OPINION
CHARLES M.
BLOW
The Ghost of the 1968 Antiwar Movement Has
Returned
April 24,
2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/opinion/chicago-dnc-antiwar-protests.html
Charles M.
Blow
By Charles
M. Blow
Opinion
Columnist
At the 1968
Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed
with police officers — whose brutal role in the confrontation was later
described by a federal commission as a “police riot” — hijacking the focus of
the convention.
Those young
demonstrators had come of age seeing continual — and effective — protests
during the civil rights movement and national mourning after the assassinations
of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr., who a year earlier had staked out his opposition to the war,
saying that while he wasn’t attempting “to make North Vietnam or the National
Liberation Front paragons of virtue” he wanted to underscore his belief “that
America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of
its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills
and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube.” He said he was
“compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.”
This was a
generation primed for protest, with moral conviction as the foundation of its
outrage about the Vietnam War — the first television war, one in which
Americans could see the horrors of war, almost in real time — and the draft
that saw around two million Americans conscripted during the era. The movement
against it began mostly on college campuses and grew.
Of course,
semesters end and students go home for the summer. But their opposition to the
war didn’t end with the academic year. In the months leading up to the ’68
D.N.C., which took place in August, organizers planned a major protest,
intended to be held regardless of whether it was sanctioned, drawing students
from around the country. Before the convention, Rennie Davis, one of the
organizers, told The New York Times, “No denial of a permit is going to prevent
the tens of thousands of people who are coming to Chicago from expressing their
convictions on these issues.”
This is all
playing out again.
Young
people, in particular, are following the Israel-Hamas war on social media and
many are horrified by what they see. They’ve also grown up with protest
movements — Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Parkland, Fla.,
students’ gun control campaign — as the backdrop of their lives. Over 1,000
Black pastors have called on President Biden to press for a cease-fire in Gaza.
And we’re seeing antiwar protests spread across college campuses.
As in 1968,
the semester will soon end and those students will leave for the summer,
allowing more time and energy for their efforts to be focused on the D.N.C. in
Chicago in August.
Antiwar
groups are already planning large protests at the convention. Hatem Abudayyeh
of the U.S. Palestinian Community Network recently told The Chicago Tribune:
“We’ll be marching with or without permits. This D.N.C. is the most important
one since 1968, also in Chicago, when Vietnam War protesters and the Black
liberation movement organized mass demonstrations that were violently
repressed.”
And you can
see substantial support for their cause. Although the spring 2024 Harvard Youth
Poll found that 18-to-29-year-olds tended to rate most other major issues,
including inflation and immigration, as more important than the
Israel-Palestine conflict, the survey found that “young Americans support a
permanent cease-fire in Gaza by a five-to-one margin.” And according to a
Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday, 53 percent of Democrats
oppose sending more military aid to Israel for its efforts in the war with
Hamas.
There seems
to be a sense in the Biden campaign that it can simply wait the protesters out,
that passions will eventually fade and that Democratic voters will fall in line
when we get closer to Election Day and the choice between Biden and Donald
Trump becomes more stark.
That is a
reckless gamble. The protesters and many voters are upset about something more
than a regular matter of foreign policy. Many believe that they are witnessing
a genocide aided and abetted by an American president whom they supported. They
feel personally implicated in a conflict in which the death toll continues to
rise, with no end in sight. This is a moral issue for them, and their position
won’t be easily altered.
It isn’t
easy to unsee the limp body of a dead child in a mother’s arms. It isn’t easy
to unsee hungry people scrambling for cover when they come under fire. It isn’t
easy to unsee the wreckage after a convoy of food aid trucks came under fire
and several aid workers were killed. People have seen all those things on their
TVs and phones.
On Oct. 7,
about 1,200 people in Israel were killed and about 240 people were taken
hostage in a Hamas attack. At this point in the war, more than 34,000
Palestinians have been killed and more than 77,000 have been wounded, according
to local health officials, in an area with a population of only around two
million people.
The numbers
are staggering. The level of suffering is unacceptable. Young people will make
that point clear this summer in Chicago.
Charles M.
Blow is an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, writing about national
politics, public opinion and social justice, with a focus on racial equality
and L.G.B.T.Q. rights. @CharlesMBlow • Facebook
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