Coming home after three more successful gigs, I was able to sit through a mild band of Jeanne's fury and enjoy the Blockbuster presentation of Born on the Fourth of July. For those of you that do not know this movie (and I assume many of you do), it told the story of Vietnam Veteran activist Ron Kovic, a patriotic, ambitious, America-loving kid who willingly joined the Marines to go to Vietnam and returned home paralyzed and distraught over what he witnessed there, evolving from being a close-minded, protestor-hating vet into an active protestor of the war.
One of the most telling moments of the movie comes when Ron is accused by a fellow vet, who didn't like Ron's drunken rant on the war, of being a traitor. He returns home, stripped of any hope left for himself or his country or even God, and gets into a heavily venomous argument with his highly-religious mother. He mentions three key events of the last two years that supported his argument - King's and RFK's assassinations, and the Kent State massacre.
We haven't yet reached that point of tragedy yet, the King & Kennedy kind, but where we could be heading is paralleled to what I witnessed in the movie.
I don't think this year is 1968, a year full of tragedy, turmoil, and hatred that almost killed a nation, but we are getting close. There were thousands and thousands of kids like Kovic who came home, stricken with guilt over what they witnessed and/or perpetrated, and many of them probably felt the same way he did. Kids today are experiencing that same thing. They are witnessing the deaths of innocents, of women and children. They are as psychologically scarred by war as those in Vietnam were too. The generation that once swore "never again" to what happened in Vietnam is raising now another generation of emotionally-distraught young adults who aren't treated as human beings by both sides of the political spectrum. I may have never lived in a military family, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know, even minutely, what these kids in Vietnam went through and what today's generation is going through.
Michael Moore's greatest moment in his 9/11 documentary is when he asks the one question we all should be asking: "Will they ever trust us again?" Watching Born on the Fourth of July, that question becomes ever more poignant. The Vietnam era was what I called the Shame on You era; I declared in this community some time ago that we are now living in a Shame on Me Era. The rope that our country is walking on is getting thinner and less sturdier with each passing day. Our country cannot continue to thrive in such a predicament. Sooner or later, we will fall over on one side of the rope, and that will be our future whether we like it or not. That's why this election is truly an election to save this nation's soul.
For forty years, since the assassination of JFK, this country has been going through some very difficult transitional periods, a very deep sleep from which we all never wanted to leave, and I think we have officially come to the part of the story where one direction must be endured and the other perished. Our country either goes down the road of fascism or down the road of democracy - it can't go down both. In 1968, a year in which many Americans wondered if the country would ever survive and rise once again, choices were made and directions pursued, and while it was a very hard time, the country eventually, for the most part, got itself back together and on its feet again. A lot of it, however, was due to the fact that people simply wanted to forget Vietnam ever happened. That's when the dark side of the drug and sexual revolution took place, a period where everyone did everything and anyone to hide the pain that was clearly there but thoroughly submerged in the public consciousness. I'm willing to bet our government, while trying to put on its best righteous face, knowingly provided, covertly or otherwise, all the means and methods by which we could forget our past and become mind-numbing zombies that were all giddy with artificial happiness. They had as much reason to forget the past as the rest of America did.
Aren't we doing that as much today as back then? Haven't we become a desensitized, mind-numbing culture, succumbed to the gratification of drugs, alcohol, and sex?
Needless to say for the longest time it worked, but in today's information age, the time has come for this nation to face the music. 9/11 was the foot that broke through our door of tranquility that we have relied upon for our own version of peace for years. It also provided the justification for the Iraq Invasion for many pro-Vietnam folks who wanted to prove that America was strong, almighty and never wrong. Iraq is now a disaster of biblical proportions, but it may have done what no other event could have done - it made us confront that horrible history of Vietnam so many of us wanted to wash away for good. Today, thanks in large part to the current presidential election, we are being forced to review that terrible time in our history. Only now, the massive, majority consensus is that that war was a mistake, that 58,000 soldiers died needlessly, and now, when we once proclaimed "never again," it is happening once again. The nation is full of righteous souls and people who strive for truth and love, and they are increasingly getting their voices heard. But here is another point of history that people tend to forget.
People need to understand, and are beginning to understand, that the principles of the 60s, the anti-war movement in general, were eventually vindicated, even more so today as we reflect on that hard period of American history. While both sides had their shortcomings, the anti-war movement was proven right - the Vietnam War was a mistake and it was time to end such miscalculations. But that vindication didn't happen at the time it needed to. The result was years of war, a tanked economy, a new generation of Americans emotionally scarred and isolated from the world, and a bleak future. We thankfully managed to pull out of such an abysmal period, simply by choosing to forget that time in our nation's history. Today, however, we can no longer avoid it. The culture war of the 60s has returned with a new generation of Americans, spawned from both sides of the spectrum. This time it's for keeps, and by our own actions, we either allow our nation to succumb itself to the perpetual war state that we came so close to forming, or we move on to a brighter future for ourselves and mankind.
Today's current government leaders were spawned from the generation that supported the Vietnam War and yet managed to avoid fighting it. Having secured a base of power that is so massively strong, it is now time for a real direction, good or bad, for this country. Neither side can wait for many more years in order to be vindicated. In this age where the new Red Scare is terrorism, our nation really doesn't have the time, nor the strength. The action that happens now will determine our future.
The testament of any person's soul is based on the action that person takes when he or she knows what is right and true. People say the majority of America isn't really informed - pardon my French but I say fuck that. The truth is out there, we only choose to be informed. The actions of our government are there for all to see, from Fahrenheit 911 to the Daily Show to our news media, which can no longer hold back the news BushCo doesn't want you to see. People are dying in a desert and on the streets here at home; people can't find work; downtowns are becoming ghost towns from layoffs and street crime; our environment is getting worse and mother nature ain't having it anymore if Florida has anything to say about it. Life ain't as good as it used to be, unless you are a rich autocrat. So either you do something about it and make real change, or choose not to and let the world around die screaming with your fingers in your ears screeching "LALALALALALALALA!!"
John Edwards is right to talk about the Two Americas, but like it or not, there won't be Two Americas anymore after Election Day. There can't be. The last time we had Two Americas was just under 150 years ago, and more than half a million of our brothers and sisters died as a result of it. There can only be One America, and that one will be of our choosing come November 2nd. "Let me sleep on it" has been America's excuse for 30 years. It's time to awake or permanently sleep. We either continue down the same disastrous path, leading us to become that which we and our Founding Fathers decried against for so long, or we face the past and vote for real change, and finally wake up to the task that those revolutionaries in the 1780s asked us to take.