring packages" to schools.
Public school systems, FFTF wrote, are already experimenting with facial recognition technology that is being deployed not to keep schools secure but to punish students.
"School administrators have already admitted to using this technology to target students for being late or minor rule breaking," reads the letter.
A company called Face Six sells facial recognition technology aimed at helping instructors keep track of classroom attendance.
Such companies are "aggressively marketing their tech to colleges and claiming that facial recognition can increase campus safety, streamline attendance, and even measure whether students are paying attention. But the truth is there is no justifiable reason to use it," said Greer. "Claims that it increases safety are unfounded, and using it as a tool of convenience puts the privacy and rights of students and faculty at risk, for little-to-no benefit."
FFTF and other groups have called for a federal ban on facial recognition technology, in addition to their campaign targeting colleges.
"This mass surveillance experiment does not belong in our public spaces, and certainly not in our schools," said Jake Martinez, director of youth programs at the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Students should not have to give up their privacy and take part in this dangerous project as a prerequisite to stepping foot on campus."
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Can the World's Second Superpower Rise From the Ashes of Twenty Years of War?
The peace movement’s small victories demonstrate that we have more power to challenge U.S. militarism than most Americans realize.
Feb 12, 2020
February 15 marks the day, 17 years ago, when global demonstrations against the pending Iraq invasion were so massive that the New York Times called world public opinion "the second superpower." But the U.S. ignored it and invaded Iraq anyway. So what has become of the momentous hopes of that day?
The U.S. military has not won a war since 1945, unless you count recovering the tiny colonial outposts of Grenada, Panama and Kuwait, but there is one threat it has consistently outmanoeuvred without firing more than a few deadly rifle shots and some tear gas. Ironically, this existential threat is the very one that could peacefully cut it down to size and take away its most dangerous and expensive weapons: its own peace-loving citizens.
During the Vietnam war, young Americans facing a life-and-death draft lottery built a powerful anti-war movement. President Nixon proposed ending the draft as a way to undermine the peace movement, since he believed that young people would stop protesting the war once they were no longer obligated to fight. In 1973, the draft was ended, leaving a volunteer army that insulated the vast majority of Americans from the deadly impact of America's wars.
Despite the lack of a draft, a new anti-war movement--this time with global reach--sprung up in the period between the crimes of 9/11 and the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The February 15th, 2003, protests were the largest demonstrations in human history, uniting people around the world in opposition to the unthinkable prospect that the U.S. would actually launch its threatened "shock and awe" assault on Iraq. Some 30 million people in 800 cities took part on every continent, including Antarctica. This massive repudiation of war, memorialized in the documentary We Are Many, led New York Times journalist Patrick E. Tyler to comment that there were now two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.
The U.S. war machine demonstrated total disdain for its upstart rival, and unleashed an illegal war based on lies that has now raged on through many phases of violence and chaos for 17 years. With no end in sight to U.S. and allied wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Yemen and West Africa, and Trump's escalating diplomatic and economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela and North Korea threatening to explode into new wars, where is the second superpower now, when we need it more than ever?
Since the U.S. assassination of Iran's General Soleimani in Iraq on January 2nd, the peace movement has reemerged onto the streets, including people who marched in February 2003 and new activists too young to remember a time when the U.S. was not at war. There have been three separate days of protest, one on January 4th, another on the 9th and a global day of action on the 25th. The rallies took place in hundreds of cities, but they did not attract nearly the numbers who came out to protest the pending war with Iraq in 2003, or even those of the smaller rallies and vigils that continued as the Iraq war spiralled out of control until at least 2007.
Our failure to stop the U.S. war on Iraq in 2003 was deeply discouraging. But the number of people active in the U.S. anti-war movement shrank even more after the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Many people did not want to protest the nation's first black president, and many, including the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, really believed he would be a "peace president."
Obama's wars were no more successful than Bush's in restoring peace or stability to any of those countries or improving the lives of their people.
