Today on Memorial Day we are at war, with ourselves, over a hidden enemy. One we cannot see or touch. Such was true during the Vietnam War, when millions of draft age men were radicalized. We realized finally, in large numbers, that all wars are not the same, and even when “necessary” solve little. Both elements in the right wing and the left wing masses, often for different reasons, eventually realized the war was both unwinnable and a complete moral and political disaster. Against a country that never did any harm to us. Some Vets even came home and threw their war medals in anger back at the White House. A bipartisan War left 55,000 dead Americans and millions of Vietnamese dead. Americans and Vietnamese are still dying today in 2020 from war related factors, such as long forgotten mine explosions and cancers.
Nature Rebels
Cov-19 is not a country, it is an attack upon us and the rest of the planet by nature itself. We have continuously defied and denied the existence of the natural world, and what is required to take care of it, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But nature is reality, the real world, not a paranoid fantasy pretending to be reality invented by Fox News or Donald Trump.
Like during the Vietnam War, we had faltering and largely discredited governments in both Democratic and Republican administrations. They were both blindly anti-communist and chose Vietnam as a flash point to stop it, once President Kennedy was out of the way. A country that routinely rescued American pilots during World War II and borrowed language from our own Constitution for their own. Their leader wrote to three U.S. presidents for support before we set up our own puppet government there. We then proceeded to prevent free elections and wage war on them.
Waging War on Ourselves
The “war” being waged against Cov-19 is being being lost, in large part because our president has decided to wage war on us rather than the virus. And the very same veterans that were ordered to fight this cruel and immoral war are now dying in large numbers in nursing and assisted living homes, along with thousands of other victims. I consider it a hypocritical exercise to see Trump honor veterans today while he watches them die because he has deliberately worked to sabotage efforts to control Cov-19.
So I ask you to remember Vietnam at this time. Remember that it was the poor, working class people and people of color that were drafted and died disproportionally. And realize that the struggles against Trump are at the same time struggles to save the very planet we live on. This is the message that needs to be delivered by us. And one that Joe Biden would be wise to adopt to break through the racial and political divides that are daily promoted by the Trump administration. We must change our ways or perish. Like thousands of other species have. We cannot wait any longer, and we cannot survive if half the country is in denial and lives in a politically created fantasy land. We face and are in fact causing both ecological and climatic disasters.
Make no mistake, Trump and his accomplices are busy daily destroying our nation. And Biden has yet to give an affirmative reason why he should lead the country and where and how he will lead it. (Virtually no one could be worse than Trump.) Or given us something to fight for in the absence of a more grass roots movement (which would have erupted this Spring without the virus) we desperately need and has been dampened down by the virus pandemic.