sovay | While the people were pressed into camps not called concentration

I have a protest in the morning, so I'm trying to encourage myself to sleep. I just finished reading Julian E. Zelizer's "A Template for 'Incivility'," about the anti-war movement of the 1960's and '70's; it reminded me again how thoroughly the Vietnam War appears to have been scrubbed from American popular consciousness. It's happened in my lifetime. I was born in 1981. I grew up in a house full of protest records. Everyone my parents' age had a story of the draft, whether they had been caught by it or not. There were veterans in my family. There were veterans on film. And now all that seems to remain of those decades is a vague contemptuous image of some ineffectual hippies, self-indulgently chanting and peacing out while the real business of the world went on outside their flower-decked circle of privilege, unless they cut their hair and turned coat to the establishment; either way, there is nothing to learn from that generation. It's a great way to cut today's activists off from previous strategies, make them reinvent the wheel. When you erase the memory of a war, you erase the memory of its resistance. You make people forget that for a full decade in American life it was normal to fight with the government: to scream at it, to scare it, to slow it down. There was a revival of that sentiment with the start of the Iraq War, but it was drowned in the hyper-nationalism of Junior Bush and his WWII cosplay. (I don't think it helped that the Dixie Chicks were all but destroyed for calling him out, which he still deserves. His reputation has been lately rehabilitated just because he's not 45, as if that's a recommendation as opposed to a bar cleared easily by pond slime. I wanted for eight years to see him on trial for war crimes.) This country's knowledge of itself is so fractured. We remember the nickname "Cadet Bone Spurs" and understand it is—incivil—of him to mock McCain for enduring what he dodged, but the rest might as well have faded into mythology, except mythology has fandoms and I am not sure Vietnam activism does.

While the people were pressed into camps not called concentration

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