Forty Years in the Streets
http://www.counterpunch.org/lisnoff09032008.html
By HOWARD LISNOFF
September 3, 2008
There is absolutely nothing as exhilarating as challenging authority
and winning! I think that is why the 1960s have such an unshakable
hold on me, and others who fought for civil rights, were in the
antiwar movement and the women's movement. I took on the power of
the United States government and I won. It wasn't easy, and it
disrupted my entire life, but it taught me many lessons about
activism and exactly what confronting enormous power means.
The e-mail I received, the day after Barack Obama was nominated as
the candidate for president of the Democratic Party, from the group
The World Can't Wait, described the difficulty antiwar protesters
were experiencing dealing with the police and the low numbers of
demonstrators who had turned out to confront the neoliberal message
of the convention in Denver. By the convention's end three thousand
protesters finally marched in the streets of that city.
The distance from Denver in time and miles is so long from where I am
today in terms of activism. The heady days of the 60s and early 70s
when everything seemed possible in terms of personal and political
change often seem like they are the memories from another life.
There is a story about two activists who meet at the end of the
decade of the 1970s. One friend had remained active, while the other
had moved away from activism and had immersed herself in a
career. The former activist was embarrassed by the commitment of her
old friend, finding it implausible that someone would remain involved
in political action so long after it had become unfashionable, and
consumerism and the various movements of self-exploration had become
so prevalent.
I remained an activist. I became involved in the movement to grant
war resisters amnesty during the Carter administration. Having been
a war resister during the Vietnam War, I benefited directly from
Carter's amnesty; being one of only several thousand out of tens of
thousands who received upgraded discharges. The entire amnesty
program was flawed and was a reflection of the society's hostility to
those who had opposed the war. Draft resisters were treated more
cordially than their counterparts who had been in the military.
When I joined the antinuclear movement in the early 1980s I knew
something had radically changed in the nature of activism. Although I
met some very fine people along the way, something had changed. An
activist in his or her thirties no longer spent entire days with
fellow activists, as had been the case during the 1960s and the early
1970s. People had their individual and private lives and went home
to their families after organizing meetings or a
demonstration. While camaraderie was certainly present in the
nuclear freeze movement, there was something missing which could
never again be reclaimed.
The nuclear freeze movement was the first movement that I had been
involved in that had intrinsic limitations. The group I belonged to
in Rhode Island spent a great amount of time canvassing huge swaths
of neighborhoods collecting signatures for a petition that had
absolutely no force whatsoever. Indeed, Ronald Reagan would
completely ignore the movement and actually expand the country's
military while pursuing the policy of low-intensity warfare in
Central America. In Nicaragua this type of war would devastate the
country and remove the Sandinistas from power.
During Reagan's presidency a huge fault line formed in the way I
began to view activism and some of the fellow activists I knew. For
the first time I began to meet many activists whose religious beliefs
motivated them. While there had always been a powerful and positive
religious presence in antiwar activism during the Vietnam War, much
of my activism now brought me in direct contact with people whose
activism was driven by their religious beliefs. Nothing illustrated
the latter better than my movement between pro-abortion groups and
anti-death penalty activism. One week would find me escorting at a
local women's health clinic, and the next meeting at the main offices
of a major religious denomination in Rhode Island to work against
attempts to try to put the death penalty on the ballot as a
referendum in a state that had no death penalty. I had become used
to the freewheeling secular activism and activists of the 1960s;
however, I maintained cordial relationships with people from both groups.
Among my heroes is the late Abbie Hoffman who typified what an
activist meant to me. I knew Abbie enough to say hello to him as we
passed in the Law Commune located on Broadway in New York
City. Abbie used the commune throughout his years as an activist,
and especially for his defense during the trial of the Chicago
Eight. I needed the commune when I became a resister to the Vietnam
War. It was Abbie's book, Steal This Book that introduced me to the
Law Commune. Abbie wrote a great essay, "The Young Must Be
There." In it he rightly held that any movement in the U.S. must be
driven by the presence and energy of young activists. Today, the
relentless draw of consumerism and the absence of the threat of
conscription has seen only small numbers of the young protest. In
addition, the baby boom, a period of relative economic affluence, and
the reaction to the staid conventions of the 1950s all helped to
propel the movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
When the Soviet Union crumbled, and the U.S. became the sole
superpower, anything but the end of history ensued. The first Gulf
War was a statement by President George H.W. Bush that force would
prevail where diplomacy would not even be attempted. The war, one
operation of which was described as a "turkey shoot" by a U.S. pilot,
was the opening salvo of the unquestioned military might of the U.S.
and its shameless use of it. A decade of sanctions against Iraq
followed, killing well over one hundred thousand Iraqis who most
often had nothing to do with the regime of Saddam Hussein. The torch
of global power was passed from the neoconservative Bush to the
neoliberal Clinton who maintained the same military posture toward
Iraq, while making it harder for Americans on the edge of a global
economy to make ends meet and making it easier to dispose of those in
the prison system who were expendable within that economic system.
Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the reign of George W.
Bush as president! To a 60s person his administration was a kind of
lethal and slow-acting poison. The last eight years have been as if
chapters were lifted directly out of Orwell's 1984! The endless wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq! The attacks against the civil liberties of
ordinary Americans! It is as if the fiendish plan hatched by Osama
bin Laden had extended after September 11, 2001. But it was
officials of the U.S. government who were conducting an experiment in
the destruction of what is left of democratic traditions and
institutions in the U.S. Even the environment has been made to
suffer by these enemies of the nation!
Each Saturday at noon I gather with a few folks in front of the town
hall in a small town in western Massachusetts. Usually three or five
people show up at the spot for the vigil where its first participant
has been standing weekly since the Iraq War began in March 2003.
I go each week out of habit. Not a bad habit, but a habit
nonetheless. I have been doing this for so long that it seems like
second nature now. Most people driving or walking by voice their
support for our action. A few express their anger through their
middle fingers. It is a long, long way from the streets of Denver or
Minneapolis, but these are the streets nevertheless.
A November victory by John McCain is inconceivable to me, but not
impossible. A glimpse of a McCain presidency has been the outrageous
beating of the press covering the Republican National Convention!
Clear echoes of the Democratic National Convention of
1968! November's choice will be between a neoconservative and a
neoliberal. A neoconservative will inevitably mean the beginning of
the end for many activists like myself who have held on to the
illusion of a reformed society for so many, many years! A neoliberal
will mean continued militarism on the part of the U.S. government,
environmental destruction, but at perhaps a slower pace, and a chance
at improved prospects for a saner Supreme Court. No third party has
yet to build a sustained movement during my lifetime. Their flash in
the pan candidates, while more desirable than the candidates of the
two major parties, have no chance of winning. Huge corporations call
the tune in the electoral system. Yogi Berra was perhaps the most
prescient of unintentional political observers when he said, "It's
like déjà vu all over again."
--
Howard Lisnoff is an educator and freelance writer. He is working on
a novel about the 1960s. He can be reached at howielisnoff@gmail.com
.
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