PBS Channel 13 www.thirteen.org recently ran a fund raising program with the producer Susan Lacy creator of American Masters, a series on American cultural history. One segment covered Joan Baez and her years of political activism in opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Rev. Martin Luther King appears in a segment saying how he stopped by Oakland, Calif. where Baez was persistently lobbing the inductees urging them to make another choice and refuse to go. She would successfully talk one into leaving, get arrested, go to jail, get released and return to repeat the process.
Looking back some 42 years, I was one who accepted Uncle Sam’s call, moving from stateside training to Vietnam, essentially entering a cultural bubble that insulated me from the revolution percolating throughout the country.
Joan Baez, whose voice I’d discovered several years earlier at Lads Music, the little record shop on Thayer Street on the Brown campus, continued waging the pacifist campaign, joining marches across the United States, visiting North Vietnam and becoming a cultural force who moved opinion.
To this day, I have difficulty admitting that what we engaged in there in Southeast Asia was wrong, that what we had gone to do was wrong and that we should get out. Casting the loss of friends and fellow soldiers off to a misplaced, useless purpose is even today too painful for me to think through on a path of logical progression. There is certainly a great fear of being led to agree with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who, long after the U.S. left Vietnam, joined in with Joan Baez and other protestors.
So the documentary plays on through these war years, and it occurs to me for the first time ever that they, Joan Baez and the others, were there for a larger purpose, bigger than what they may have been aware of perhaps. What they marched for, sang about, and reached for was deeply profound; a unity of national soul. Beyond the music of protest was a collective, deep soul cry for a unity that can come only in peace.
As with Joan Baez and the anti-war cast of those years, Bob Dylan, David Harris, and others as with me, the freshness of youth has given way to the mellowness of the 60’s. And as the PBS camera pans the decades, I cannot avoid feeling tugged at some deep level of emotion, stunned to see that “it” was never about pro war or anti war; pro civil rights or pro status quo; but it was about our collective soul.
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…”
John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
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