What happens when your elected President becomes the Vietnam War? When the President elect becomes so polarizing as to cause bursts of protest like we haven’t seen since that terrible war. We know we are in uncharted territory. But can we ,or do we, have the capability to understand the larger context of what we are seeing? Looking back with hindsight we know the history of what the protest brought about and how they helped to push the Nixon administration to pull out of Vietnam. We know the left and their allies pretty much pushed LBJ to not run for a second term. But what does it mean when your President = Vietnam War?
On October 21, 1967, one of the most prominent anti-war demonstrations took place, as some 100,000 protesters gathered at the Lincoln Memorial; around 30,000 of them continued in a march on the Pentagon later that night. After a brutal confrontation with the soldiers and U.S. Marshals protecting the building, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested. One of them was the author Norman Mailer, who chronicled the events in his book “The Armies of the Night,” published the following year to widespread acclaim. Also in 1967, the anti-war movement got a big boost when the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. went public with his opposition to the war on moral grounds, condemning the war’s diversion of federal funds from domestic programs as well as the disproportionate number of African-American casualties in relation to the total number of soldiers killed in the war….….….….
………..The following year, Nixon claimed in a famous speech that anti-war protesters constituted a small–albeit vocal–minority that should not be allowed to drown out the “silent majority” of Americans. Nixon’s war policies divided the nation still further, however: In December 1969, the government instituted the first U.S. draft lottery since World War II, inciting a vast amount of controversy and causing many young men to flee to Canada to avoid conscription.
Vietnam War Protest
Now in 2017 we have our popular vote loser President traveling to cities where large protest and rallies will follow. We are literally not even a week into this administration and it already feels like a year. How long before the nation has Trump fatigue? Its what finally turned the tide on getting us out of Vietnam. Its what I believe got us the wave election of 2006 as Bush fatigue. But I just don’t know what it means for us at this moment. Out of all the “never before seen” that this election and administration has brought us so far, I really wonder what it will mean for us when the President of the United States is as reviled as the Vietnam War……….
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