The Civil Rights movement, while it had its peaceful side in the person of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers, also had its violent side. The 16th St. Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham AL on Sept. 15, 1963, an act of racial terrorism, killed four young girls. The Freedom Riders of 1961 were subject to mob beatings. The tactics that Bull Connor, Public Safety Commissioner in Birmingham AL, used against the civil rights protesters in 1963 presented a scene to us where attack dogs and fire hoses were used against peaceful protesters, and over 3,000 people were jailed. The Watts Rebellion of 1965, as well as subsequent urban riots over the next five years, saw cities burn and people die (34 died in the Watts Rebellion). And I won’t even go into the 1968 Democratic National Convention that saw the Chicago police wail on young protesters. You can Google it. And one cannot talk about death and the boomers without talking about the Vietnam War. If you were a young man growing up in the sixties, you had to face the draft one way or another. Military service was compulsory, not volunteer as it is today. As the US involvement in the war intensified through the sixties, the odds that military service would put you on the front lines in Vietnam became greater and greater. The war was a reality, the draft no joke, and as every day television showed footage of jungle combat and more flag-draped caskets returning from Vietnam, the idea that some unseen collection of men could send you off to your death in a jungle thousands of miles from home was palpable. I was not a part of the campus protests that swept the nation (being still in high school), but in my senior year of high school I turned 18 and became eligible for the draft. That meant I had to actively face the reality of being sent to war and dying. My first act of political protest was to declare myself a conscientious objector to war on religious grounds. In my first year of college I did not take the student deferment (II-S), but rather continued my application for a 1-O status (conscientious objector available for civilian work contributing to the maintenance of the national health, safety, or interest). But in 1971, as the war began to wind down and US military involvement was reduced through “Vietnamization,” the strict “everybody called” draft was replaced with a lottery system, by which every date in the calendar year was assigned a number by lot, and your draft number was determined by the number assigned to your birthday. You were only eligible for the draft in your 19th year; after that, if your number was not called up, you were free from having to serve through conscription. It turned out that my number, something like 117, was not called. And so I did not serve in the military as a draftee. My case to be classified as 1-O also came to an end, as it was now a moot point. I was motivated; I escaped death, and I escaped having to inflict death on others. All this is a prelude to making the following appeal – for God’s sake, millennials, get the fuck out there and create a viable political and social counterculture! Make it loud and obnoxious. Get in people’s faces. You’re smart people, intelligent, with good intentions, good ideas and a wonderful sense of altruism. You’re just too comfortable, that’s all. The powers that be are hiding death from you. They make sure you never see pictures of caskets coming back from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. They make sure you see only
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