While Obama reluctantly honored Bush's agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw US troops from Iraq and he signed the Iran nuclear deal, he was far from a peace president. He oversaw a new doctrine of covert and proxy war that substantially reduced U.S. military casualties, but unleashed an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria that destroyed entire cities, a ten-fold increase in CIA drone strikes on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and bloody proxy wars in Libya and Syria that rage on today. In the end, Obama spent more on the military and dropped more bombs on more countries than Bush did. He also refused to hold Bush and his cronies responsible for their war crimes.
Obama's wars were no more successful than Bush's in restoring peace or stability to any of those countries or improving the lives of their people. But Obama's "disguised, quiet, media-free approach" to war made the U.S. state of endless war much more politically sustainable. By reducing U.S. casualties and waging war with less fanfare, he moved America's wars farther into the shadows and gave the American public an illusion of peace in the midst of endless war, effectively disarming and dividing the peace movement.
Obama's secretive war policy was backed up by a vicious campaign against any brave whistleblowers who tried to drag it out into the light. Jeffrey Sterling, Thomas Drake, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, Edward Snowden and now Julian Assange have been prosecuted and jailed under unprecedented new interpretations of the WWI-era Espionage Act.
With Donald Trump in the White House, we hear Republicans making the same excuses for Trump--who ran on an anti-war platform--that Democrats made for Obama. First, his supporters accept lip service about wanting to end wars and bring troops home as revealing what the president really wants to do, even as he keeps escalating the wars. Second, they ask us to be patient because, despite all the real world evidence, they are convinced he is working hard behind the scenes for peace. Third, in a final cop-out that undermines their other two arguments, they throw up their hands and say that he is "only" the president, and the Pentagon or "deep state" is too powerful for even him to tame.
Obama and Trump supporters alike have used this shaky tripod of political unaccountability to give the man behind the desk where the buck used to stop an entire deck of "get out of jail free" cards for endless war and war crimes.
Obama and Trump's "disguised, quiet, media-free approach" to war has inoculated America's wars and militarism against the virus of democracy, but new social movements have grown up to tackle problems closer to home. The financial crisis led to the rise of the Occupy Movement, and now the climate crisis and America's entrenched race and immigration problems have all provoked new grassroots movements. Peace advocates have been encouraging these movements to join the call for major Pentagon cuts, insisting that the hundreds of billions saved could help fund everything from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal to free college tuition.
A few sectors of the peace movement have been showing how to use creative tactics and build diverse movements. The movement for Palestinians' human and civil rights includes students, Muslim and Jewish groups, as well as black and indigenous groups fighting similar struggles here at home. Also inspirational are campaigns for peace on the Korean peninsula led by Korean Americans, such as Women Cross the DMZ, which has brought together women from North Korea, South Korea and the United States to show the Trump administration what real diplomacy looks like.
There have also been successful popular efforts pushing a reluctant Congress to take anti-war positions. For decades, Congress has been only too happy to leave warmaking to the president, abrogating its constitutional role as the only power authorized to declare war. Thanks to public pressure, there has been a remarkable shift. In 2019, both houses of Congress voted to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen and to ban arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, although President Trump vetoed both bills.
Now Congress is working on bills to explicitly prohibit an unauthorized war on Iran. These bills prove that public pressure can move Congress, including a Republican-dominated Senate, to reclaim its constitutional powers over war and peace from the executive branch.
Another bright light in Congress is the pioneering work of first-term Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who recently laid out a series of bills called Pathway to PEACE that challenge our militaristic foreign policy. While her bills will be hard to get passed in Congress, they lay out a marker for where we should be headed. Omar's office, unlike many others in Congress, actually works directly with grassroots organizations that can push this vision forward.
The presidential election offers an opportunity to push the anti-war agenda. The most effective and committed anti-war champion in the race is Bernie Sanders. The popularity of his call for getting the U.S. out of its imperial interventions and his votes against 84% of military spending bills since 2013 are reflected not only in his poll numbers but also in the way other Democratic candidates are rushing to take similar positions. All now say the U.S. should rejoin the Iran nuclear deal; all have criticized the "bloated" Pentagon budget, despite regularly voting for it ; and most have promised to bring U.S. troops home from the greater Middle East.
