Why We Fear

Wednesday November 9, 2016

Coincidently my wife and I just visited the site of the Woodstock Festival last week, on Friday November 4th.  Some people, including me, consider it hallowed ground.

I know lots of people don't understand, or think it's silly, but let me explain.

In August of 1969 a "youth movement" was well underway, which began when the Beatles arrived in 1964.  Young people were actively rebelling, and even though I was only fifteen at the time, I was one of them.

Two years earlier, in 1967, the Beatles released "All You Need is Love" which could have been the anthem for that "youth movement."

In November of 1968, "Law and Order" candidate Richard Nixon won the presidential election, by playing on the fear of older people who didn't understand the "youth movement."

"Richard Nixon ran on a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the nation's cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. A year later, he would popularize the term "silent majority" to describe those he viewed as being his target voters. Nixon won the popular vote by a narrow margin of 0.7 percentage point, but won easily in the Electoral College, 301-191."

If you think last night's map was red, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1968

It was well known that Nixon was in favor of "escalation," sending more troops to Vietnam to get it over with once and for all.

More and more people across the country were protesting the war, while believing that "All You Need is Love."

The Woodstock Festival was three days that showed that over 400,000 young people could show up and enjoy a rock festival, without major incident.  That's why Max Yasgur's speech meant so much to us.

(It was later revealed that the NY Governor at the time, Nelson Rockefeller, wanted to send in the National Guard, but the promotors convinced him that everything would be OK.)

Well only nine months after Woodstock four Kent State students protesting the war would be killed by Ohio National Guardsmen.

In my opinion, that was pretty much the end of the "youth movement."  

But Kent State was also the beginning of the national shift in opinion against the Vietnam war.

As more and more people, young and old, turned against the war, Nixon faced re-election in 1972.  He began to realize that he couldn't win a second term without the votes of people who were against the war, so what do you know, then foreign policy advisor Henry Kissinger announced "We believe that peace is at hand" on October 26, 1972.  Arguably, that was Nixon's "October surprise."

By 1975, details of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate hotel by Republican operatives began to leak to the press, so Nixon formed another group of operatives "Plumbers" who were assigned to stop the leaks.

Finally, unable to stop the leaks, and despite claiming that if he as president did something, it wasn't illegal, he was forced to resign in August of 1974.

The Vietnam war finally did end with the fall of Saigon on April 29, 1975, under president Gerald Ford, a Republican. North Vietnam, a communist country, then annexed South Vietnam.

In the end, 58,315 Americans lost their lives, and 303,644 were injured. People from South Vietnam, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, New Zealand and The Philippines were also killed and injured.

People who are my age lived through all of this, we've seen it with our own eyes.  

We know that American college students can be murdered exercising their constitutional right to assemble and protest.  

We know that a president can deliberately deceive the population "We believe peace is at hand" in order to win an election, playing politics with American lives.  

We know that a president can act with impunity insisting that "When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal."

That's what we are afraid of today.

Steve Thompson

(This is my opinion.  I've been as accurate as possible with the facts, events, dates, etc.  You have the right to disagree with me, but don't waste your time arguing with me.)