I remember May 1970. Ten thousand people were with me on the New Haven green to protest the Vietnam War and the trial of Bobby Seale, a Black Panther leader.
Things came to a head when in the middle of the demonstration when President Richard Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia. The next day National Guardsmen at Kent State retreated to a knoll away from advancing protesters when they suddenly wheeled and fired a volley into the crowd. Four people were dead. The headlines the next day proclaimed that “The war had come home.”
When I look at the picture from Minnesota, the tear gas, the masks, and the brutality, I get the feeling that it is all happening again. Except that this is different. The war that people are protesting is not in Asia but in American cities.
Where there is a similarity is in the militarization of our culture that has made the shooting of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti possible. The agents dressed as though they were in Fallujah instead of Minneapolis may well have served in our forever wars and been shaped by that experience. Even if they are too young to have experienced war firsthand, they grew up during a century that began with a terrorist tragedy and morphed into a security state. In their parents’ basements they played Call of Duty and other simulated war games that echoed the real fires burning overseas.
A nation that stays too long at war must accept the effect that it has not only on the veterans of that war, but on the general population. Now we have a malignant president who is all too eager to unleash that violence on his own people. He is staging a theater of cruelty in Minneapolis to demonstrate who is and who is not a real American.
When Lincoln faced the prospect of real Civil War, he appealed to the southern states in his first inaugural address.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely, they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
What angels are waiting for us today?
David Parrella lives in Buckland.