So, as we look to the future in this election year, what are our chances of reviving the world's second superpower and ending America's wars?
Absent a major new war, we are unlikely to see big demonstrations in the streets. But two decades of endless war have created a strong anti-war sentiment among the public. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 62 percent of Americans said the war in Iraq was not worth fighting and 59 percent said the same for the war in Afghanistan.
On Iran, a September 2019 University of Maryland poll showed that a mere one-fifth of Americans said the U.S. "should be prepared to go to war" to achieve its goals in Iran, while three-quarters said that U.S. goals do not warrant military intervention. Along with the Pentagon's assessment of how disastrous a war with Iran would be, this public sentiment fueled global protests and condemnation that have temporarily forced Trump to dial down his military escalation and threats against Iran.
So, while our government's war propaganda has convinced many Americans that we are powerless to stop its catastrophic wars, it has failed to convince most Americans that we are wrong to want to. As on other issues, activism has two main hurdles to overcome: first to convince people that something is wrong; and secondly to show them that, by working together to build a popular movement, we can do something about it.
The peace movement's small victories demonstrate that we have more power to challenge U.S. militarism than most Americans realize. As more peace-loving people in the U.S. and across the world discover the power they really have, the second superpower we glimpsed briefly on February 15th, 2003 has the potential to rise stronger, more committed and more determined from the ashes of two decades of war.
A new president like Bernie Sanders in the White House would create a new opening for peace. But as on many domestic issues, that opening will only bear fruit and overcome the opposition of powerful vested interests if there is a mass movement behind it every step of the way. If there is a lesson for peace-loving Americans in the Obama and Trump presidencies, it is that we cannot just walk out of the voting booth and leave it to a champion in the White House to end our wars and bring us peace. In the final analysis, it really is up to us. Please join us!
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OK Boomers, Wake Up!
Sanders is the person you used to be but forgot about.
Dec 21, 2019
I keep reading that polls show young people--the so-called Millennial Generation aged 23-38-- are overwhelmingly backing Bernie Sanders in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination (along with even younger voters) while the so-called Baby Boom Generation of people now aged roughly 55 to 75 are going for Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg or some other ossified mainstream Democratic pol.
Speaking as a Baby Boomer myself, and increasingly an admirer of Sanders, I gotta ask: OK Boomers, what's happened to you?
Think back: What were you doing back in the late 1960s when you were in your teens or early 20s as the Civil Rights Movement was finally winning the right to vote for Black people, when the Vietnam War was raging and classmates of yours were coming home in body bags? Where were you when President Nixon in 1970 urged Ohio Republican Governor James Rhodes to send the Ohio National Guard onto the Kent State Campus to put down a student protest against his illegal invasion of Cambodia, expanding an ugly war to yet another country, and the "heroic" guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed students? Where were you when we were all shattering the walls of prudery, experimenting with sex, the mind-freeing wonders of marijuana and yes, even LSD? Where were you as women and their male supporters suddenly stood tall and said that just having the vote wasn't enough; they demanded equality with men on the job, in the home, in politics and in their relationships?
We Boomers have been maligned in the media and by politicians since back when we were wearing bell-bottom jeans, when women were putting flowers in their usually long or frizzed-out hair, and when any guy with the slightest facial hair grew a beard or at least a mustache (lately, it's that we're keeping jobs from young people by not retiring, or that we're hurting their retirement future by opposing any cuts in our own benefits!) More importantly we were marching against war, against nuclear weapons and arms spending, and condemning the empty consumerism of our parents. In obtaining our attire from thrift stores and traveling the roads by thumb, we were challenging the premise of capitalism itself, saying that it wasn't what you owned that defined you, it was what you stood for.
We were reading the Realist, R. Crumb Comix, New Times and Ramparts, as well as writers like Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Malcolm X, Marshal McLuhan and Henry Thoreau for our worldview.
And we were, for the most part I would argue, happier and freer than we are today.
