the problem is that those amazing people who made the civil rights agenda happen in the 60's were not heros, they were doing simply what they thought they should be doing.
the problem is that those amazing people who made the civil rights agenda happen in the 60's were not heros, they were doing simply what they thought they should be doing.
It was not I who suggested they were manufactured. I haven't looked back to see who it was made that or a similar statement. I was speaking with tongue in cheek - Whatever that is.
The Diane Rehm Show
Monday, January 13, 2003
10:00 - Anti-War Movement
http://www.wamu.org/dr/
There have been many good guys that have helped minorities in the past. I'd like to share this story, because he is one of the heroes of America. When President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 to incarcerate all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, Governor Carr of Colorado told the Japanese Americans we were welcome to come to his state at personal sacrifice. Needless to say, he lost the subsequent election, but about fifteen years ago, the Japanese American Community built a memorial to Governor Carr in Denver. c.i.
C.I.
I didn't know that story.
I have decided this post may be wrong for the thread.
I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die-Rag
Country Joe & The Fish
Well, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
Yeah, he's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Yeah, come on Wall Street, don't be slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of its trade,
But just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Cong.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Well, come on generals, let's move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Now you can go out and get those reds
'Cause the only good commie is the one that's dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, and don't hesitate
To send your sons off before it's too late.
And you can be the first ones in your block
To have your boy come home in a box.
And it's one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Those Three Are On My Mind
Harry Belafonte
I think of Andy in the cold wet clay
Those three are on my mind
With his comrades down beside him
On that brutal day
Those three are on my mind
There lays young James in his final pain
Those three are on my mind
So I ask the killers can you see those three again
Those three are on my mind
I see dark eyed Michael
With his dark eyed bride
Those three are on my mind
And three proud mothers
Weeping side by side
Those three are on my mind
But I'm grieving yet
And for some the sky is bright
I cannot give up hoping
For a morning light
So I ask the killers do you sleep at night
Those three are on my mind
I see tin roof shanties
Where my brothers live
Those three are on my mind
And the little burnt out churches
Where they sing we forgive
Those three are on my mind
I know of Tom paints water tree
I know the price of liberty
Now I ask the question that is deep inside of me
Did they also burn the courthouse
When they killed those three
Those three are on my mind
Those three are on my mind
Those three are on my mind
sweetcomplication
I am such an avid fan of Belafonte. He has been out there for so long. Even in his seventies he continues to do more than many other people.
The greatest Civil Rights/Peace move that could be made today is the defeat of the Bush administration and the returning of America to the people. Right now the corporations and neocons think they own it and we are supposedly there to serve as willing bots/fodder to their machine. The Bush administration embodies that strategy more than anyone since before WWII.
edgar, I would only make one correction to your post: GWBush and his neocons taking over our country is the first time in its 200 year history. He has sent our men and women to die for his corporate buddies. It's outright disgusting.
I contend that this country is very much as it was before and during the Hoover administration. We did not succumb to the social advances you and I grew up with until Roosevelt instituted his New Deal.
CI
I see this thread on a2k as highlighting my view, in part.
Bush spoils system.
"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be."
Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, 31 March 1968
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/
I chose this, my favorite thread, to make my 20,000th post. I want to underscore the statement by Martin Luther King, quoted immediately above. This thread is a sort of revival of one run be me and Joanne Dorel on Abuzz, right before we came over to Able2Know. I want to thank all of you who participated and also Craven for giving us the opportunity.
My impression of the so called peace movement is of a self-indulgent generation addicted to drugs and easy answers, but very adverse to constructive work or personal accountability. Not much there that looks admirable to me even in retrospect.
My most memorable direct contact with such advocates was when they dropped garbage and worse on the decks of our carriers sailing out of the Golden Gate for tours of duty in WestPac and the Gulf of Tonkin. They didn't appear so noble to us then.
I have memories of this, but nostalgia is not the word for them.
They were a diverse mix of people. Just as I am sure you didn't create a massacer of innocent villagers over there like William Calley did, we didn't all do those things you accuse us of. We could go tit for tat over and over. My side did this; your side did that. In the end it proves only partisanship.
I didn't accuse you or anyone of anything. I did observe the insulting banners hung from the Golden gate bridge and the offal and garbade dropped on us as we passed under., Happily their aim and windage corrections wasn't that good and much of the material missed us, but enough of it hit for us to know what it was.
War is indeed a terrible thing and one shouldn't indulge in it either lightlly or to feed the vanity of self-proclaimed intellectual strategists. However it was these people in the Democrat Kennedy and Johnson administrations who got us into this war. The sad fact was they lacked the wisdom and the balls to get us through it successfully, wasting many lives, American and Vietnamese in the process.
My strong impression was that the principal motivating factor on college campuses was the draft, and not any altruistic opposition to war. It was all very sophomoric and all quite futile. The only demonstrable result of our political loss to the North Vietnamese Communists and subsequent abandonment of the Government of South Vietnam, was the sacrifice of the Vietnamese people to a generation of poverty and tyranny under a very backward and oppressive regime. Apart from the PRK and Myanmar (Burma) also ruled by authoritarian regimes, Vietnam and Cambodia are the poorest and most backward nations in Asia. So much for the hugh-minded agrarian reformers that this misguided and pampered generation of self-indulgent Americans imagined were leading the opposition in Vietnam.
Again, I say, there were differing reasons, as there were differing people on both sides. Some who went to war didn't want to go, but felt they could not disobey. For them, the morality or lack of it was not the question. Obeying orders was. Others believed in it so strongly they reupped to go again. My brother refused to be sent because "I'm not going to fight somebody else's war." I protested it on grounds of morality. Some refused to go because they didn't want to be killed. You are not accusing anyone, but you are accusing people anyway. Kennedy and Johnson had the balls to start a war, but couldn't win it. Nixon expanded the war, having balls the size of watermellons, and got that many more needlessly killed. In no way was he better on the question of the war than Johnson. Only difference, Johnson came to recognize the futility and left office with the situation such that his successor could end the fighting. Nixon's "secret plan to end the war" was to bomb them into submission, among other things and he ignored Johnson's moves. Too bad they didn't remove him from office his first year.
We had been "bombing them into submission for four years under Johnson, The problem was we were bombing the wrong things. Johnson MacNamara and the self-styled "intellectuals" running the show refused to allow us to bomb surface-to-air missiles being unloaded from Soviet Ships in Haiphong, or to simply close the harbor by mining it - or even to bomb the missiles in various central locations where they were being assembled.. Instead we were directed to wait until the missiles were assembled and operational, and then directed to attack them - costing us hundreds of aircraft, many lives and prisioners. Nixon quickly closed the port of Haiphong by mining it and in a brief intensive bombing campaign exhausted the air defenses around Hanoi - in the last days we could fly anywhere at will without much opposition. Sadly, by then we had already lost the political war on the streets and campuses of the United States. A generation of unfortunate Vietnamese have paid the price for that madness.
