Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The email from the radio station asked that I contact one of the hosts of a program. That program seems to be on the political left. I searched for information about the program and my instincts were right, but why the hesitation that finally gave way to contacting the host who had written the email?
Even with the constraints on left writing, the hosts of the program had located several articles I had contributed to CounterPunch and wanted to hear more. I talked about appearing on the program with a family member and wrote to a fellow leftist, who I communicate with on Facebook, and that person was more than supportive of a potential interview.
But still the nagging question lurking in the background about how far to go in a rightwing society standing more publicly than taking to the streets and writing.
Countering a war that ended long ago doesn’t seem to be much of a challenge these days, but my personal battle went on for so many years and my work in the very conservative environment of public education was apparent. During the height of the Nuclear Freeze Movement, a lawyer who I respected said that it would be a major mistake for me to risk arrest during protests at the nuclear submarine production facility in New London, Connecticut. There is a clause in many teacher contracts which can be used to fire a teacher for acting in a way that violates community standards. I don’t know if the school department I worked for would have used that tactic, but since I was outspoken about my rights, took part in political action through protest, and supported the rights of other teachers in that district, it’s a safe bet that some kind of sanctions would have been used if I stepped out of line and stood against nuclear proliferation, an issue that begs action now as it did then. I was one of two so-called breadwinners in our household and kids going hungry is not something I wished to entertain. The Trident submarine, then produced in Connecticut is a doomsday device, as are all parts of nuclear bomb delivery systems, the others through ground-based missiles and bombers carrying nuclear weapons. We are now on a hair trigger for nuclear war because of the wars in Ukraine and the Palestinian Territories and the sense of urgency that was apparent in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis seems to have vanished in the endless saber-rattling on the part of the US and its allies.
The equally perilous reality of environmental disaster is ever-present. The greed of the fossil fuel economy is unsurpassed in its disregard for all species.
Around the same time as the Nuclear Freeze Movement, the hostage crisis in Iran flared up. I trained as a draft registration counselor aware that advising or encouraging young men who met with me to refuse to register for the draft could have been dangerous. When the opportunity came for publicizing the counseling, I stood back. That counseling ended up being draft registration encouragement. The best that could be done without some risk was to provide information about how to develop a case for conscientious objector status should a military draft actually take place, which it didn’t. What the hostage crisis did do was to heighten militarism in the US and create the climate for Reagan’s low-intensity wars and George H.W. Bush’s full-blown war in Iraq (Gulf War 1991). The Vietnam Syndrome would soon die. Nowhere in the hostage crisis was there any discussion about the fact that the US had orchestrated a coup in Iran in 1953, eliminated a democratically elected government, and ushered in decades of US-supported repression there.
Fast forward to the attacks in September 2001, which created a war frenzy not seen since the December 1941 attack in Pearl Harbor. Without a discussion of the issues that created a monster like Bin Laden, the facts on the ground resulted in 20 years of endless wars, including wars for regime change in places such as Libya, Syria, and Iraq. I became involved in an antiwar effort that could not counter the enormous juggernaut that led to a permanent active war stance that continues today. There were death threats against those who opposed an open-ended war in Afghanistan and the wars that followed in the Middle East. The leaders and advisors of our efforts against war finally realized how futile it was to counter war in the face of the war frenzy and we folded up our tents and disappeared.
While the antiwar group did function, however, we did host a few panel discussions on issues surrounding the war in Afghanistan and once again I refrained from participating on a panel of war resisters. I had learned the lesson well of the limits of action I was willing to take. When a family member removed a US flag from our mailbox during the first Gulf War, we awoke the next day to find masses of yellow ribbons hanging from trees on our property. The eradication of the Vietnam Syndrome, the hesitancy of people in the US to support foreign wars, could not have been more apparent.
As a fellow protester from California said, they, the majority, find out about a person and hold you to account for your points of view and actions. Just who, then, is the Bill of Rights meant to protect, the well-ensconced critic of the system or the bold protester? Are there even any more of the former? The mass media is now a cheerleader for endless wars!
In the community where I now live in the so-called bluest of blue states, I learned quickly about intolerance. There are some people who don’t like anyone different from themselves. I made the grave mistake of asking a driver of a massive truck that traveled on a driveway bordering my driveway to please consider slowing down on his frequent runs. The response was swift. The driver was the son of a local town official and another town official took on the role of harassing my family in various ways that continue today. That official told me I was “known to the police,” which is a chilling indictment in a society moving to the right. The local government here is authoritarian despite the fact that most people are at least in voting behavior liberal, whatever that means now.
Speaking out can harm employment. Both the Red Scare and McCarthyism proved that. I published several articles in Humanist Magazine in the early 1990s. At the time, I was an adjunct faculty member at my alma mater. That job was not my main source of employment. After teaching there for six years, I was told that I would not be rehired for the next fall semester. The reason given was that the school would assign my course to a full-time faculty member. A fellow faculty member and friend told me that it was my writing about religion and human rights that had angered the school’s administration. My friend was a successful fiction writer in addition to his faculty position. At no time during his tenure at the school was he ever adequately recognized for his many publications. He had married a former student well after that person had taken a course he taught, but that was enough to get the attention of the administration that refused to acknowledge his many accomplishments.
