My third impeachment is really different from the others
(CNN)Friday,
November 15 will go down in history as day two of the public
impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump, but it also happens to
be the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest mass demonstrations
against the Vietnam War — the Moratorium March on Washington.
More than 500,000 young,
antiwar demonstrators flooded the streets of Washington in the largest
ever single peace protest in American history at the time. It seemed as
if all of America's youth had poured into the city to personally send
the message of "Hell no, we won't go" to President Richard Nixon.
Clara Bingham
The Moratorium March on Washington came a month after the October 15 Peace Moratorium when 2 million people
in cities and towns across the country took the day off to recite the
names of the war dead, hold teach-ins and vigils, and march. Life
magazine described it as "the largest expression of public dissent ever
seen in this country." America was on a cliff's edge of a revolution.
Thousands took to the streets, traveled the country, organized, gave
speeches, and disrupted their everyday lives for many years to stop a
war that they believed was unjust.
The
sheer brawn required to organize the two moratoriums in an age before
cell phones and the web was nothing short of heroic. The speakers
included senators like George McGovern and famous activists like Coretta
Scott King but the music by Peter, Paul, and Mary, Richie Havens, Joan
Baez, Pete Seeger and the cast of Hair is what everyone listened to.
I
can't help but think of the historic parallels. We had a madman in the
White House then, and an even madder one now. We had a corrupt President
who had hired thugs to spy on his Democratic opponents then, we now
have a corrupt President who has asked a foreign country to sabotage his
political opponent. Of course, the ravages of the bloody, unwinnable
war and the draft that threatened the lives of more than 20 million
young men who were eligible to be drafted turned out to be the ultimate
motivational tool. There's nothing like looking death in the eye to spur
on political action. In 1969 and 1970 alone, nearly 18,000 American soldiers were killed.
We
don't have a draft today precisely because of the Vietnam mass
protests, but the Trump administration has given us plenty of reasons to
take to the streets. How about pulling out of the Paris climate accord
and deregulating emissions standards? How about Trump's violent rhetoric
and embrace of the NRA's policies
in the face of an epidemic of gun violence? How about fencing
immigrants in cage-like enclosures and separating migrant parents from
their children? And let us not forget Trump's pledge to roll back abortion rights.
Trump's
blatant racism alone — telling congresswomen of color to "go back to
where they come from" and saying that there were "very fine people on
both sides" during the white nationalist protest and counterprotest in
Charlottesville that left one woman dead — is reason enough for
thousands to raise hell in front of the White House for months on end.
Yet, after the success of the enormous January 2017 Women's March, which had more than 1 million protesters
in Washington, DC, much of the resistance on the streets has fizzled.
With some noteworthy exceptions for protests organized by young gun
control and climate activists, protest has gone indoors: most of us feel
like we're making a difference with the click of a tweet, a re-tweet, a
like on Instagram, or joining a Facebook group. We whine and complain
about the state of our broken government and our venal President in the
comfort of our own homes.
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But
one thing we do know is that crowd size matters to President Trump.
Taunting him outside his door would surely provoke him. On November 15,
1969, Nixon claimed
that he spent the afternoon watching football, but he paid attention to
the protest. He may have publicly defied the rebellious youth movement
and embraced the "Silent Majority," but historians have learned that
the antiwar movement made a difference and forced Nixon to scale back
his plans to escalate the war.
To give a sense of the extent of
the wholesale national rebellion in 1969, by the next year, more than
3,000 draft resisters were incarcerated in US prisons and countless men
had deserted the armed forces, many fleeing to foreign countries like
Canada and Sweden. The late Tom Hayden wrote, "The 1965-75 peace
movement reached a scale which threatened the foundations of the
American social order, making it an inspirational model for future
social movements and a nightmare which elites ever since have hoped to
wipe from memory."
On Friday, we should remember the moratorium marches, and take notes.
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