Where Are We Now?

On Tuesday October 26, a little over a week ago, a group of about 1000 demonstrators met in Washington to take another try at making a protest to end the war. The group was striking in no way except size: it was one of the smallest nationally publicized antiwar protests to date. Almost all of the demonstrators were familiar with Washington and militant protest. They talked of Mayday, the Pentagon, Chicago, and hoped that, despite their small number, this protest, dubbed the Nixon Eviction, would become something to talk about later.

The crowd at the morning rally on the 26th was mildly tense. A forced merriment, a hard try at a show of spirit, did not quite cover the underlying weariness of the people--a weariness exaggerated by a weekend of rain. The target of the actions planned for the afternoon--the White House--lay obscured from the view of the ralliers, just beyond a grassy knoll. The 4900 police put on alert for the demonstration also lay obscured.

No one paid much attention to the rally. A Southern woman emceed a few deja-entendu speeches, and exuberantly drawled, "Right On!" after each one. When the speeches were over, telephone contact was made with representatives of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (PRG) in Paris. The representatives' voices were amplified over the rally's sound system, and the crowd made a short attempt at reverential attention. The Vietnamese made two speeches--little rhetoric, little new, little substance. The Seven Point Peace Plan, which told Nixon if he set a date for withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from Vietnam, the Vietnamese would agree to a ceasefire and release the POW's, was repeated in part. The Peace Plan, the breakthrough in the lifeless Paris talks that Nixon had chosen to ignore, was now being "put to the people rather than the diplomats," one of the speakers told the rally. Now it was the job of the people to get Nixon to pick up the phone, talk to the Vietnamese and set the date, the speaker said.

With this inherently unattainable goal, the protesters marched toward the White House, toward Nixon (and the police), with a "Nixon Eviction Notice," saying, in part, "We the People hereby serve notice of our determination to evict you from public office." A permit had been denied for the march to the White House; as soon as the demonstrators left the rally site the march was illegal. The question was then not whether there would be a bust, but when and how it would take place. Less than half an hour later, when the protestors encountered a police line ringing the nine-block area around the White House and began a sit-down in the street at one point in front of the line, the arrests began. After 20 minutes, 298 protestors--all those who refused to move to the sidewalks--were arrested. There was no feeling of exhiliration, no feeling of unity, as there had been in the Mayday protests last spring when 13,000 people were arrested. The police didn't even seem irked, except by the fact that their days off and leaves had been postponed for the day.

It requires no great amount of insight to see that there is something wrong in this protest, that there is in fact something wrong with the enormous decline in antiwar activity since 1970. The cause for protest, the war, remains, yet the student movement--the backbone of the antiwar movement--appears somnolent, if not moribund.

Up to a tenth of the population of Indochina is killed annually by American weapons; Cambodia's Angkor Wat, one of the greatest works of religious architecture in the world, is gutted by American artillery shells; the brown earth of Laos blushes redder and redder from the blood of peasants killed by our saturation bombing. We perpetuate horror upon horror in a war we have already lost, a war we lost long ago, a war we could never have won, a war intolerable to the principles we avow as our own, and yet students remain if not unmoved, immobile.

The news of the summer alone would seem enough to cause an upswing in student activity. The release of the Pentagon Papers revealed clearly and publicly the calculated cynicism of our Vietnam policy. Medina was acquitted of all charges stemming from My Lai, and Calley seemed to be lined up for a pardon. Nixon, ignoring the PRG peace plan, decided to let the killing continue rather than set a date for the American withdrawal which he has promised since before his election. And two days before Fall registration, a new bombing campaign began in the North: "The biggest air raids," a straight-faced television commentator said, "since the bombing halt began in 1968."

And still the students sleep. Time and Newsweek call it apathy, or "the new mood on campus." Perhaps Nixon's Vietnamization program has succeeded in de-Vietnamizing America and the colleges. It has made the war seem more distant: our friends are no longer being killed, our war is being fought by mercenaries and computers, our televisions speak of the economy and China.

But can we believe ourselves to be so naive or cynical that we have fallen for Nixon's scheme? Are we so simple-minded that we are satisfied by yellow men dying instead of white and black? I cannot swallow the media's apathy theory. It is not apathy that has infected and paralyzed student protest. It is despair--a despair rooted in weariness and supported by the selfish but short-lived convenience of inaction.

When I returned from Washington after last week's depressing protest, a guy in one of my classes assured me of his deep opposition to the war, but said he questioned the efficacy of the tactics of current antiwar protests. A despair over tactics, a feeling that we aren't getting anywhere, has logically become stronger as the was has continued. Any demonstration observed alone appears in retrospect to have accomplished nearly nothing.

Continuous protest is necessary and effective in making the politicians who prolong the war uncomfortable, in showing support for the direct victims of these policies such as the Vietnamese and the American soldiers in Vietnam, and in easing our own personal sense of oppression brought on by awareness of the horrors being carried out in our name, with our money.

Tactics for massive protest range from moratoriums and marches to blocking traffic. The important thing is that everyone who cares does something. We cannot sit still while the war goes on until the inauguration in 1973, or as now appears likely, until the inauguration after that. Another million lives is too high a price for inaction.