Somehow, in the intervening years since the victory of the Vietnamese over the US invaders, the impeachment hearings and resignation of Nixon, the end of the draft, passage of the Voting Rights Act and creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the at least partial liberation of women, we've lost our way. We got married, raised families, bought oversized and over-priced cars and houses, got sucked into being investors in IRA and 401(k) plans (trusting in stock markets instead of labor unions), and became consumers instead of people. We became better-off versions of our own parents. Some of us even became Republicans or Neo-liberal Democrats, worried more about our own gain than about those who were being left behind or crushed by what we used to call the "System," and ignoring what our nation was and still is doing to the world.
During all these intervening years, as we've lost our way, Bernie Sanders has stayed the course. Four years too old to be officially a Baby Boomer, Sanders, born in 1941, hails from that demographic cohort that, during the Nixon years, to its undying disgrace, came to be known, and even to self identify, as the Silent Generation consisting of those born between the wars or during WWII. Sanders, though, has never been silent. He protested and faced arrest as a student defending the rights of American blacks and opposed both US apartheid and the Vietnam War. He then entered politics as a socialist, winning election as mayor of Burlington, VT (which under his leadership became known as "the People's Republic of Burlington" ... and as one of the best US cities to live in). Later he moved on to Congress, first as a representative and then as the state's junior senator--a position he still holds.
Bernie Sanders, my fellow Boomers, is the person we were supposed to be as we grew older and wiser: An obstinate and outspoken defender of the downtrodden, a rejector of consumerism, and a defender of the notion that we all are better off when we demand that government help those who are the neediest, not those who are the most wealthy and powerful. Sanders may have on occasion failed to remember our mantra that all wars are bad, but he seems to be coming around to that view again in this race for the presidency.
We Boomers as a group need to do the same. In fact, those of us who are not supporting Sanders in this coming election year need to do some soul searching about who we really are and what we really stand for.
Maybe my wife's university employer offers (at a significant cost to us) a really great health plan, but that is no reason for me to say I oppose expanded and improved Medicare for All as proposed by Sen. Sanders. Not only would Medicare for All cost me and my wife a lot less than we, and her employer, pay now for our healthcare, but with Medicare for All I would know that everyone else in this nation--all my fellow citizens--would have the same access to free high-quality health care as us.
Maybe if the government subsidized the installation of point-of-use electrical generating equipment (wind, geothermal or solar panels) on all US homes, I'd be paying higher taxes, but our air would be vastly cleaner, our cars would all be electric and virtually cost-free to drive, and we'd no longer have power bills from climate-change-inducing and pollution-causing power plant operator. A Green New Deal that promises to find jobs for those displaced by the urgent shutdown of greenhouse gas polluters, as advocated by Sanders, even if jarring for some, would be good for everyone.
If we ended our national imperial policy of endless wars and slashed military spending, maybe the US military and the arms industry would lay off a lot of people, but Americans would be viewed a lot better by the rest of the world, and our nation would be able to spend a trillion dollars a year or more in much more productive ways--like engaging in a crash program to save the earth from human-caused mass extinction.
When we were younger and more idealistic, we always talked about "peace, love and understanding," remember? Now we talk about Russia-gate, Trump, Terrorism, the next recession, how or when we're going to retire, and our next Caribbean cruise.
I'm not sure how it happened, but we as a generation have lost our way and our soul. We urgently need to "get back, get back, get back to where we once belonged."
Bernie's been there all along, and now we need to not just support but to join him. We don't want or need a corporate lackey and banker's best friend like Joe Biden who was opposing busing while Bernie was joining anti-discrimination sit-ins, and who came up with the racist and classist idea of mass incarceration that has made the US the nation with the most people in jail in the world. Nor do we want or need a guy like Michael Bloomberg who as Mayor of New York saw his wealth grow from $4.6 billion to $36.7 billion, and who, when he was in charge of that city's struggling public college system, the City University of New York, chose to donate $1.8 billion not to CUNY but to Johns Hopkins, a wealthy private university in Baltimore with a $3-billion endowment at that time! And we don't want or need a guy like Pete Buttigieg who is backed by dozens of billionaire capitalists, and who spent his formative years working for a venture capital firm called McKinsey that makes its big bucks by advising profitable companies like Blue Cross how to make more by ditching massive numbers of their workers, and who calls for sending the US troops into Mexico!
