Actually, I think you’re the one missing the point. The purpose of voting is to give citizens the opportunity to articulate their will as to how we should be governed. Voter ID laws that are burdensome and unequally applied prevent accurate articulation of the people’s will and undercut the core tenet of democratic government.
I think the hate really came to the forefront during the 1960s and 1970s.
Desegregation dredged up the bottom-feeders of hatefulness, especially in our southern states. I have rarely seen anything as hateful and intolerant as Gov. George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door. His face twisted with anger and frustration, his chin jutting out in defiance. And seeing images of the police turning dogs, firehoses, and billy clubs on unarmed demonstrators, both black and white.
Images of white women, ordinary housewives in starched full skirts and those pointy-tipped sunglasses, screeching full-throated into the cameras, their faces contorted by a rage that you would never imagine coming from someone who enjoyed a normal, comfortable life. A preternatural rage.
I felt I was seeing a soul all charred and blackened by hate. Like charred fish. I’ve never witnessed anything so horrifying.
It seems that other factions on the American scene, instead of being horrified by these images, adopted these and similar tactics as their very own.
My family lived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1966 and 67 when the happenings in Haight-Ashbury were beginning to receive national coverage. It was “peace, love, and understanding” at the very outside. “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” (Semi-colons forbidden by the spirit of the time.)
As the 1960s drew to a close, the tone from the Left became angrier, more intolerant.
By 1970-71, we had anti-war demonstrators descending on airports specifically to demonstrate against GIs returning from Vietnam. Specifically to punish these GIs for serving. Many had been draftees, who were now returning to be punished for not evading. I remember seeing the demonstrators giving the returning GIs the finger. And screaming obscenities in their faces.
The tactic was to single out and attacking the little guy. Trying to make him feel small and worthless.
The only thing I can remember seeing as maliciously intolerant as the intolerance of these demonstrators, was the image of George Wallace, blocking the schoolhouse door.
Both sides of the same coin.
Radioactive intolerance. Weapons-grade intolerance.
Seared souls.
At around that same period, we had anti-war demonstrators wading through the reflecting pool in DC, screaming and chanting obscenities, and giving the finger, also, during a speech from the President. On Memorial Day. With tons of ordinary families and tourists present. Moms and Dads with strollers, middle-aged WWII vets in uniform who came down for the day.
A day ruined by people behaving like men and women possessed. (Figuratively speaking)
Much resembling the behavior of the housewives screeching into the camera in Selma and Birmingham.
And these tactics were born and bred in the late 60s and early 70s, and continue on to this very day.
Unbelievable.
I don’t remember seeing, hearing, or hearing about anything like it.
My parents told us they didn’t remember anything like it, in their time, either.
I don’t know how long a society can survive with people whose souls are seared, charred with hatred and rage, living in it. Running it.
People whose own interior landscape would have to resemble (figuratively) something like a twin-engine crash, and fire. The fuselage scattered, the flames extending up to the trees, the people dead. Smoke and horror, within the hearts and minds.
That’s what I believe hatred and rage do to people.
I’ve seen this rage and hatred on people’s faces, on both camps.
People I’ve loved, and trusted, and admired, have taught me to fear these twin evils and to avoid them, to the extent that I can. Because they are the destroyers of our own hearts and minds.
How do you determine which is the better/least bad option? If I vote D because of issue x, then I will quite likely get fucked on issue y. If I vote R because of issue y, then I get fucked on issue x. And no matter who wins, I’ll get fucked on issue z.
There is always being a single issue voter, but it is questionable whether it is a good idea to subordinate everything else in an enterprise as complex as governing the US to a candidate’s or party’s official stance on one single issue.
I’ve always thought the bad treatment of returning Vietnam vets to be quite exaggerated. This is an interesting article. Believe it or not, your choice.
Did some soldiers get spat on? Perhaps, but I personally don’t believe it was commonplace. It’s just one of those things that has become accepted truth by repetition.
Then why do democrats keep winning in my state? If it’s supposed to suppress minorities, it’s not working.
May I ask, BobLibDem, whether you remember where you were and what you were doing and how the people around you were reacting in the early afternoon of November 22, 1963?
I prioritize issues, so some are more important than others. Generally, I prioritize them by potential for harm, and I base that potential on American history – so, for example, the issue (broadly) that has caused, by far, the most harm to Americans and America, is bigotry/hatred/racism, so that is the top issue for me. If I think both candidates are acceptable on that issue, then I’ll move to the next one (which might vary depending on the office and other circumstances). It’s been a long time since it hasn’t been very easy to choose a candidate based on this.
My late husband served in VietNam as a Medevac (Dustoff) helicopter pilot. When he came back, he was called a baby killer. The military was reviled during those dark days even if it was not “commonplace” to be spat on. It wasn’t until the first Gulf War in 1990 when the military came to be respected again that VietNam vets started crawling out of the woodwork with no fear of being shunned and verbally attacked. I lived through it. I was there. Suggest you do more research.
