Old Glory Beckons a Berkeley Peacenik

Above my desk, right alongside the photo of my two sons, hangs my antiwar diploma: an arrest citation for joining the May Day 1971 mobilization that tried to shut down Washington.

We were mad then, just as I am mad now at the Berkeley Fire Department’s initial decision to strip the U.S. flags from the back of its trucks because a municipal bureaucrat feared the flags might ignite protest.

Berkeley, which has many more churches than bars and claims the highest per capita use of public library books in the state, fancies itself the conscience of the country. Any abuse of animal, mineral or vegetable sparks an answering salvo from some Berkeley-based group.

However, the city’s anti-flag directive told firefighters, who just went door to door raising $50,000 for the relief effort in New York City, that morality doesn’t have much meat on its bones in Berkeley.

Berkeley originated both California cuisine and the free speech movement; now the food is good and anti-flag talk is all too cheap. But while Berkeley shies away from flag-waving as a threat to public order, the real moral center of America can be found in lower Manhattan, with its bucket-brigade humanitarians.

In my day, hard hats were Nixon’s storm troopers against long hairs like me; now they’re my heroes. Times change.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a peacenik in the worst way. I’ve got two draft-age sons, and for their sake, if nothing else, I desperately wish we could negotiate a way out of this. Or just pull up stakes and go home, like we did in Vietnam.

But there’s no one to negotiate with and nowhere to go. While this may not be understood in Berkeley, where consensus opinion reposes in a flabby, politically correct “niceness,” the urgent danger is clear to Bassam Abu Sharif.

He’s the Palestinian who was dubbed “the face of terror” by Time magazine because of his role in a multiple hijacking in 1970 before he became an advocate of negotiating with Israel. Interviewed on the radio last week, Abu Sharif described the East Coast attacks as “mad and sick terrorism that has no political aim.”

And that’s the point, fellow peaceniks. Osama bin Laden leads a messianic movement, not a liberation struggle.

Bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh; he’s more like Jerry Falwell on speed. His violent brand of religious fanaticism, whirling like a dervish out of centuries of simmering conflict between Islam and the West, wants only to crumble us like the twin towers.

There can be no Paris peace talks; there can only be containment and isolation of the enemy until he burns himself out and is eliminated. In this isolation effort, America needs every friend it can get.

Secretary of State Colin Powell is on the right track; the more hawkish members of the Bush administration are not. In any case, we here at home can build our own coalitions. We can get to know and feel comfortable with the United States’ immigrants from the Middle East, and the Islamic culture that sustains them.

Ever since the Crusades, Arabs have been the other, the barbarians on the border. Peace activists could construct something similar to the Vietnam teach-ins, only this time about Islam.

Meanwhile, it’s back-to-basics time. In the terrible days of Vietnam, it took guts both to fight the war and to fight against it. We Americans have plenty worth risking our lives for. We have civil liberties won through centuries of struggle.

And we have the flag. Maybe some will see the sudden emergence of American flags on cars, homes and lapels as jingoism, but I choose to call it community.

Seeing the flags at half-staff in front of Berkeley firehouses--where they were never challenged--I notice that when the flag is lowered, it comes more directly into the line of sight.

It’s not Old Glory anymore, run up on a pole for a snappy salute. Lowered toward Earth, the flag becomes more human and familiar--a shroud, a remembrance, maybe even a friend welcoming this peacenik back to his own country.