Yesterday was a very bad day for my husband. As some of you know, he served for 23 years in the Navy, and suffers from occasional PTSD from incidents which occurred while he was active duty. He retired in April 2003, so he wouldn’t have to fight this bogus war, and is now a pre-nursing student at a local community college.
It should have been a good day. He got in early, got a lot of work done in the library and computer lab, and he only had one class, his favorite, American history. The professor has a very dry sense of humor (the class begins with Reconstruction, and his opening line to a group of Southern teenagers, most of whom buy into the Southern Mythos, was "You lost. Get over it") and challenges the students to think, something they appear to resist with all their might. Ben was looking forward to this class.
It was on the Viet Nam War. My husband was lucky enough to have not been shipped over there, though he easily could have been, once he failed the final physical at the end of the first cadet summer at the Air Force Academy because of poor eyesight. He couldn’t afford college, so he enlisted in the service least likely to send him over. He did however spend the months in the lead-up to Gulf Insanity I. Later he ended up having to shoot a sniper while on a flight line watch in Saudi (to those who say sailors don’t have guns—they sure as hell do when they are on a flight line watch) who turned out to be a Saudi teenage boy. He also got to see Saddam’s handiwork on the Kurds up close and personal.
The professor kept asking questions. Only my husband answered. He kept answering because he was having some trouble staying in the here and now as nightmares washed over him while wide awake.
The professor finally had enough. "I have one person answering. Are the rest of you asleep?" He was trying desperately to make connections between what happned in Nam and what is currently happening in Iraq, something they didn’t want to deal with.
A little blonde got up enough nerve to say something. My husband wouldn’t tell me exactly what she said, but I can picture it. My nieces, Thing 1 and Thing 2, are fairly typical college students. They back Bush 110% because he’s the president and a Christian and God chose him to be president instead of that arrogant Al Gore or that CATHOLIC LIBERAL John Kerry ( cps indicate a voice rising sharply). They regard any questioning of the Official Point of View as damn near treason. They are certain that we hadn’t invaded Iraq and if the Patriot At weren’t intruding on our rights and if they hadn’t used torture at Abu Ghraib and if those Evil Monsters weren’t locked up in Gitmo, well, fer shure, there’d have been another 9/11. They are pretty much typical of students down here. Not all of them are like this—but a lot are. Raised in a fundamentalist Christianity that doesn’t look kindly up[on asking hard questions or thinking critically and gives points for accepting what authority figures tell you, they don’t even know how to begin to question.
My husband lost it. "How many of you have served in Iraq? None. How many of you have served in the military? None. How many of you have friends or family members who’re serving or have served in Iraq? None. How many of you know someone who’s been ion combat? How many of you know anyone who’s active duty or retired military? None."
He stood up. " Well, actually you do. Me. Twenty three years in the Navy, seen combat, seen what Saddam was capable of. I got out so I didn’t have to fight a war based on lies. I follow the news, and by October 2002, anyone who took the trouble to do so would have known that the aluminum tubes used by Bush to support his belief that Saddam was trying to rebuils his nuke program was crap. By January, I knew that Joseph Wilson had debunked the attempt to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger as a fraud. I turned down a promotion that would have given me 3 years of job security and a sizable improvement in my pension so I wouldn’t have to fight for a lie. I remember Nam, and I can see the similarities. And so would you if you’d stop watching Fox News and actually think for a while."
The guy next to him moved to another table as if criticizing the president was a contagious disease.
My husband buried his face in his hands. The professor asked if he was okay. My husband explained his background and that he occasional PTSD. At that point, the professor dismissed the class 10 minutes early. Normally, students hang around to schmooze, and my husband is well-liked and they kid and joke. Yesterday they scuttled away, uneasy and unsettled.