I don’t understand why you would even question the veracity of this? What’s it to you anyway?
Yeah, I was in second grade. We were all pretty shocked and saddened. Don’t recall any other reaction.
The current patriotically correct memory of how soldiers were welcomed home I believe is full of holes. I was too young to serve but I have known Vietnam vets and none have recounted to me any such stories. Some, no doubt, had rude welcomes. Others did not. It probably had a lot to do with where you lived. Personally, I believe that it’s healthier for a nation to not view its military with wide eyed awe and reverence as it does today.
“I lived through it. I was there”
I, as well. And that’s why I asked BobLibDem whether he could remember his personal experiences from the day President JFK was assasinated.
A person who was 5 or 6 on that day would be barely old enough to remember the impact on those around him and what he himself saw and heard and felt. And so, that would give him a YOB of around 1957 or 1958. Which would put him in his late pre-teens to early teens during the early 1970s when these things were happening. And at that age, old enough, I would expect, to be capable of forming lasting, adult, reasonably accurate impressions about what was happening to other adults in the world outside his own immediate experience.
Younger than 60, or so? Probably not.
BobLibDem, it seems our posts crossed just now. Please ignore my today at 3:02 PM concerning further speculation about your age. Moot, since you were kind enough to provide the necessary information.
[QUOTE=Euphrosyne;20788018
Younger than 60, or so? Probably not.[/QUOTE]
No, definitely not.
To be honest, I don’t know what I would have done had I been drafted. I don’t harbor any ill will to those that went, nor do I condemn those that chose to go to Canada. In those days, if you were rich you could pay a doctor to discover bone spurs in your feet, if you were poor you were fodder for the war machine. The war was a colossal waste of lives and money and in the end, all in vain.
I don’t believe that questioning how many vets got rude welcomes home to be the third rail that one does not touch for fear of death. There is honest disagreement as to the extent that this happened. If you or your loved ones had bad experiences, this is going to alter your perception as much as the Vietnam vets that I have known not telling me of these things has altered mine.
BobLibDem, I understand you were around and aware during the period when the GIs were returning from VietNam, and you indicate that your impression is that such confrontations were relatively rare, compared to what I remember and what ThelmaLou remembers.
Do you remember the activities of the SLA and the SDS, and the Weather Underground (the anti-war gang, not the news outlet) ? Do you recall the murder of the police office by K.A. Power, the bank robberies and the bombings? Do you also remember how so many campuses were in turmoil, the rioting, looting, and burning of college libraries, the forcible taking of university administration buildings, the holding as hostages university administrators?
Do you remember the 1972 bomb detonated in the Pentagon in honor of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday?
All anti-Vietnam war protests or related protests.
I was there, living in the DC area at the time. Because of the news coverage we received in the Nation’s Capital, these events were very much up front and personal even to high school kids, living at home. I do remember it well.
They didn’t talk about it. My husband didn’t talk about his VietNam service AT ALL until, like I said, the vets started coming out after the first Gulf War and the military was admired again. The fact that no one volunteered any stories to you is not very revealing one way or the other.
Perhaps. I have a brother in law who never spoke of his time in Vietnam until sitting around a campfire maybe around 2000 where he just let it all out at once. I just happen to think this notion that returning vets coming home to universal mistreatment is a bit of revisionist history and the link I provided shows at least one study that supports my view. I also happen to think that there is a line between respect for the military and worship of the military and too many in the US have crossed it.
Perhaps I touched a nerve with some, but Vietnam is apparently one thing that still divides many of us.
Because he’s seeking to poke holes in my argument that the way returning vets were treated is emblematic of the hatred with which the left in this country has treated issues and people it disagrees with since the sixties.
Eh… wellll, that’s part of it, I suppose. By the same token, the Left is never going to get that it’s not okay for someone to marry into the Presidency, and people are right to have serious reservations about that kind of European oligarch shit. (I say that as someone who is mildly but decidedly on Team Lefty). I agree with the conservative position on this, without endorsing the ridiculous lengths they’ve taken it to. But I feel like that was the roots of the current historical moment.
I don’t know if it’s “touching a nerve” so much as it is finding the hubris off-putting. the age of Google and Wikipedia leads too many people to think 5 minutes of searching makes them an expert.
sort of how I feel when people who have never set foot in the state of Michigan tell me what it’s like in Detroit.
I did look at the article you linked to, and read the review of the book described in the article.
The article appears to focus on denying that the specific act of spitting on returning GIs by anti-war protesters happened often.
This may well be true.
However, reports of anti-war demonstrations involving screaming at, waving fists at, and making obscene gestures at, although not spitting at, the returning GIS are expressions of aggression that I heard from a number of different people who had been present on the scene. And I heard reports of these incidents very shortly after the time they occurred, and continued to hear these incidents alluded to by others who had been present, in the years immediately following.
I heard about these from different people in different settings.