Bernie Sanders may not be perfect. I have criticized (in Counterpunch magazine) his stubborn and indefensible support for the Pentagon's basing of 18 hugely expensive and destabilizing F-35A nuclear-capable fighter bombers with the Vermont National Guard at Burlington's little municipal airport in his home state--a position totally at odds with his claim that the plane itself is a wasteful weapons system. But his faults pale in comparison with all the competition.
Hell! We all have our faults. But we Boomers had something in our younger days that was right-on: a commitment to peace and justice, a pacific preference for love over hate and war, a gut opposition to racism and later to sexism, and a willingness to take it to the streets to make our positions heard and responded to.
We need to get that mojo back, and now is the time for us to do it, if not for ourselves, then for the two generations that follow us: our kids, and our grandkids.
Sanders at 78 still has those values and has been acting on them, or at least most of them, for his whole political career. He should have been the Democratic Party's candidate in 2016, but the forces of corporatism and reaction, in the party leadership and in the mainstream corporate media, and a rigged system of "pledged" unelected
Superdelegates," kept that from happening. The same thing is happening again this time around. We need to take the lead and not just leave this struggle to the kids, who by the way are showing us the way forward, with 57% backing Sanders for president.
Remember who you were, and be that person again fellow Boomer. This is not just about Trump and Russiagate. It's about saving the world.
Now, I hear all the time when I mention Sanders to people my age--generally liberal Democrats--that Sanders "has no chance to win," that his socialist ideas like Medicare for All are "too far left for most voters," and that he's "a one- or two-issue candidate: Medicare for All and break up the banks." Meanwhile, the media are now claiming, on the basis of ignorance about the UK and of lazy thinking, that the drubbing of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party on Dec. 12 is "a warning" for Democrats not to nominate a left-wing presidential candidate. So let me address these erroneous tropes. First of all, Sanders has been a combination of viciously attacked and/or ignored or misrepresented by the corporate media, and especially the liberal media. MSNBC has actually misstated his poll standing repeatedly. The New York Times has written more about Bloomberg (polling 0-1%) and Yang (polling 5% at best) lately than about Sanders who is in the lead in California polls and in second place or even leading in nationwide in some national polls. Don't believe me? Check out Real Clear Politics, which runs poll averages instead of just single polls. Don't think the media are being unfair in their reporting on Sanders. Read this, this and this. The LA Times actually was forced a few weeks ago by massive reader protests to correct a headline that said Warren and Biden were losing ground in California, but failed to mention that it was Sanders who was taking the lead!
The truth is, Sanders is leading or gaining ground in the primaries nationally and in key states like South Carolina, California and Florida. Also true is that he is speaking not just to progressives, but to the core working-class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party and voted for Trump last time. I saw this at work in 2016 in the Catskills of NY where we have a summer house in a low-income bit of Appalachia where everyone is either Republican or independent but typically conservative, but where they also depend upon Medicaid or lately, the ACA if they have jobs, to get their health insurance. During the 2016 Democratic primary, our village, a single election district that regularly votes all Republican, had lots of Sanders signs on lawns and bumpers. After Clinton won that primary, the signs and bumper stickers all switched to Trump or to "Lock her up!" signs. That should tell you all you need to know.
As for my leftist friends who think Sanders is too squishy and liberal, check out his enemies: Virtually the entire mass media, Mayor Bloomberg, the $56-billion Man who joined the race for president fearing that the party might, god forbid, nominate an anti-capitalist like Sanders or and anti-billionaire like Elizabeth Warren. Remember two things: A candidate can be defined best by the enemy he or she makes, and perfection in a candidate means election failure.
Sanders in 2020!
