Boomers don’t protest too much
In a “Star Trek” episode titled “A Taste of Armageddon,” warring aliens from two highly evolved cultures battle one another by computer. When one side loses a battle, the simulated battle deaths are calculated and then an equal number of real citizens are killed in disintegration chambers.
On Jan. 10, when President Bush explained why he wanted to send more troops to Iraq, I remembered the “Star Trek” episode from 1967. The moral of that episode was this: When you separate the mind of war from its flesh-and-blood reality, things really disintegrate.
After Bush’s announcement, I expected that the American people would hit the streets in protest. A lot of us –70 percent, according to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll – are against the proposed surge that might mean 20,000 additional young men and women serving in Iraq.
But protests have been spotty nationwide. A headline in Friday’s Christian Science Monitor asked: “Whither all the war protesters?”
Spokane’s Peace and Justice Action League staged a protest a week ago Saturday. Its intent was to “remember and protest the fifth anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo as America’s own torture chamber.”
I planned to attend and observe the protest. (We Spokesman-Review staffers cannot participate in marches.) But when Saturday morning arrived, I was tired. It had been a busy workweek. And the same day Bush announced his surge, our washing machine died. The new one arrived a day later, and I was anxious to catch up on my laundry. Weary and obsessed with laundry – two lame excuses.
My entire generation of baby boomers, I fear, has become lazy and lame in the protest department. A good number of us voted for Democrats in the last election, hoping they might be able to end the madness in Iraq. This was action of some sort, but nothing like the marches we did in the past.
The Vietnam protests were numerous and vigorous, because we were young and filled with righteous energy. Now we protest-generation boomers are in our 50s and 60s. We take naps on weekends and brag about it.
I talked this week to Rusty Nelson of the Peace and Justice Action League. He and his wife, Nancy, have been super protesters for years. I confessed my laziness and asked his opinion of my fellow boomers who protest in words against the surge but don’t do much about it in action.
Nelson told me that about 40 people showed up at the Saturday protest. The group walked from the STA Plaza to River Park Square. Some of the protesters, representing the prisoners of Guantanamo, wore orange jumpsuits. Others wore black hoods. They were all kicked out of River Park Square.
Nelson, 62, isn’t as judgmental as I am about the boomers. He said people are busy, and they must choose their battles.
“Sometimes it just doesn’t work out” for people to protest, he said. But that didn’t stop the Nelsons or the 40 protesters who did show up. They put me to shame.
The original “Star Trek” episode aired as opposition to the war in Vietnam was revving up. But it would take eight more years for Americans to exit that war. And what a mess it all turned out to be.
I can’t imagine another eight years in Iraq. But it could happen because the war in Iraq, though painful to the intellect, is not flesh-and-blood painful to the vast majority of Americans.
The troops and their families are sacrificing, yes, but like those aliens in “Star Trek,” most of the rest of us can separate the reality of that bloody war over there from our daily lives here. Daily lives filled with weariness, laundry and just a tiny hint of Armageddon.