Marching with the Moratorium
November 15, 1969. This was it. the big one. On the front page of The Washington Post, Nicholas Von Hoffman (who would later be fired for calling Richard Nixon a "dead mouse on the kitchen floor," published a column advising residents of D.C. that they had nothing to fear from the protesters, that they were peaceful and were coming to the city to assert their legal right to protest openly. This was in the days before the Metro made it possible to get into and out of Washington easily and Linda and I, with the twins, used my deep blue VW to get to the Mall. It was exciting, electric. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young people were walking everywhere, looking for the start point for the march.
On November 9th, a week before the Moratorium, The New York Times had published a petition signed by 1,365 active-duty servicemen calling for the end of the war. If you've been reading this blog for a whole, you'll recall that Don and I signed it when we were down in Fayetteville, NC, to participate in a march sponsored by GI's United Against the War. In a small chapbook of my essays published almost 25 years after that advertisement appeared, I wrote that having my name on that list of active-duty servicemen was one of the times my name had been in print that I am most proud of. That remains true.
The march on November 15th was one of the last times I was able to see Linda and the kids (more about that later). We all held hands and marched in the middle of a very peaceful half a million person throng, right down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. When we got to the White House, the people on the stage were relatively irrelevant: big names associating themselves with the march. BFD. Who cares that they were there. They simply were not needed. The 500,000 of us would have been there with or without them. I would have preferred that they simply walk along with us, but some people cannot resist a photo-op.
As we walked past the White House, Linda and I each lifted one of the kids onto our shoulders so they could see. Nixon would say, later that day, something to the effect that it was good to see young Americans exercising their right but that it would not matter in his pursuit of the war.
Damn that was fun! For those of you who think protesting against wars or against injustice should be a deadly serious thing to do, I would ask why they do it in the first place. When you put yourself out there, even in a crowd of half a million, you should really enjoy what you’re doing. I hope all those Egyptians out in Tahrir Square had a hell of a good time as they brought Mubarak down. I saw photos of smiling laughing Czechs during the Velvet Revolution and even during the Prague Spring before it was crushed. I’ll bet the Chinese in Tien An Men Square were mostly happy. That’s just how it ought to be. People sacrificed beach balls and Frisbees, sang and shouted. Acting on your convictions should not cause frowns, only laughs!
Not too long ago, I wrote an appreciation of the work of Elena Poniatowska in writing about the student strikes in Mexico City in 1968. Here’s what she said:
[The novelist] Luis Gonzalez de Alba remembered how the halls of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters were crammed full; how buses were used as improvised pulpits; the return of the [student] brigades after the protest marches, when boys and girls would set themselves to folding banners like sheets, storing placards…then climbing aboard their already crowded school buses to return to guard duty on the rooftops; the sandwich at three or four in the morning, the tacos at a taqueria on Insurgentes Avenue, the hot coffee, the laughter, the happiness that brings triumph…
That’s how it is. People who think protesters should be deadly serious, poker-faced, “boring,” don’t bother me. I just think they should re-examine what they are doing and why.
The down side of all that for me was that the National Security Agency finally read the petition in The Times. It was organized to help them locate those of us who signed. Why? To confirm that the signatures were valid. There’s been a petition, fairly recently, apparently signed by active-duty soldiers to oppose the wars in the Middle East, but they are not transparent enough and people don’t really believe active-duty servicemen signed it. Our petition was neatly organized, just to avoid that kind of uncertainty, into the posts and bases where we served. Under "Fort Meade, Maryland," home of NSA: "Henry P. Hall."
What happened as a result of that will wait for the next blog post. But on that day, I was deliriously happy, still in love, surrounded by people who agreed with me. There may have been a VC flag around, but I didn’t see it. There were people with various causes marching, but all of those people were also against the war, and I pretty much supported their causes. It was fun! I was happy! Linda was happy! And we by damn marched against that war.
Whether we accomplished anything or not is irrelevant.
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