Personal Reflections of an Antiwar Activist on Visiting Vietnam in 2017

While I can’t claim to have experienced the war our soldiers experienced, the U.S. war in Vietnam had a profound and painful impact on my life.  I grew up in the shadow of the glorified role played by the United States in World War II.  I embraced that role and participated in Memorial Day marches and ceremonies as a young Boy Scout.

                When I first attended Oberlin College as a freshman in 1964-65, I encountered a campus highly politicized in the aftermath of Mississippi Freedom Summer.  I joined in idealistic campus activism.  However, in February, 1965, when the United States announced that it had begun bombing North Vietnam, I encountered a very small group of dark-clad protesters against the war at Oberlin’s traditional protest site, the Memorial Arch.  My instinctive reaction was: who were these few people who felt they knew more than the State Department about Southeast Asia?  I acted on that instinct by standing as a counter-protester with a sign that read “Here’s one Young Democrat who supports the Johnson Administration.”

Like most Americans I hadn’t yet encountered anything that might contradict my naiveté, but I began to listen to classmates who read material I hadn’t been exposed to; I began to pay closer attention to the Vietnam “crisis” the media were now calling a “war.”  Before long, I had become a skeptic, a “dove,” who believed U.S. intentions were good in the struggle with the Communist Soviet Union but had been misapplied in a Vietnam struggle where at best our nation’s efforts seemed counterproductive.

It wasn’t much longer before I had learned enough about the war to realize that the stated “intentions” were a cover for an immoral assault on the nation and peoples of Vietnam (and, soon, Laos and Cambodia).  As my learning deepened about the war, it had three effects on me.  One was that it shattered my earlier belief in my nation’s “noble” foreign policy; it shattered the world I had grown up in and left me feeling that my country now viewed me as “anti-American.”  This was and is an enduring, painful part of my coming of age –like learning some terrible dark secret about a family member you have loved and looked up to as a child.

The Tragedy of the Two Americas

Published on Tuesday, November 15, 2016

by Common Dreams 

by Ted Morgan

   It may not happen soon, but the deep social fractures must be acknowledged, and then healed, if progress is ever to take hold. (Photo: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)

As the world struggles to make sense of the 2016 election, my mind traveled back to two books I read recently: Eddie Glaude’s Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.
Reading the two books simultaneously, I was immediately struck by this reality: these are two very different communities of people who feel great pain.  For a variety of valid reasons, they both feel like outsiders in what they perceive to be mainstream American culture.


Glaude’s community of outsiders, of course, also includes people of color generally, along with LGBTQ folks and women, as well as their allies in the white male Left.  Hochschild’s outsiders include much of the white working class and many who live in rural America.  In some respects these two communities are at the heart of the split between so-called “blue” and “red” America.

Despite sharing the pain of being outsiders, however, the two communities are completely isolated from each other.  Not only that, but many in each community probably view the other group as at least indirectly responsible for their pain.

Living with repeated reminders of their pain, both communities are largely cut off from feeling empathy towards the other.  The tragedy of this empathy gap—of the two Americas—is that it not only prevents these communities of people from coming together and understanding that they do have significant common interests, but it also entraps them in a system that perpetuates rather than heals their wounds.