John Lennon’s « Give Peace a Chance’ and the Bed In Love In really said it. That was a protest. Great performance art. We were against all war. I learned Buffy St. Martie’s Universal Soldier and sang it in coffeehouses, playing, guitar poorly. People actually asked me to sing and play, Draft dodger’s Rag, a great song by Phil Ochs, I’d learned from Jon Cowtan. Still a funny song. I was an intellectual but I wasn’t serious. We were at the Strawberry Mountain Peace and Love festival. In San Francisco we shut down the city, so many of us. It was psychedelic. The White Room by the Cream instantly takes me back there. More so than the Grateful Dead who were playing then. It’s a bit of blur with flashes of smiles, laughter, naked bits of beautiful bodies, the Golden Gate Bridge and bits Gracie Slick blasting out across the city. across the city.
No one was throwing rocks. No one was attacking police. No one was carrying guns or shooting weapons at the authorities. It wasn’t a riot. It was a protest.
Kids these days don’t know the difference between a protest and a riot. None of us were getting paid. All of us were living off our parents or summer jobs, casual work that paid for the rent. There wasn’t any coke or fentanyl. People drank beer and wine. Some of the old geysers in their 30’s were chugging back whiskey but they were just there for the young girls. Mostly everyone was too wasted to be smashing federal buildings. All that lovemaking, smoking and hiking didn’t make for playing baby military types in black suits and throwing Molotov cocktails. Paisley and bright flower Hawaiian shirts were more the motif. Lots of dancing. I remember a group of us dancing one evening in candlelight like a Winter Palace Matisse painting. It was a time of encountering zen and learning about mystical Christians like St. Theresa of Avila. Gandhi was our hero and Martin Luther King. Non violent resistance was a protest. We were protesters.
Years later , long after I’d been billy clubbed and hand cuffed for ‘giving lip’ to the authorities, long after I was expelled from high school for saying fuck, the mayor would march beside me along with some MP’s in the last of the peace marches I joined in. That was way before the Pride Parade and way before I dressed in drag and made a pilgrimage to Stonewall in New York. I was respectable , a bit peculiar, but respectable. Like protests. Protests were respectable.
My parents raised me that if you broke something you had to pay for it. My parents raised me to respect the work of another man. My parents raised me to know that a man and a woman in uniform were just doing their job and that I shouldn’t make it more difficult for them than necessary. Dad had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during WWII and respected the men who served. He didn’t even hold a grudge against the Germans and Japanese soldiers who served against him. It was the politicians and leaders he had concerns about. He didn’t feel they cared much for the middle classes and lower classes. I learned young that politics is about choosing the least bad alternative. I learned also that democracy could be bad but it was never as bad as dictatorships, especially religious and communist dictatorships. Like Phil Ochs said, « we hate Chow en Lai and I hope he dies , but there’s one things you’ve see, someone’s got to go over there but that someone sure ain’t me. ». We were humble kids compared to the narcissists today. I’m not saying we weren’t arrogant like them but we were just saying ‘Give Peace a Chance’. There was no civil war. Hanoi Jane was a traitor. We cared for the American POW’s up to their neck in farces tipped pogo sticks. We didn’t like celebrities fucking the enemy. We even knew communists lied. They tried to continue the war in Europe after Berlin was taken. They would always claim to be the victims ,but they built walls to keep their citizens in. The Berlin airlift was a thing of beauty. Non aggressive. I grew up seeing that on tv documentaries. Brilliant flying, Not long after, we watched Armstrong stepping down on the moon.
I remember it was another miracle when the Berlin Wall came down. All those people freed from communism. All the folks Solzhenitzen wrote about getting out of the Siberian Gulags. Now there’s millions in the Communist Chinese Gulags today and hundreds of thousands in religious Islamic Iranian prisons.
Today I listen to the news and hear liars calling riots and looting, protests. I can’t wrap my head around it. A lot of people in the north go crazy with a thing we call ‘cabin fever’. The lockdown really must have done a number on people, especially the media. They sound so turned around they don’t know right from wrong like the Prime Minister of Canada. CSIS, the national security service, says the Communist Chinese party has infiltrated the Canadian education system, media and politics to the highest level.
I’m too old for this shit. I like staying in. I’m as afraid of ignorant people and the lawless as I am of Covid 19. I don’t understand why paying more than half my income in taxes I can’t feel safe walking in the streets at night. The elite then and now had walls around their own homes. Now they have bodyguards and private armies and don’t want citizens to have rabbit guns. Everyone had guns when I was growing up, before Trudeau’s father.. Then we left the doors unlocked. I asked the police I know why the mobs keep destroying property, interrupting traffic and communications ,more and more, without anyone suffering consequences. What happened to law and order and peace. They told me the politicians won’t let them stop the riots.
I’d like to defund the politicians.
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