Three simple words that can ask two entirely different questions. There is a certain indifference that resonates from the question,"So what, if?" Maybe the question: So, what if!? offers better and more positive possibilities for tomorrow.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The John Birch Society...

co-sponsored CPAC 2010?

I am one of those children of the sixties, they talk about.   No, I didn't burn my bra, if that's what you are wondering.  In fact, I probably fell under the heading of "respectable" life style.  I got married, then got pregnant and pregnant and pregnant.  We put our children's needs above our own.  Soccer, cleats and shin guards, traveling team dues and long weekend trips as far as Canada so that they could play, gymnastics and dance, coaching softball in the summer, neighborhood newspaper routes, girl scouts, basketball shoes, camp and miles of driving on icy Indiana roads to watch games, cheer leading camp, performing jazz choir dresses and shoes.  It was all really very wonderful --tiring, but wonderful and worth it.

Of course, having been married in LA County, California, we knew, my ex husband and I, that our marriage had only a 50-50 chance of survival.  And so, although it made it through 100% of my children's' childhoods, it was destined to bite the dust at some point, and it did.

What, in the hell is this woman talking about?

Well, only this.  I didn't burn any of my bras.  I was never a part of any college campus protests, but I fully understood, and held as my own, the "flower power" philosophy.

Two boys from the crowd that I ran with after high school died in Vietnam.  They were best friends and I considered them both friends of mine.  But back then, you see, there was something called "the draft."

These two boys didn't just disappear into some National Guard unit, somewhere, they disappeared forever.

Not everyone who I knew that went to Vietnam died.  I knew a few others.  One I actually dated before he went--but when he returned home, he wasn't the same boy that I had dated.  Another was married to a friend of mine from high school.  When he came back, she discovered the same phenomenon--he wasn't the young man that she had married.  Then there was my cousin's husband.  He was a Marine.  When he came home, he was ready and eager to go back--it was his duty.

Years after the fall of Saigon, I happened to be in a position to see first-hand another Vietnam veteran.  He was going through the court system at the time and, from all appearances, had a personal pendulum that swung back and forth between uncontrolled flash backs and alcoholism.  But, like I say, he was being well cared for by the county court system.

But I digress.  I suggested that this post would be about The John Birch Society's co-sponsorship of CPAC, didn't I?  Sorry, but if you will indulge me for just another minute or so, there are a few more tidbits I feel compelled to add. 

Back in the olden days, a dear relative of mine and her husband tagged me along on vacation with them a few times.  Two of those trips were to Florida.  That was during the times when life's necessities, like rest rooms and drinks of water, were still color coded.  I remember the first time I ever saw a sign posted above a water fountain:  Whites only--is what it said.  As a teenager, I saw that world begin to crumble.  I watched it begin to  play out on our black and white television--it was on that same television, by the way, which a few years later, I saw depicted, and heard disclosed,  a sanitized version of the most recent happenings in Vietnam-- and the most recent tallies of casualties and deaths.

During these same times, there were organizations whose names were not to be mentioned in polite company.  It was the folk song writers and musicians that provided , through their songs, cliff note versions of their identities and their aimed purposes.  The John Birch Society was one of them:

The Chad Mitchell Trio sang about them in 1962: 



And, then there was Bob Dylan:



Who also wrote and sang these words:



So here we are.  CPAC, without raising so much as an eyebrow, welcomes The John Birch Society as a co-sponsor.  My, my, my.  Like my mother used to say, "You're known by the company you keep!"

Hopefully, there is a budding young singer/songwriter out there who could put those words to good use and start a "revolution"--one quite different from the one that the teabaggers are trying to start.  Something along the lines of:

  

I've been wondering for a while, now, what would happen if we all dug out our old cassette tapes or even bought new CDs of 1960s Protest Music, slipped them into our car tape or CD players, turned them up full blast and rolled down the car windows and up and down every street in America? 

Would people get the message?

Would the far right religious militarists and neo cons, who persist in opining that Iranian should probably be America's  next "mission from God,"  finally find that they were wasting their breath--because this song had become the unofficial national anthem?

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