Old Baggage, Old Villains in the Plaza

When I was young, back in the Eisenhower days, my father loved to repeat the old saw that each generation would have its war, and would fight that war in its own way. He served at Verdun in World War I and regarded World War II largely as a sissy event. Dad was that kind of guy.

But he died in 1968 and thereby missed what might be called the modern corollary to his axiom: Each generation now has its anti-war movement to accompany its war.

And that gets us to San Francisco. Although the demonstrations that have taken place here--and in many other cities--over the past week have been overshadowed by the hourly reports of incoming Scuds, I am here to bear witness to their sheer scale. These events have amounted to something more than mere gestures.

On Saturday, an immense crowd trundled through the Mission District into Civic Center plaza. This expanse of concrete and grass is huge and could swallow a couple of football fields. By the time the crowd settled in, the plaza was so jammed with humans that you could not navigate through it.

The newspapers said 20,000 people and maybe they are right. Let’s just say it was a large 20,000. This was the same size crowd that comes to see the Pope at Easter, a sea of human beings.

But there was something wrong here, just as there is something wrong with this movement. If you were a member of the Vietnam generation, as I am, you would recognize the problem immediately. This movement is not a creature of the present, but of the past. Somehow it has been stolen from the generation of young people to whom it properly belongs.

And the thieves are us, the Vietnamers.

This theft is so complete that Sunday’s march here sagged under the burden of old baggage. You could have attended this march and missed the fact that it was about a war with Saddam Hussein.

The day was kicked off by some drum-beating warriors of the American Indian Movement, who reminded us not to forget Wounded Knee. They were followed by a Chicana radical who offered a not-so-brief history of the struggle in Nicaragua. Viva Nicaragua, she repeated at intervals and a few in the crowd nodded, yes, viva Nicaragua.

And so it went. At one point a middle-aged man pressed into my hand a copy of the International Trotskyist. The Socialist Workers Party filtered through the crowd promoting a “general strike” as the remedy to our problems.

As for the young people, they did attend and they did march, by the thousands. But this event did not belong to them. They were reduced to the role of onlookers, kids forced to watch an older generation haul out its old, old list of political beefs.

I kept trying to picture myself a student at, say, Cal State San Jose who regarded Saddam Hussein as pond scum but also wondered whether we should be launching 2,000 sorties a day against Baghdad. A kid who thought a few more months of sanctions might have worked just as well.

This was no place for that kid. This march did not allow for shades of gray. Not once would Saddam Hussein have heard a discouraging word from these people. The villain had long been identified, and it was George Bush. And, of course, Amerikkka.

More than 20 years ago, when we of the baby boom era invented the anti-war movement, the Achilles’ heel of our cause was its much-expressed contempt for the nation that allowed it to grow and flourish. That contempt, though somewhat disguised this time around, still thrives.

And it makes the whole exercise ugly. Would it be different if this anti-war movement truly was the creation of a younger generation rather than a weary replay? We don’t know. But it would be an interesting experiment. Perhaps this generation could pull off a trick that always escaped the Vietnamers: creating a peace movement that is obviously founded in a love of country.

It would be nice to think they could. Because otherwise we will be stuck, for the duration, with these marches that seem a pantomime from another era, that waste a genuine yearning for peace, that make enemies of the wrong people.

So give the kids a chance.

And, hey, viva Nicaragua.