On November 15, 1969 half a million people descended on Washington D.C. to protest the Vietnam War, not a single one of them directly or indirectly subsidized by a TV network or an astroturfing group of lobbyists.
I made the trip to DC with some college friends. There were four of us, joined by two girls that we stopped to pick up in New York, all, somehow, crammed into a Camaro (bucket seats in front). I’m not quite sure how we did that, but we did.
We found a place to sleep at the Sigma Nu fraternity at American University. We (the men among us) were members of that fabled society, and our brothers in D.C. had no choice but to put us up, though they didn’t much “like our kind”. Fraternity trumped politics in that instance. The fraternity, we were told, was in the building where Edwin Stanton was shot, and we slept in the very room in which the deed took place.
Coming from Maine, I assumed the weather would be comparatively mild so far South. It was, in fact, biting cold, and all I had between me and that cold air was a CPO. I froze all day and into the night. My future spouse was somewhere in the crowd, presumably more warmly dressed than me.
One event of that day has stuck in my memory. We were wandering the streets of D.C. early the morning of the 15th (or was it the next day?) when we were approached by a young woman who asked us if we were hungry. She got an affirmative answer and she told us to follow her. She took us to a restaurant and paid for our breakfast. We took up two tables, and since she sat at one and I at another, I never said a word to her. It was a much appreciated act of pure benevolence, and ever since I have felt that I owe a sort of inverse karmic debt.
Back in those days, the media actually paid attention when people on the left took to the streets. At least in terms of numbers, the moratorium was pretty much replicated when the Iraq war was in the planning stage, but those demonstrations were rendered meaningless by the simple expedient of ignoring them. Conversely, a few teabaggers who can’t even articulate their grievances get a respectful hearing with Republican Congresspeople bellowing (without a hint of irony) that so many voices raised in tandem simply cannot be ignored. Whatever else you might say about them, those 60s protests were real. We now live in an age of “reality” television, in which fake reality has replaced the real thing, both as entertainment and as politics. Those 60s protests were instrumental in ending that war, though the proper lessons were never drawn from that experience. It remains to be seen whether faux demonstrations will have as much of, or more of an impact. Given the disconnect between the Beltway and the rest of us, the odds are better than even that enough Democrats will follow the money and bow to the manufactured “will of the people” as they were never willing to do when the outrage was real and the cause was just.
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