Down here this is a pretty common reaction to not buying into the president’s lies. I know there are students who are savvy and aware and who keep up with politics, but I haven’t run into any. I suspect hat, like me, they keep their heads down and try to go unnoticed, because the Conformity Quotient is extremely high and you pay a high price for sticking out. The people who filed suit in three counties against the Ten Commandments in local courthouses had to be listed as John Doe because a previous litigant had received death threats and had her home and car vandalized. I’ve seen a lot of anti-abortion and anti-immigrant demos on the local news—but very few anti-war ones, if any, and those were led by older folks. The only people I’ve talked to who don’t buy the Bush line completely were older—50s and 60s—who’ve seen jobs dry up as companies outsourced them and have children or grandchildren serving or who could be drafted if the draft were resurrected.
I reminded my husband that even during Nam, for every peace marcher, there were 3 or 4 Tricia Nixon Clones, that Young Republicans helped Nixon get elected twice. That the Guardsmen who fired at Kent State weren’t much older than the students they killed. That Berkeley was the exception, not the rule. That the draft meant most young men faced a real possibility of being shipped off to Nam and that ending the war was in their self-interest. Since students today don’t face anything like that, don’t know anyone who is serving over there, or even who is active duty, this war is something they watch on the news and view as a Holy War against Islamofascists who want to turn this nation into a Muslim theocracy. Most of them don’t even know anyone who’s not a Christian, let alone a Muslim—and most of them couldn’t tell a verse from the Q’oran from a baseball statistic.
There are righteousbabes out there—I’ve run into them in ME and MA. I see them here on DKos, and they give hope. But down here, I’ve yet to see one—well, except my nephew the drag queen who fled to San Francisco at 19 and only comes home for a few days at a time, which is all he can bear, and a few of his friends.
Yes, we’ve won back the House and the Senate. If we want to retain them and elect a president in 2008, we NEED the youth vote. My question for you is, how do we wake up a generation that seems to be asleep? How do we get them to start thinking independently without reinstating the draft so they have a personal stake in ending this war? How do we get them to realize that outsourcing means there will be fewer and fewer jobs for educated Americans, not just factory workers? How do we get them to realize that universal healthcare is a necessity because fewer and fewer Americans are insured—and sooner or later they will probably be among them, if only temporarily? We need fewer Bush twins and Tricia Nixons, and a lot more righteousbabes.
UPDATES AND CLARIFICATIONS
No one is bashing younger voters. The entire point of this diary is they are our key to winning any Southern states in 2008. It’s our job to wake them up. We have obviously reached some of them, judging by the figures people posted for blue voters by age. We haven’t reached nearly enough. TO reach them in the bible Belt we have to fight against both their religious beliefs (I think you have to register as a Repub before they let you join an SBC church these days—that was snark) their training not to question authority of any kind (unless their preacher tells them to or the candidate’s views are contrary to the way they interpret the Bible), and everything they’ve been taught to believe by their parents. I’ve lived 9 year total in the South (84-91; 2003-2006—and that is closer to 4 years than 3, since we got down here in April). My husband’s incident was just reflective of what I hear around me when I go to the store or the movies or talk to the in-laws.
We are looking for solutions here, not insulting a generation at either end of the spectrum. And what may shock some of the younger people is that a Pew Study I’ve posted a link to down below in the posts, shows that people aged 50 and over—my demographic—were more likely to oppose the war in 2003 and still in 2006. The age group most strongly opposed to it were those 65+, likely because they served in Nam or Korea or WW II, and they know that war was a last resort. There’s also a certain amount of self inters tint heir opposition: most don’t want to see their grandchildren drafted.
My challenge to you is simple. How do we overcome the brainwashing of the Christian Right and staunchly Republican parents to woo more younger voters to our side? And how do we get the ones who feel no connection to the war—because most Americans don’t—to see the light? I think those two are the keys to any Southern Strategy in 2008, because it’s harder to change minds that are already made up, and people tend to be more conservative as they age.
As to how my husband was the tail-end of the Nam Era, but had only served 23 years when he rtired inn 2003—he got out a couple of times. I explained in detail in two posts. Breaks in service aren’t the norm, but they do happen.