Stay in the Streets: Why

(This is the first of a two-part feature.)

I would love to be able to write:

"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

I cannot. Tyranny, like hell, may not be conquered at all. At least not by us as we are. We have had the life sucked out of us-gigantic blood-swollen ticks sucking at our hearts and heads. The statue with the big torch has burned us to ashes. We can no longer love nor feel nor even want nor hate. We will have to sink back into the clay again in order to form ourselves as men. That is how I will begin. Clay first, then men.

"Les choses etant ce qu'elles sont, les hommes sont ce qu'ils font."

The second floor of the Harvard CRIMSON. A young, liberal member of the Harvard Corporation is sitting on a broken, green leather chair, stuffing falling out all over. A dozen reporters watch eagerly with notebooks.

"Are you against the war?" I ask.

"Of course I am."

"What are you doing to end it?" Pause. "Why, nothing."

"The most revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exported classes: animals, trees, water, air, and grass."

Most of us are human racists. We think that the world was made for us. Some even think that we made the world (and therefore we can destroy it). Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden because they thought that it was all theirs. God was the first ecological revolutionary.

Roxanne O'Connell reports that 10,000 pelican chicks won't be born this year because pelican eggs are collapsing and killing the embryos. The mothers ingested DDT which upset their calcium metabolism. That caused them to lay thin-shelled eggs that could not support their weight. Pelican eggs collapsed in the rookeries all the way from Anacapa to Mexico. The pelican, the osprey, the cormorant, the petrel, the seagull, the American Bald Eagle and the peregrine falcon: all of their eggs are collapsing, the shells are too thin. No new generations are being born.

Near Lake Arrowhead, about ten per cent of the Ponderosa pines, about 1,300,000 trees, have died from the L.A. smog. Ponderosa pines reign over the Western forests. They're often two hundred feet all, with ten-inch-long needles. They are the oldest trees with the longest roots. In a sense, they hold the forest together. After a forest fire, grass begins to grow, which is soon replaced by bushes, like mountain mahogany and thimbleberry. Fast growing poplar trees shade out the bushes, like quaking aspens. After about a hundred years, the coniferous forest again dominates the area. Ponderosas are the ones that hold the soil to the land.

From the Old Mole: On the banks of the Mississippi below St. Louis, there are signs warning picnickers not to eat their lunch on or near the banks. The spray from the river contains typhoid, colitis, hepatitis, diarrhea, anthrax, salmonella, tuberculosis, and polio. It is an open sewer. If you place a fish in a container of river water, it will die in sixty seconds. Dilute the water a hundred times with clear water, and the fish will die in twenty-four hours.

The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has five categories for judging natural water resources. If a river is Grade "A," it is clean enough to drink. Grade "E" is an open sewer.

The Nashua River flows into Fitchburg, Mass., with one of the biggest amounts of trout in the East. Above Fitchburg, it is Grade "A" and people pipe it to their houses to drink. In Fitchburg, half a dozen paper mills run the length of the river inside the city limits. They dump everything from acid to corrugated box refuse into the river. As the Nashua leaves Fitchburg, you can almost walk across it. It is grade "E."

The Nashua then flows into the Merrimack. In September, 1839, the two Thoreau brothers floated down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Only a hundred years ago, Henry David thought that the Merrimack was the river of his dreams.

The Merrimack then flows into the sea. There is a cubic inch of oil inside every cubic yard of sea water. Only four or five hundred years after we end all pollution will the ocean be clean.

ANADER'S Raider called the CRIMSON from Washington last summer and announced that they had discovered a number of scandals in the Agriculture Department bigger than Billy Sol Estes. He said that half of the Ag Dept. was so corrupt that they'd have to be fired.

In his research on chemical disinfectants, he found that the crop sprays used by large Midwestern land owners caused cancer in chickens. It turns out that about half of the chickens we eat have cancer in their bodies, or maybe it's a third in Massachusetts. Cancerous chicken tissue is supposed to cause brain lesions in dogs and cats.

He also found that the Ag Dept. had covered up a trichinosis epidemic in St. Louis that had been caused by poor meat inspection. In fact, the Ag Dept. had information showing that meat inspection standards were far too liberal, yet they were preparing to liberalize the standards even more.

The day after the revolution, eight million people will be in the streets tearing down New York City with sledge hammers. What America has given to the continent is the colorgrey. Grey streets, grey buildings, grey skies, grey smoke, grey cement, even grey snow. The weight of all of the buildings of New York is on your shoulders as you walk down the street. New York has boxes where people work, boxes under the ground where people travel, and boxes where people live. The isolation and atomization continues out on to the street. In a small Western town, you can say hello to anyone. In New York, people are still encased in glass when they touch the sidewalks.