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In Praise of I.F. "Izzy" Stone
In these critical times, remembering what one of last century's most courageous journalists taught us
Jun 18, 2019
In this era of Donald Trump--with its widespread corruption and abuse of power--the world of journalism could use the voice of I.F. Stone, one of America's greatest muckraking reporters, who died 30 years ago today at 81 on June 18, 1989. From the 1930s through the early 1970s, Stone was an indefatigable researcher and an uncompromising critic of political oligarchy, crony capitalism, racism, and American militarism. He challenged mainstream journalism's conservative "he said/she said" approach to reporting and, in doing so, inspired several generations of investigative journalists to follow his example.
He was born Isidor Feinstein in 1907. His father, who ran a dry goods store, had immigrated to Philadelphia to escape anti-Semitic persecution in Russia. But the family found that racism and bigotry was deeply ingrained in the United States, too. One of his most formative experiences was witnessing a group of African Americans picketing the local movie theater at the 1915 opening of D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan.
He began his journalism career began at age fourteen, when he published his own neighborhood newspaper, Progress. Though a lackluster high school student in Haddonfield, New Jersey--graduating forty-ninth out of a class of fifty-two, and more interested in his budding reporting career than his class work--he was an avid reader and became radicalized as a teenager.
While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked part-time at the Philadelphia Inquirer, earning $40 a week--a good wage in 1928. He dropped out in his junior year, began working at the paper full-time, and was a journalist for the rest of his life. With newspaper work, he said, he never "felt compelled to compromise with my conscience." In 1937 he changed his last name to Stone to keep readers who were too prejudiced to get past his Jewish-sounding byline, but among friends and colleagues, he was always called Izzy.
After several short stints at papers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, he worked as an editorial writer from 1932 to 1939 for the Philadelphia Record and the New York Post. In 1937, he wrote a series of editorials for the New York Post attacking the U.S. Supreme Court for knocking down key components of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program as unconstitutional. In one he wrote, "Those safe, conservative majorities brought on the Civil War. Those safe, conservative majorities have stood in the path of almost every major piece of social legislation enacted by the elected representatives of the American people. To suit their ends, those safe, conservative justices have twisted the Constitution itself beyond recognition." Later that year he published his first book, The Court Disposes, in which he observed, "The Court can scent communism several centuries downwind, in a federal income tax or a minimum wage for chambermaids."
A few years later, the Post, concerned that Stone's left-wing editorials were costing the paper advertising dollars, forced him from the editorial department to the newsroom but gave him nothing to do. He soon resigned.
Stone and his wife, Esther, moved to Washington, DC, which became their permanent home. He covered the nation's capital initially as a freelancer for The Nation, then for PM (a leftist New York daily that lasted from 1940 to 1948 and whose staff included cartoonist Theodor Geisel, "Dr. Seuss"), the New York Star, the liberal New York Post, and the radical Compass. When the Compass folded in 1952, Stone was forty-five and had a family to support. But he was a pariah in the midst of the McCarthy era and could not find work.
Without a job, he began I. F. Stone's Weekly in 1953 and continued its publication through 1971. He never accepted advertisements for what he called his "four-page miniature journal of news and opinion," designed with a simple lay-out and without photographs.
As a publisher, Stone became "an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise, subject to neither mortgager nor broker, factor nor patron." To get started, he used the mailing lists of the Compass and other publications, along with $3,500 he had received in severance pay and a $3,000 interest-free loan from a friend. He quickly had 5,000 subscribers, which had swelled to 70,000 by the 1960s. Charter subscribers included Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bertrand Russell. "In the fifties, to find his Weekly in the mail was to feel a breath of hope for mankind," playwright Arthur Miller recalled.
Stone researched, wrote, and edited the newsletter himself, helped only by his wife and an occasional student assistant. From the start, its influence was much greater than the size of its readership, because other journalists, politicians, and activists read it dutifully and picked up on his leads.
Reporters and editors admired Stone's ability to unearth facts, connect the dots, ferret out the truth, and uncover patterns of lying, cover-ups, and hypocrisy by politicians and government officials regarding civil rights, civil liberties, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, Cuba, foreign policy, and war.
