Antiwar Issue Is ‘So Just Like Yesterday’

I picture Caitlin Orr wearing faded blue jeans with a hole in the knee and an American flag patch on her backside, a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of sandals and, oh yeah, some flowers in her hair. It’s 1968 and she’s sitting in a meadow with several hundred other college kids listening to a local garage band and a succession of speakers decrying the Vietnam War.

It’s me in the time warp, not her.

The real Caitlin Orr wasn’t even alive in 1968. She’s 16 and goes to Fullerton Union High School, where, among other things, she’s on the soccer team. To my knowledge, she’s never sat in a meadow.

But she is an antiwar protester in a place and time in which you don’t see a lot of them. They’re hard to find on college campuses or in Congress, let alone the halls of a Fullerton high school in Orange County.

Caitlin has Iraq on the brain, convinced the United States is heading down the wrong path in contemplating war in the Middle East. She’s also a bit of an entrepreneur, hawking “Think Peace” T-shirts around campus for $15 each.

As a baby boomer who remembers the Vietnam War protest days, I ask Caitlin if that era seems like a million years ago. “Oh, no,” she says, “it is so just like yesterday. It would seem like a long time ago if people had matured in any way, but as you can see, history is repeating itself. People are saying the same things now they were many years ago.”

By that, she means the response of some of the people unhappy with her peacenik point of view. A fellow student attempted to counter Caitlin’s argument by saying: “I would invite all those who favor peace to take your signs to Iraq.”

Caitlin says her father reminds her that “America, love it or leave it” was the battle cry of many of those who protested the protesters during the Vietnam War era. “He says he’d always say, “Love it and change it,’ ” Caitlin says.

What’s different now -- other than 30 years passing by -- is that there was no equivalent of Sept. 11 to color the debate during the Vietnam era. Does anyone today doubt that the terrorist attacks on America have muted many of those who normally would be protesting an attack on Iraq?

Caitlin says she in no way dismisses the gravity or meaning of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. She just thinks Iraq is the wrong target.

But if an unshakable belief in their own position and near-contempt for the other side characterized the antiwar movement in the 1960s, Caitlin sounds a bit different. She’s talking about setting up lunch-hour discussions at school, at which people on all sides of the Iraq issue would take part.

Having only antiwar participants at the sessions wouldn’t spur a dynamic discussion, she says.

My intention today is not to debate her or anyone else about Iraq. I’m here only to praise this nascent flower child for her courage in bucking popular opinion. It’s as American now as it was when John Adams in pre-Revolutionary War America defended British soldiers in court for firing on Boston colonists.

Needless to say, the divisions in America over Iraq don’t come close to matching those during the Vietnam era. The political hostility in the air then got into everyone’s lungs and poisoned many.

Caitlin seems way too chipper for that. “This could be a good thing,” she says of her fledgling campus movement. “Think peace. Who doesn’t want to think peace?”

Ah, the innocence of the young.

I suggest to Caitlin that Fullerton isn’t exactly a hotbed of liberalism. “I’ve been told that,” she laughs. “But you’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach him at (714) 966-7821 or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.