How She Shut the Store Down

SHE WAS basically an apolitical Cliffie. She would argue at Adams House with her friends about the war and the blacks and the tactics of SDS. But she had never gone further than the personal dialogue. She had never marched through the streets of New York or across Memorial Bridge in Washington. In the snowy days of New Hampshire she had been quietly at work in her room painting and writing poetry.

But there she was now with her signs and instructions from the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. She had gone to the office at 44 Brattle Street with a certain amount of curiosity, and an infinite amount of apprehension. They had told her that they needed people to go from store to store in Cambridge asking the merchants to observe the Moratorium by closing up shop on the 15th. And before she realized exactly what it was she had gotten herself into she was out on the street heading for her first confrontation.

"Excuse me, sir," began the mildest confrontation on record, "but I would like to talk to you about the possibility of closing up your store to show your sympathy with the Vietnam Moratorium."

"I am sorry young lady but you'll have to talk with the manager about that," replied the middle-aged man behind the counter. He fidgeted with some sales slips as he spoke, and he seemed about to walk away when the Cliffie regained her composure.

"Is he available?" She thought she close her words well.

"Back in there," and he pointed to a shiny red door at the back corner of the store.

She knocked on the door and went in. She was embarrassed in the first place by the fact that she was supporting the Moratorium with her little deed. Carrying around the posters and the instructions seemed like some kind of wife-of-the-liberal-professor racket and she despised the image. But add to that the embarrassment of barking up the wrong tree and then getting barked back at and she was just about to call it quits.

"May I speak with the manager?" she said this time. No one was going to catch her twice with the same trick.

There were two men in the room sitting at desks that faced each other. They both spoke at the same time.

"He's not in," scoffed the younger man on the right.

"I am he," said the other.

They both looked at each other in quiet amazement. She looked at the floor and understood she had been caught again.

Five stores later the results had not improved. She had begun to organize her thoughts into a form which argued her feelings about the war more coherently, but the answer to her questions and her arguments was still the same: NO.

I am sorry no. I sympathize, but no. I would like to, but no. Nonetheless, it was no.

At the sixth store, they told her to wait a few minutes and the manager would be right down to talk to her. She waited. Five minutes went by, then ten. She returned to the clerk and was told that the manager was informed and would be down momentarily. Five minutes later she turned back to the clerk and asked again.

This time he said, "That was the manager who just walked out, gone for the day. "Some people did not even have the courage to argue an answer of no.

By this time she was no longer embarrassed. She thought of the Weathermen arguing with bricks and stones through store windows, and of the shopkeepers who had told the news interviewers, "I don't understand. I oppose the war, so does everyone. Why break my window?"

AT THE entrance to the seventh store she paused. The wind blew straight black hair gently across her face.

There was no violence in the air. No men masked from view by gas masks. No clubs and guns. Only a store-front window that reflected the afternoon sun, and an owner who would probably be kind but firm and negative.

The intellectual arguments about the military-industrial complex, about the legitimacy of the American involvement, about the nature of U.S. imperialism, and about the NLF being the real representative force were all too distant now. They mattered little in the arguments she put forth to another individual. She was asking someone to close up shop to end the war. Arguing about the systems that dictated this disaster, denied the right of the individual to change things. And her arguments were now about the ability of the individual to collectively alter the course of the nation.

She walked into the drugstore. Six times the answer had been no, and with each experience her feelings about her involvement in the protest had changed. Her embarrassment had given way to the feeling that those with whom she dealt should be embarrassed. The sense of playing games and the attitude of one-ups-manship had given way to the feeling of urgency. Perhaps, she thought, her friends would argue against the importance of her work, but now it was important to her.

"Excuse me," she began and was finally directed to the manager after several intermediaries. The manager was standing up over the back-counter conversing with his wife.

When she asked about closing the store, the wife spoke up first. "We are opposed to the war, opposed to the killing and all that, but I don't see how closing the store will stop the war. And besides you are asking my husband to sacrifice his income and we can't afford it."

The wife had spoken with all the cliches that were in the book. But they had to be answered as if they were questions that one had never met before. They had to be faced as if they were a real confrontation.

Before the Cliffie chose her words, however, the wife added, "I think all this protest is irrelevant."

Back in his room at the end of the same day a Harvard senior entered this into his personal log-book. "I realized just several minutes ago that I am coming close to the afterlife, the real life. I am not scared but I am apprehensive.

"Ever since I came here I have had the security of being insulated. First three years of insulation, then two and finally one. The years have peeled away like the blankets on my bed. Now I am cold and can't sleep.

"What I think about when I can't sleep is the war I can't see or feel. People die and I live oblivious. What do I do? Go to a shrink or go to a doctor and ask him to find out what's wrong with me as I tell him where to look and make up things that I don't feel. Do I tell him with honesty that I just don't want to go into the Army to fight this war? Then am I chicken and will they scoff at me? Will I be affected? Is the war really wrong? But is it so right I should die for it?

"Does one take up the banner of righteousness and telling the real world where to get off, go out to join the pariahs? Can I resist the war and suffer the jails? Is one morally worse or better for one or the other? And if I leave the land of the brave what will I do if I want to come back? Can I go away forever?

"Stillness prevails but no sleep overcomes me.

"What of those who do not suffer my anxieties because they were never offered the chance? How can I explain to them what my choice will be? In old times they paid those who took the place of someone else. But now the rich get off for free.

" What of this poor land which I was raised to love and cannot now forget? Who should mend its ways and return it to the path which it ought to tread? "

Also that same day the Defense Department announced that a new low had been hit: 64 Americans had been killed in fighting that week. The headlines did not feature the number of South Vietnamese who were killed, nor the number of bodies that our troops had counted as Viet Cong killed. But if you added up the numbers in the story ...

The same week Las Vegas had to call up the Nevada National Guard to quell a racial disturbance and the bureaucracy announced that unemployment had jumped to 4 per cent.

She fielded the question aboutprotests being relevant as best she could. But the argument with the wife seemed to forebode ill for her question to the husband.

"Sir," she said with a degree of hopelessness, "will you close your store to help observe the Vietnam Moratorium?"

"Well I had been thinking about it." His reply did nothing to give her confidence. Her mood turned a little bitter.

"Would you like to close your store for an hour at noon?"

"Well I had been thinking about closing the store all afternoon," replied the man.

There was a moment of total silence.

The young girl gave the old man a poster to put in his window. She printed at the bottom of the sign: closed from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

When she walked out the door the war had not ended, but another beginning had been made.