Stone got his stories not by cozying up to the powerful, parroting official press releases, or currying access to high-level policymakers, but by methodical tracking, following like a bloodhound the paper trail of hearings, transcripts, government documents, newspapers (he read ten a day), and foreign-language publications. In part, his methodology was developed out of necessity. He had very poor vision and hearing, making it difficult for him to cover press conferences and speeches. He did all this, of course, long before the Internet, on-line newspaper archives, or personal computers.
He published original, critical articles about the Korean War, Senator Joe McCarthy, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who despised Stone and read the Weekly compulsively. In 1953 Stone revealed that Pepsi-Cola had signed a $20,000 note for McCarthy when his bank account was overextended and that, at the same time, Pepsi was lobbying McCarthy's subcommittee to decontrol sugar.
He was unblushingly patriotic and believed, especially during the dark days of McCarthyism, that he was carrying out the Founders' desire for a truly free press. "I may be just a Red Jew son-of-a-bitch to them, but I'm keeping Thomas Jefferson alive," Stone said.
He wrote articles filled with his outrage over racial injustice, such as the murder trial of the killers of fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till, who had been killed in Mississippi in 1955 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. "Basically all of us whites, North and South, acquiesce in white supremacy, and benefit from the pool of cheap labor," he wrote.
In 1941 he resigned from the National Press Club when it refused service to him and his African American guest, William Hastie, a former federal judge. When Stone tried to join again in 1956, after the club was integrated, he was blackballed.
During the nuclear test ban debate in 1957, Stone pieced together a story that reporters for major newspapers missed. To undermine support for a test ban, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) argued that there was no way to detect nuclear testing from a great distance and thus that there would be no way to verify the agreement. Stone found a government seismologist who told him that an underground Nevada test had been detected from as much as 2,600 miles away. The AEC was forced to claim it had made an "inadvertent" error. "No agency in Washington has a worse record than the AEC for these little 'errors,'" Stone wrote. Stone published the story in his tiny Weekly, and it was picked up by other reporters and politicians.
Stone used this method to investigate many issues, from military spending to worker uprisings in Hungary, free speech infringement, and American arrogance abroad. In 1964 he was the first American journalist to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which LBJ used to justify going to war in Vietnam. Throughout the 1960s Stone exposed the government's lies about the Vietnam War with thorough documentation, providing ammunition for the antiwar movement.
In one stirring piece, written in 1965, he compared events in Selma, Alabama, and Saigon: "If the federal government handled Negro aspiration as it handles the revolt in South Vietnam, we would be sending 'counter-insurgency' teams from Fort Bragg into the South to kill civil rights agitators. We would be burning out with napalm the Negro neighborhoods in which we suspected that CORE or SNCC workers were hiding."
In 1967, with the war intensifying, he condemned the U.S. military's practice of destroying whole villages to get a handful of guerrillas. "Imagine 30,000 Chinese troops uprooting Iowa villagers to save them from Republicanism and you get some idea of how likely this is to win--as our sentimental generals say--the hearts of the people."
Stone wrote thirteen books, including Underground to Palestine (1946), This Is Israel (1948), The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952), and The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished (1971).
In declining health, Stone began publishing the newsletter on a biweekly basis in 1967 and gave it up entirely in 1971. He then taught himself Greek and wrote a nonfiction mystery-thriller, The Trial of Socrates, published in 1988. The book, a New York Times best seller for nine weeks, explored why ancient Greece, a civilization known for its embrace of free speech, would execute Socrates for what he thought and said.
Controversy hounded Stone even after he died. In 1992 the right-wing magazine Human Events charged that he had been a Soviet spy, based on newly released documents. Stone's FBI file, released in 1994, contained 2,000 pages. According to his biographer D. D. Guttenplan, "The FBI didn't find a single piece of evidence to suggest that I. F. Stone was anything other than he seemed--an unrepentant radical who concentrated his fire on his own government's failings."
During his career, Stone won the George Polk Award, the A.J. Liebling Award, and other honors from the ACLU, the Newspaper Guild, Columbia University, the National Press Club, and the Sidney Hillman Foundation. In 2008, Harvard University's Neiman Foundation for Journalism created the annual I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence and Ithaca College's Park School of Communications established the Izzy Award for "special achievement in independent media."
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