In 1580, Montaigne took a trip through the ravines along the Sioule River near Clermont-Ferand. He stopped his carriage at one point and looked down hundreds of feet at the river and hundreds of feet to the rocks that dominated the horizon. As a Renaissance man, he was horrified. Everything should be built to the measure of man, and les Gorges de la Sioule certainly were not. He would have died if he had seen New York.

A FRIEND picked me up at the San Diego airport last Christmas and drove me fifteen miles to where I live. As I got out of the car, I saw my little brother watering the green grass under a blue sky.

My brother is now a freshman at Berkeley. In his last year in high school, he invested the five hundred dollars he had inherited from my grandmother and made a couple thousand dollars in the stock market.

When he saw me, he smiled and chanted, in Chinese, "Long live Mao Tse-tung!" As he chanted, he punched through the sky with his right fist three times.

We talked for a while and then he turned down the garden hose and laid it in a trough he had made around a lemon tree.

"Jesus, Larry, you've become a raving anti-imperialist!"

He looked down as he began to talk. I looked down too. "I saw Felix Greene's 'Inside North Vietnam.' I went to see it every night for a week. There was this one scene where a buffalo boy got machine gunned by American planes as he was trying to push his buffalo to cover."

As I looked up, I saw that he was searching my eyes.

"I swear Dick, all he was doing was pushing his buffalo to cover."

ABOUT the war. The Big Generals have asked for a six month moratorium on troop withdrawals. A week or two ago. the Man, the President promised that we shouldn't worry, that there will still be 225,000 troops in Vietnam by July 1971.

The numbers don't matter. Marines back from the war explain that the U.S. has built massive fortified bastions at places like Cam Ran Bay and Da Nang. They don't intend to leave. The strategy is to pull all of the American troops back behind the battlements and cease most of the American ground attacks. "Vietnamization" means putting a buffer of South Vietnamese troops between the attacking NLF and the Americans in order to cut American casualties.

The U.S. then increases attacks in Laos and Cambodia which force the North Vietnamese to give aid to the guerrillas in those countries, thus giving less to the NLF. As it is, more bombs have been dropped on Laos than on any other country in the history of the world. A few years ago, there were 3 million people in Laos. Now there are somewhat below 2.5 million. For a little comparison, straight from Kurt Vonnegut, America killed 135,000 Germans at Dresden, 83,793 Japanese in Tokyo, and 71,379 at Hiroshima.

The final part of the strategy is to bomb all of South Vietnam, which the U.S. does every day. The areas friendly to the NLF, which are by now more than eighty per cent of the South, will be bombed until they are totally isolated from the rest of the country and can no longer receive medical supplies, ammunition, and information. The idea is to kill enough Vietnamese so that the NLF has to understand that they'll all die if they don't call a cease-fire.

With a cease-fire, the Green Bercts go back in and start all over again. Nixon has until the beginning of 1972 for all of this to happen.

He can then present his achievements to the American people: 150,000 American soldiers out of Vietnam, American casualties reduced to a half or a third of what they were under Johnson, and a cease-fire, which the NLF would find very difficult to break. Nixon then gets elected in 1972 and has four more years to put the Vietnamese in concentration camps.

If the plan doesn't work, then Nixon will use other means. The weekend everyone left for Christmas vacation, a high Defense Department official announced that the President had ordered contingency plans drawn up for "returning the war to the North" if infiltration continued and if American casualties remained high. Izzy Stone has a seemingly endless amount of documentation showing that Nixon is planning to start bombing North Vietnam once again.

In a word, if the NLF continues to make it difficult for the United States to commit genocide on the people of South Vietnam, Nixon will respond by committing it on the North.

The only way that I have been able to understand the war is to pretend that each time a GI or a Vietnamese died, that it was my brother or my father or my mother that died. By now over a million Vietnamese have been killed and probably eighty thousand Americans. All of America could not begin to digest that much sorrow.

You will probably notice that there is a peculiar lack of statistics in all that I have written. It is very tempting to give one stroke of the pen for each of the millions of people that America has killed or starved or maimed, or the thousands of rivers it has polluted, and reduce it to a table or graph and then say, "Look!"

Six or seven million South Vietnamese-nearly half of the population of the country-now live in concentration camps around the major cities. Saigon now has 2,800,000 people in it, making it the densest city in the world, twice as dense as Tokyo.

The newspapers give numbers killed every day. Numbers, the ultimate refuge of rational man. You can show anything with numbers. The New York Times, March 17, 1968, page one:

"Saigon-American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement in the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day long fighting."

That's the Times' story about the My Lai massacre. How many stories like that have you read in the last week? in the last year?

Everyone has read horror stories about the war. Some people are unable to read anymore of them. I figure that if the Vietnamese have to live through them, I should be able to read them. Every person who carries an NLF flag in a demonstration has probably internalized a thousand horror stories about the war. That's one of the reasons he's for the NLF.

What I see in nightmares at night, in case you're interested, is faces. Mostly kids. One of a kid rolling over andover on the ground, trying to extinguish the burning napalm, his flesh turning to charcoal underneath.

