{"id":4376,"date":"2016-05-12T09:40:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-12T16:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=4376"},"modified":"2016-12-29T22:43:13","modified_gmt":"2016-12-30T05:43:13","slug":"big-birthday-memory-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/12\/big-birthday-memory-17\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Birthday Memory #17: They Will Campaign Against Us Until We’re All Dead – and Maybe After"},"content":{"rendered":"

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from\u00a0July 9, 2008<\/em><\/p>\n

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From the day Richard Nixon was nominated<\/a> in 1968 until Tuesday afternoon, forty years<\/em> later, when John McCain began running this \u201cLove\u201d commercial, Republicans have been running against us.\u00a0 All of us who share a history of opposing the Vietnam war and working to elect an anti-war<\/a> president<\/a>.\u00a0 Against everything we ever were, believed, dreamed, voted for, marched against, volunteered to change, spoke about, created, sang, wrote, painted, sculpted or said to one another on the subway or the campus or anyplace else from preschool parent nights to Seders to the line at the supermarket.<\/p>\n

How is it possible that what we tried to do is still the last best hope to elect a Republican?\u00a0 They used it against John Kerry<\/a>.\u00a0 They used it against Max Cleland<\/a>.\u00a0 They did it every time (well, almost) they were losing policy battles in the Clinton years.\u00a0 They called CSPAN and said unspeakable things.\u00a0 \u00a0And now they are using the history of people my side of sixty to run against a man who was, if my math is right, seven years old during this notorious \u201csummer of love\u201d which \u2013 I might add, had nothing to do with those of us working to end the war.\u00a0 In fact, there were two strands of rebellion in those years.\u00a0 The Summer of Love<\/a>\/Woodstock<\/a> folks and the political, anti-war activists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Leary_nyt_cropped_2\"<\/a>At the 1967 National Student Association<\/a> Convention in Maryland, I saw a room full of students boo\u00a0Timothy Leary <\/a>off the stage, literally.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t want to \u201cturn on, tune in, drop out\u201d we wanted to organize against the war.\u00a0 \u00a0The anti-war movement was not a party.\u00a0 I know that\u2019s not a bulletin but it is so hard to see all of us reduced to a single mistaken stereotype.\u00a0 Those who chose to find a personal solution weren\u2019t nuts; communes and home-made bread were a lot more immediate gratification than march after march, teach-in after teach-in, speech after speech.\u00a0 \u201cIf you\u2019re goin\u2019 to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.\u201d\u00a0 Tempting, romantic \u2013 and not us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even more painful is the fact that the cultural and political divide is still so intense that research (I assume) told the McCain guys that this commercial would work.\u00a0 That our patriotic, committed efforts to change our country\u2019s path, and the cultural alienation that drove others toward the streets of San Francisco, combine to become a stronger motivator than all the desperate issues we face today, this<\/em> side of those 40 years.\u00a0 Perhaps even worse, these Bush years have dismantled so many of the successes we did have, so that in addition to facing, yet again, this smear against the activism of 1968 (and I repeat, that wasforty years<\/em> ago \u2014 longer than most of the bloggers I know have been alive) there\u2019s the awareness of what we did that has been undone.<\/p>\n

I need to say here that I grew up on the shores of the Monongehela River in Pittsburgh and my classmates were kids who mostly went into
\nthe steel mills or the Army after high school.\u00a0 I knew plenty of supporters of the war. \u00a0I went to prom and hung out at the Dairy Queen with them.\u00a0 But it never occurred to me to\u00a0demonize them, to hold against them their definition of patriotism.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not writing off or looking down upon those who did support the war; I\u2019m saying that this cynical, craven abuse of the devotion of people on
\nboth sides to the future of their country is reprehensible and\u00a0precisely the kind of behavior that has broken the hearts of so many Americans, on those both sides of the political spectrum, who just want their candidates to lead us in hope for what our country can be, not defame others whose dreams aren\u2019t quite the same as theirs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from\u00a0July 9, 2008 From the day Richard Nixon was nominated in 1968 until Tuesday afternoon, forty years later, when John McCain began running this \u201cLove\u201d commercial, Republicans have been running against us.\u00a0 All … Continue reading Big Birthday Memory #17: They Will Campaign Against Us Until We’re All Dead – and Maybe After<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,3799,3800,3,4,3798,3801,6,27,9],"tags":[3413,1393,107,1383,2374,3415,1396,1389,1119,3414,1392,1390,1388,753,21,1074,1267,1391,1395,1394,3844],"class_list":["post-4376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-3799","category-3800","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-big-birthday","category-big-birthday-70-1946-2016","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-politics","tag-3413","tag-anti-war-march","tag-baby-boom-2","tag-barak-obama","tag-culture-2","tag-current-affairs","tag-drop-out","tag-john-kerry","tag-john-mccain","tag-life","tag-march","tag-max-cleland","tag-national-student-association","tag-patriotism","tag-politics-2","tag-presidential-election","tag-summer-of-love","tag-timothy-leary","tag-tune-in","tag-turn-on","tag-vietnam-war-edit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-18A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4376"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4730,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions\/4730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}