I’m sitting on a perch overlooking the Hudson River. Freight trains pulling tremendous half-mile long lines of cars up the west side and passenger routes rolling up and down the east side.
I’m reminded of a day in May 1970, sitting on the opposite side of the river. A kid named Danny and I climbed up in a fire tower to smoke weed and watch the river, talk about the draft and the war in Vietnam and all the protests. It was the day after the four kids were killed at Kent State by Nixon’s National Guard. I was just a kid too, maybe twelve. Earlier this morning, I saw the news that the cops are starting to now aggressively remove protesters from the 2024 college campus protests against the Israeli/Gaza war.
It’s all so goddamn complicated and it hasn’t gotten any easier or clearer since 1970. I’m here watching the same river flow just as it was fifty years ago and I’m just as worried and sad now as I was then.
I’m worried as the date May 4th approaches that the protests will over spill into violence and shooting. It’s just a creepy feeling I’m sitting with. Because nothing changes sometimes and everything changes sometimes, but human nature doesn’t seem to change at all.
I suppose the common thread here is we all hate war, at least any sane person hates war, and we want to speak out and protest that war, but in large-scale protests things get heated and tempers flare and before you know it, there’s a small-scale war all its own and people die. Nothing ever changes and nobody wins. Nobody really ever wins a war. Somebody just loses less.
The fact is never lost on me that the most anti-war guys I’ve ever known were the guys I knew who saw the most brutality in war. Not many of them were much for protesting, they just wanted to be left alone with their nightmares.
It’s odd to have lived my entire life in essentially the same place, the Hudson Valley, and revisit places I went to escape reality so many years ago and think about how much has changed and how little anything has changed.
We all say we hate war, but we seem, as a species, to be damn good at it.
I hope these protests end without bloodshed, and the war ends, and the specter of Kent State is just the worries of an old man who thinks too much.
That’s all I’ve got for this week. Here’s a book giveaways and contest… don’t forget to click the image to open the pages.
Stay safe, it’s getting weird out there.
Bill
It's a sad world we live in Bill. The "United" Nations has agreed in principle, to allow Palestine full membership. The only countries Palestine is united with are those also governed by terrorists groups. These countries live for war, not peace, and have no place in the United Nations. America, even though refusing anymore weapons aid to Israel, still stuck by them and voted NO. I wish I could say that Australia did the same but I fear our politicians are more concerned about how the rest of the world views us, than what is actually right and just. While Hamas rules in Palestine, they have no place in the UN.