When you read a story about a battle, pretend you were in it. I was going to spare you from meeting one of my friends. but I thought that the 43 per cent of the freshman class who still wanted Thieu and Ky to win needed him. If you think hard enough about him, and his friends, you'll be in the streets Wednesday afternoon too.

From a report by a Quaker worker in Quang Ngai:

"How can I tell you what it was like! These people coming in filthy, with glazed looks, numb. Nobody talking, nobody crying and the sounds of furious battle not yet ended pursuing them in the door. The emergency room floor, still covered with blood from yesterday's casualties, smelled in the heat of the day and was oppressive. . . .

"One little fells of ten or so, shot in the face. There are bullet or fragment holes in the back and buttocks, one of which had exited through his abdomen, the others lodged somewhere. He, like most of the others, came in lying in a pool of blood. Feces and ground up bits of bone were flowing out of the buttocks wound. Vomit ran from his mouth and mixed with the blood pouring from his mouth and mixed with the blood pouring from the face wound. We worked with him for a long time but his chances were slim. He was in shock (most of them were) and struggling to get up from time to time. at times opening his eyes wide to beg for water or complain of the pain in his belly and then lapsing into unconsciousness. His father stood by silently. . . ."

A quick lesson about understanding America: If you want to know why something exists in America. try to figure out who benefits by having it. Why does the government spend so much money on roads and so little on efficient mass transportation? Well. roads are for cars, and GM. Ford. and American Motors make cars. Did you know that there is no longer any way to get from San Diego to Los Angeles by bicycle?

Lesson number two for understanding America: He who pays is never he who benefits. The American taxpayer pays for the continued production of planes and guns and bombs. He pays for training the Guatemalan army and, of course, for U.S. troops in Vietnam. The profits go to the major corporations. Most people in this country can now buy less with their wages than they could five years ago. They certainly haven't benefitted.

In the fall of 1968, I helped Peace and Freedom canvas Cambridge for rent control. Most of the people just stared back blankly when I tried to tell them that their rents were too high and that their rooms were pits. After a while I just couldn't take trying to make another person unhappy.

The system has forced people to think that they live in hell because they deserve no better. You are poor because you are dumb and uncreative and your breath smells.

I went into one old woman's apartment that had an inch-wide crack running the width of the ceiling. I tried to tell her that with rent control, she could force the landlord to abide by the housing code. She could make him fix the crack.

"No," she said, "everywhere I go I have cracks in my ceilings. It's not the landlord's fault. it's mine. Somehow leaky ceilings are part of my life."

Jesus, I thought, You mean that this woman has lived sixty-odd years thinking that her presence in rooms causes the ceilings to leak?

I grabbed her by the hand and took her next door to her neighbors. where of course, she had never been. In this atomistic society. you are crammed into your own room and told not to visit your neighbor. When the neighbors answered, we went inside and looked at their ceilings. The crack continued all the way across their room too.

"You see." I said. "it isn't your crack, it's the landlord's crack. You didn't cause it, he did. He let your apartment deteriorate. He's only interested in taking your money."

She signed the rent control petition and thanked me and went back into her room. For all I know she may think that "her" rooms never have electrical outlets because she lives in them. I am really frightened to think how many people live in this country thinking that all of their troubles are their own fault.

THE FATHER of a friend of mine is the vice-mayor of the little town I live in outside of San Diego. He sells washing machines, refrigerators and stoves. We were eating dinner one night about five years ago, and I told him that I thought I wanted to be a professor.

"Dick," he said. "you don't want to become a teacher. You've got too much life in you for that. We go through a special routine when teachers walk into the store. You have to make them feel secure. Teachers are afraid of life. They're afraid to step up to the plate and take a crack at it."

He had started with a little hardware store and was now one of the most influential men in the city. I suppose he's in the ruling class. But he spent his life putting his head and his hands together. He learned what he had to make it. if he didn't he'd go under. He could have been destroyed by the tooth and claw of petty bourgeois competition. Instead, he saw only one way up and he followed it.

Like most of our parents, the ugliness of the success vanished before the necessity of obtaining it. He struggled because he would have starved if he hadn't.

I can almost envy that necessity as I sit here with a dozen books scattered over my desk, a sales slip marking the first or second or fourth page of each of them.

America imposes the model of a life in which you are supposed to struggle to the top. Society then imposes collective moral sanctions against anyone who does not accept the hysteria. But if you don't accept the model, you are lost as well as hated. You are not so much ostracized as left to find your own way. There's nowhere left to walk if you refuse to climb their ladder.

We are left with the freedom, but also the necessity of inventing ourselves. Instead of finding meaning in our lives, we must first find a direction. The Vietnamese, for example, are different. Their condition presents them with the necessity of fighting American aggression. They accept that necessity as valid and meaningful. They can therefore find meaning in the lives they are forced to lead. From them, we will have to learn.