Try Not to Turn On To/Things that Upset You

Vietnam: The Price of Uncritical Thinking

When I was in college, in 1968, I found myself standing in a bank line with one of my favorite professors, Robert Jay, the anthropologist.  I told him I thought the war in Vietnam would never end. It would just go on and on, at higher and lower volume, until  my own kids, if I ever had any, were fighting over there, too.  My brother, a physician, was already on his way over and any able bodied American male eventually would exhaust his exemptions and find his way on a plane bound for Saigon and parts beyond. It seemed to affect our family without affecting any of our neighbors, back home. For most people, it seemed, just letting it happen, just accepting the idea that we were at war to "defend freedom" seemed to be enough to not get involved, or to embrace ideas which were clearly bogus, like the idea we were over there because the Vietnamese people wanted us there. 

Professor Jay shook his head slowly, "No," he said.  "Eventually, when enough boys from enough small towns die, when enough mothers have to actually face the prospect of losing their own sons, then those parents will actually start thinking, and  the war will end."

As it turned out, he was correct, although it took seven more years for that to happen.

Until then, the uncritical thinkers of America allowed the war to grind on, to consume more lives, American and Vietnamese.  And now, more than forty years later, we still have uncritical thinkers who provide the ballast for the American ship of state. We have people who want to believe Romney is a "businessman" so he will know what to do for the economy, and they believe Paul Ryan is trying to save Medicare by destroying it.

Today, is my last day wandering the roads of Hampton, New Hampshire in pursuit of voters.  As I have previously mentioned, many roads, and most intersections,  in Hampton have no street signs, and now I realize many homes have no visible address. It is as if we live in a village of Hobbits, where addresses and names on homes are considered somehow undesirable.

How the fire department or the police ever finds a home in trouble, I have no idea. 

Outside of one home a deer was strung up by its neck, dangling from a limb, and the home behind it had no address. Neither the deer nor the home was contained on my computer sheets, which directed me to the addresses of likely Democratic voters.

News is that 38,000 more Republicans than Democrats have voted early in Colorado, giving Romney, presumably,  a 38,000 vote lead in that swing state-- pretty depressing.  Florida has similar numbers, apparently.  Voters in likely Democratic strongholds in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have been scattered by Sandy, rendered powerless and likely Obama will not get those votes.

So, two days before the election, things are not looking good. It may take another four, or eight years before things get uncomfortable enough for enough Americans to start thinking critically to ask how we lost Medicare and Social Security and how abortion became, once again, illegal and how the upper 1% became the upper 1/4% and how school prayer become legal again and how gay marriage became illegal, and how all those immigrant kids got deported when they didn' t self deport and how the Tea Party and the Free Staters came to power. 

And we may be asking how sending an army of American boys and girls to fight in Iran happened, and how that became another fight to protect our freedom.