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At the end of its evening newscast, PBS silently shows the faces, names and ages of the latest American soldiers killed in the Iraq war. Many of the soldiers are very young, some nineteen, others twenty. The oldest among them, usually NCOs, are in their early thirties. A day or so ago, fourteen soldiers were shown, one of them a girl much like my eighteen year old daughter. They died when the helicopter taking them to Baghdad airport so that they could go home on leave was shot down. One of the soldiers was on his way home to attend his mother’s funeral. There would be a double funeral in that family. Later in the evening, on another channel, I watched an interview with Bernardine Dohrn. Now in her sixties, she is a respected law professor at Northwestern University who specializes in juvenile’s and children’s law. She spoke as though, yes, she had a past, but that was now a long way behind her. Though there were still some nuances of pride about that past, she did not want to dwell on it and wanted to put it behind her. Both she and her husband are now good members of American society, although some donors to Northwestern have refused to give money as long as Dohrn has tenure there. Dohrn’s past was part of the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She and Bill Ayers, her husband, played a leading role in the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and later in the Weather Underground, an organization whose objective was to overthrow the US government using as much violence as necessary. On the FBI’s most want list, Dohrn and Ayers spent eleven years in hiding. While the protests and violence centred on the Vietnam War, other issues gave rise to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement. It was a turbulent time in America. One has to wonder, as one watches the faces, names and ages of the latest causalities of the senselessness in Iraq, how long it will be before something like the radicalism of the 1960s will again rise up in the US. Despite Bush’s pronouncement of a few months ago, the war is still on. If it ends shortly with an American withdrawal or otherwise, the young faces will have been honored, buried and forgotten. But if it goes on and on much like Vietnam did, and if it continues to escalate, it will surely result in the re-emergence of violent radicalism. It’s the American way. Ed |
