Remembering Those Who Serve

My war was Vietnam. It became a formative backdrop when I was growing up. It launched me into a lifetime of service and protests.

Even though Memorial Day 2013 is behind us, I still remember those who went to war, fell in action or came home wounded in visible and invisible ways. My high school graduating class was hit hard. 1964. The draft cranked up and took boys almost right out of classrooms. About 40% were drafted. I don't know how many didn't return. I don't want to know, I guess, because I've never looked at the honor rolls on Classmate.com.

My college graduating class was hit hard too. 1968. We still had the draft, although we also had protests rising everywhere. More were educated about options for not going to 'Nam. Some went to Canada. Some kept their student deferments. Some pretended to be gay. And others went because they didn't have options. Again, some returned; others didn't.

I protested. Marched. Stood silently in support of our wounded and dead servicemen. And I wept for my own loss. My best friend, a man I planned to marry, never made it back. He was ROTC in college. Med school on scholarships. Probably didn't have to go, but accepted his call to duty. His mother took his baby in. No, not mine. I went to grad school, waiting and praying for his return.

I was in grad school in Japan when I learned he was missing in action. For months, we had no further word. His mother sickened and could no longer care for his little girl. I wasn't his wife, so I couldn't take the child. We lost her to an adoption. I'm sure she grew up in a happy home. I just wish it had been ours. Nineteen months later, we were told he was dead. His mother collapsed and never recovered. She died within weeks of learning of her son's fate.

I pulled every string I had to get the truth of his death. After all, he was an orthopedic surgeon who didn't go out to the field. Until this one time. He went to a triage center to help stabilize the wounded before they were airlifted out. He caught the last chopper. It was went down with no survivors. The military knew what happened within hours of the incident.

Hours. We learned months later. I finally badgered an officer who told me the truth. His chopper was in Cambodia when we weren't officially in Cambodia. The firefight was there. The wounded were there. My friend died there.

When Memorial Day and Veteran's Day roll around, I think of my friend, his patients, his family, his child. I think of those who served and who still serve.

Thank you one and all for serving. Thank you one and all for preserving our way of life. Thank you all for being my heroes.

Activism, Then and Now

I have recently had the pleasure of a conversation with Nikki Giovanni, poet, activist, mother, daughter, black woman. Did I say activist and poet? Professor Giovanni is going to read poetry in our community on Thursday, Apirl 28th, in honor of National Poetry Month. My interview with her covered so much ground that I couldn't put it all in the article I wrote for Laker Weekly on April 22.

Professor Giovanni talked about her continuing activism, which ranges from rights for black women, to rights for all women, to equality. She told me several stories about the Freedom Riders who came down from New York to the Deep South to register blacks to vote.

This got me thinking about my own years of activism. Back "in the day," I was a class A-one protestor. I grew up in California, so I wasn't really involved in the civil rights movement first hand. I listened to Dr. King's speeches and watched the horrors unfold in black and white on nightly television, but these were images. They weren't my reality.

My reality was getting our troops out of what I considered an unjust and illegal war in Vietnam. My high school graduating class was drafted nearly en mass, with over 80% of the boys being called up. The lucky ones came back - or never went because of exemptions. When the draft gave way to the lottery system, I thought my friends were safe. Not so, because my college graduating class got blitzed too.

I counseled young men about legal ways to avoid the lottery or draft. I sat in. I marched. I stood silently to protest Dow Chemical recruiting on my college campus. I spent several nights in jail, arrested for illegal occupation of Federal buildings. Read: I sat in until the police finally decided to roust us from the lobbies of these buildings. I will never forget what it was like to sit in a drunk tank, so crammed in that we had no place for our legs. We had to wrap our arms around them to keep them close to our chests.

I boycotted iceburg lettuce, table grapes and Gallo wine, because these were produced by agribusiness. The workers labored in deplorable conditions: no shade, no fresh water, no toilets. When Cesar Chavez began organizing marches in the Delano Valley for workers' rights, I marched right behind him. It was the first and last time I was interested in unionizing, but the results of our efforts were better working conditions, including such obvious benefits as shaded benches for lunch, fresh water tanks and porta-potties. I still have pellets of buckshot in my butt as a reminder that not everyone thought we were doing the right thing.

That was then.

This is now.

I have lamented in recent years that no one has causes. No one is fired up about inequities. No one gives a damn. The Tea Party has disproved these thoughts.

I do not agree with the Tea Party. I think most of them or their potential candidates are shouting about the wrong things. Birthers? Gimme a break. Obama not qualified to go to an Ivy League school? Neither was W but he went and graduated. Reproductive rights? Keep your paws and laws off my body. Family values? And these are what???

What I would like to see protestors shouting about are the big issues facing our nation's future: What do we do about the failing banking system? How do we begin trimming our national debt, so that my new grandson has something to look forward to? How do we get Congress to stop watching the Home Shopping Network with our government credit cards in hand? How do we face the fact that Social Security wouldn't be in trouble if previous Congresses hadn't borrowed against it without repayment? How do we keep our pledges to our senior citizens for health coverage? How do we help the poor stay well and maybe break the cycle of poverty? How do we put people back to work? And why the hell are the Tea Partiers and the rest of Congress so pissy-scared about raising taxes?

Now if any one of these issues became a rallying cry for the populace, you can count me in. I'll lace up my sneakers, grab a bota bag of water and get back to the front lines. But until that happens, I think we will be putting too much noise in the system worrying over funding Planned Parenthood, public television, the Army sponsoring a NASCAR car, and whether or not Obama was born in the USA.

If people dig hard enough, perhaps they will find that Obama wasn't born anywhere, that he's a vampire and, therefore, immortal. Wouldn't that give the Tea Partiers something to sink their teeth into?