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This lingering debate about stale issues is not a matter of boomers dominating our national dialog, but rather derives from the fundamental failure of we, as Americans, to reach a resolution on anything of great importance. This, in turn, is a by product of democracy and our inflated notions of what “personal opinion” means and should mean. How many times do you hear in conversation, “We’ll, everyone is entitled to his own opinion”? It means, at base, nothing, but it is part of our national consciousness of what it means to be an American. Are we all entitled to be fools? Are we entitled to embrace retorgrade ideas long after the world has moved on? Yes, unfortunately.
To a large segment of the population, Vietnam was a disgraceful attempt by one of the most powerful nations in the world to impose its will on one of the most backward, in a technological and economic sense. We picked up, after all, where French colonists had stopped and continued, for many long years, to fight the war in their stead. To these Americans, we were intervening not to stop communism, but to create a stalemate in what was a civil war for the national destiny of Vietnam.
While hundreds of thousands marched in the streets, the rest of the nation went about its ordinary business, perhaps seething with anger from time to time, especially when paid agents of the Federal government and others created a street theater of violence to make it appear that the war protesters were lawless haters of their own country. (Some were, most weren’t. Many were patriots facing one of the most difficult choices, dissent against their nation’s war.)
Now, just about everyone agrees that Vietnam was, to some degree, a mistake. But what kind of mistake? Was the obligation the same on young men being forced into the military the same high obligation faced during an actual, vital threat to our nation, such as WW II? Was it honorable to seek not to kill and die in a war where even our own national leaders did not agree and one that was started by the false information of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution? Should you willingly kill, or die, for your country, even if the war was wrong? If so, when would such an obligation end?
Nothing was settled when that war came to an end. There was a sense of national exhaustion, combined with the aftermath of Watergate, that turned as quickly away from those divisive times as possible. In a few short years, it was as though it all had never happened. By 1980, five years after the withdrawal from Vietnam, America elected a president who told people everything was not merely fine in America, it was wonderful, a new day dawning.
Ah, yes, civil rights. From 1865 onward, the south has never accepted the imposition of the national will in matters of race. Why should they stop resisting now? When Virginia recently stirred major controversy with a Civil War history month, old line Virginians were all over local television news saying that the Civil War settled nothing but the fact that the south would remain in the Union. As the saying goes, that war is not only not history, it isn’t even in the past. Hey, we have our own opinion, right?, even if the whole of the national government and the US Constitution says it is wrong.
We needed a national reconciliation council on both of these major issues in the wake of the upheavals of the late 1960s and into the 1970s. We needed something like what happened in South Africa after apartheid. We didn’t get it and we won’t get it, in part because it is too valuable to politicians to keep fanning those flames of resentment in the hope of keeping their voting blocks angry and together in opposition to progress.
Was the Vietnam war wrong? The question was too difficult to address by government officials after the war, because over 50,000 of our young men, and some young women, had died there. Do you want to be the one telling a parent that their son died without good reason? We had also spent billions and dragged our national prestige around the world through the mud, even though other governments had done far worse with less justification.
Who would be the one to, finally, condemn the southern states for 150 years of opposing the basic freedoms of our Constitution in the name of their economic and political needs? Who would be the one who would say, yes, we need to establish a fund, bigger than that which went to AIG and the investment banks, to try to right the wrongs of not just slavery, but virtual slavery and economic and social oppression for a hundred years after the Civil War? This job, I fear, is just too large for us to face, so we address it in little increments, such as the southern states have done in recent years by apologizing, somewhat late, for slavery. Apologize and move on, without addressing the real, underlying issues that remain.
These matters resound to this day because they are part of the American soul. It is not, as Obama and some of his aides suggested during the ’08 campaign, a matter of adolescence extended far too long by a generation too wounded, and too happy fighting, to let go. That was simply wrong. We are not over Vietnam and the civil rights struggles because we have not settled the matters raised by those traumatic times As a nation, we haven’t faced up to our task of putting what should be settled matters to rest with a general consensus view of what transpired. If we slog forward and keeping pushing back, we will have to face the same issues, all over again, at a future date when the price is even much higher than it is now.
Doug Terry
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