1. The Vietnam war followed the brutal murder of Kennedy. Love him or hate him, none of us believed he deserved to be murdered while sitting next to his wife, and none of us bought the Oswald did it with a Manlicher Carcano bolt action POS.
2. We grew up with very little compared to the young people of today. We had no video games. We had only 3 channels and PBS on TV. We had no computers or the internet. We had no cell phones. No VHS.
3. We were raised by parents who grew up during the Great Depression and fought in WWII and/or Korea. War propaganda was EVERYWHERE in Hollywood, radio and TV. Stories of surviving the depression were part of everyday life.
4. We were forced to dress the same, tuck in our shirt tails, raise our hand to speak, never question authority, have our hair cut at the same barber shop, mind our manners, do as we were told and no back talk.
5. We were pissed off that our parents did nothing about the President's murder. We were pissed off that Johnson escalated the war under false pretenses. We were especially pissed off that we had to face the war, whether we were for it or against it, because there was a draft. We were pissed off that the excuse, The Domino Theory, was a childish bucket of crapola that no one with half a brain ever bought.
6. With many less options and distractions, we were very well read. We hung out together and exchanged ideas, face to face. We had a common enemy, and we were hip to their bullshit. We knew that the CIA was nothing more than a corporate goon squad that fomented wars and overthrew 'unfriendly' governments for Exxon.
7. Our dissent grew and our motto became 'hell no, we won't go'.
8. At the same time, blacks had had enough of living in squalor, being lynched, being denied opportunities and being denied the right to vote.
It all came to a head as the establishment continued to murder or attempt to murder, or imprison our leaders. Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, George Wallace, etc. The FBI spent most of it's resources wiretapping, infiltrating and harassing American citizens.
You had the part of us who were brainwashed by the Leave It To Beaver and John Wayne images who joined up to fight in Vietnam, who willingly joined the establishment. Then you had those of us who revolted against that brainwash and you had pissed off blacks.
We weren't about to let the hypocrites who were shoveling Freedom and Democracy while they illegally invaded Vietnam and killed millions of innocents abroad and at the same time practiced slavery through the draft and denied blacks the right to vote, all the while killing our leaders and unleashing hell on our demonstrations, herd us into their bidding without a fight.
It came to a head when the Ohio National Guard fired live rounds into a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State, killing four teenage citizens.
Still, the bottom line is that despite our huge and many times violent protests, despite the fact that 76% of Americans wanted out of Vietnam, we pressured Johnson daily, making him a prisoner in the White House, to the point that he refused to run for a second term, we burned cities to the ground, stopped colleges from functioning at all and many other things...we stayed in Vietnam for 10 years. 10 years!
Afterward, they took the dollar off the Bretton-Woods gold standard, caused unprecedented inflation/recession cycles, faked oil shortages that drove the price from $1.40 to $40, successfully tied the dollar to oil and proceeded to run up $9 trillion in debt, loot the SS Trust Fund into insolvency, etc., etc., etc.
The powers that be proceed with their plans while we bang heads in the trenches with the grunts. They are never mentioned, let alone caught and convicted. The Fed is at the bottom of the list of polled Americans as to who or what are the root causes of our economic woes, while they ARE the root cause.
It certainly would have been nice to see the young people rally behind RP instead of Obama. It breaks my heart.
Bosso
