Letter to the Editors
To the editors:
Greetings
So Draft letters begin. Uncle Sam wants you for cannon fodder, drone operator or other cog in the mass murder machine.
Once upon our lifetime, students
Ah April Fool’s Day: here once again
To all you students paying to attend Reed these days and all of you paid faculty, administrators and staff at Reed College, If you are under age 55 WE were here before you were born, and we left to fight against the WARS, to study Pelopennesian Wars no more. I drove around the Pelopennese two weeks ago, even went through Sparta. Magnificently mountainous and a definite macho vibe. I heard that the Athenians were the bad people way back then. Now it is WE AMERICANS who feed our economy with the blood of millions, while we idle through our hours of countless endeavors and pleasant distractions ignoring each and every citizens responsibility for each and every bullet, bomb, landmine rocket and missel ordered, manufactured and deployed, which finds it’s target, rends human flesh, explodes landscape into rubble, and drives Wall Street in it’s mission of crashing the biosphere. Our species, once sapien, now h. ignoramus.
One only needs to imagine one bomb landing on any one of the campus dorms, as you read this at Reed, or, perhaps more painfully, receiving notice that Napalm has just destroyed your family back home, your neighbors and childhood pet are dead. Someone you love horribly burned, and there is no medical help available. What we felt regarding the people of Vietnam. We felt this again during the 1980s genocide of Central Americans, and the huge profits derived from the long anti-Semitic bush league wars.
You see The 3rd Reich murdered 6 million Semites of Jewish origin, and our 4th Reich murders Semites of Islamic origin. Nazis then Na$i’s now.
Arriving for the first time at Reed in September 1969, some of us had already engaged in the peace movement and identified with SDS. Those very bright kids ahead of us in college already had the intelligence, which had not yet broken widely in the press, that the secret kissinger/nixon plan to end the war involved unspeakable ramping up of bombing campaigns. The x in Tricky Dick's name was being written as a swastika. And little Henry out of Harvard was being identified as a Nazi Jew. At first this seemed a bit much, so in the spare time we found neglecting reading the annual fall parade of Greek lore, we formed a fascism study group and came to understand the nature of the beast not as political science, but as a horrifically twisted flaw in human culture identified in Latin as fascism: how the binding of the new body politic of conquered indigenous peoples subjugated by Roman doctrines enforced by violence (public crucifixion being a particularly persuasive method) resulted in just a generation or two in a society that self-regulated itself in subjugation to Rome, power concentrated among the elite whose orders were followed by soldiers organized to carry out violent campaigns large and small to perpetuate orderly tyrannical rule. Indigenous Homo Sapiens became Homo Domesticatus, a degenerative cultural evolution ever more prevalent today.
But let us, the younger generation we were and the younger generation you are, jump to Palestine and Gaza right now today. How do we succeed in throwing out of office those 535 citizens whose collective criminality shames the suffering of my/our Jewish ancestors beyond belief and tolerance. IF NOT NOW since 2016, like Code Pink since 2001, has met with no definitive success. The screaming of our hearts and minds, well one must learn to manage that without going cynical or it destroys one from within.
The press reports estimates of those dead. But it is those surviving upon which unspeakable suffering is inflicted, with the effective full support of both blood-drenched, pointedly divisive death parties, the blue and the red. For some time We who still are SDS, seniors señoras y señores for a democratic society, survive on our sense of humor, creativity and long-cultivated analysis and vision of how to break and reconfigure the bonds of fascism in concert with our fellow citizens in every congressional district whose vast majority are decent, kind, intelligent humans making what they can in the social and economic conditions of themselves and their families. We see a path to engineering an electoral flushing of all incumbents out of office and electing viable non-politicians to steer our society toward a kinder destiny.
We understand how the initiative and momentum of OUR peace movement circa 1960 to 1984 fell to pieces, and that our expectation that power would shift into our kinder hands around the time we turned 30, was skillfully sabotaged by blue/red connivance and the attrition of our generational endurance. We understand how the encampments on behalf of those millions in GAZA a year ago fade from the ineffectiveness of protest, petition, and all the other tried and failed ways the peace movement has not moved policy for the last five decades.
WE knew how to mobilize a green movement, a no nukes movement, a civil rights movement, even an anti-WTO movement, and when the only action required for what we have up our sleeve with the cards dealt us is each eligible citizen casting their precious three votes no longer to the INcumbency but to our viable Independents drafted to serve the orchestrated about turn of our nation, well, there is no rancor nor struggle involved. There is celebration and the waving of pens mightier than the smoke screens of media chicanery.
That is where our 465 House Band Campaign Bandwagon comes in to play on stages in every district, with music endorsed by local taste and preference. Hey we got the flower power, so making a choice between partying for Peace and Partying for WAR, well that has not really been put to a Vote before. Plebiscite is the term.
Between you and US, your grandparents are the generations of your folks whose votes will flow in the campaign proposals WE espouse to fundamentally improve the future prospects of you, their youngins, and We their old foggies. To relieve the financial burdens of prolonged elder medical expenses and institutional care, well who wouldn't vote for that, at no taxpayer expense even..
In our lifetime, our sick democracy elected 20 years of Bush league tyranny, eight years of London School of Economics-driven neo-colonial Clinton economics, eight years of a most improbable, bright, and eloquent citizen kept on a leash by the Vice President, now known as Genocide Joey, a career procurement senator from DuPont sitting, a lady in waiting, much like LBJ behind JFK, should the bright young man elected onto the throne of presidency get out of line beyond the bloody interests of the league of power elite. We are glad the Obama family survived office, but we see how those eight years were played from the power in the shadows.
Now they have played their trump card twice onto the throne, for their long game of re-establishing aristocratic fascism is engineering Victory over the broken state of OUR 1776 flagship democracy.
Forgotten it seems, in the way we see the cards, that Jokers are Wild, and in the prerogative to freely vote out of office and out of power all members of the Incumbency, and draft in their stead three esteemed local citizens backed by Our Great American Music Party...so put on your dancing shoes or go barefoot, there is a month till May Day. While we failed to launch last summer a scenario We called Electoral College Gambit (a collective chess metaphor, who plays cards anyway, not Us) we have the choreography waiting in the wings, both left and right wings. Music, Song and Dance ...(and sports) might just put United back into meaning something in our starkly divided nation.
We are not tipping our elder SDS 4$PN hand until we have an interested task force on campus, before the Summer break. You are all hanging out on Woodstock SE in the PNW already, and some of us were at the wildly inspiring Woodstock shindig two weeks before arriving in Oregon for the first time in our lives the summer of ‘69.
Reed College in 1969 was Hogwarts, though it was the Tolkien books which made us aspiring Hobbits on our road back to nature, organic farming, and world peace.
It is not late, nor can this never happen. It is now, and if you volunteer for this Peace Draft, expect to also be paid down the line in currency and satisfaction.
Whether you are inclined toward arts or sciences or both, Our 101 course in Political Arts can employ and harness your talents, while leaving you the reins.
We invite you to send your name and contact email to the Quest along with questions you might have… and let Our Party FPN be among the first campus nationwide to catch the virus humanity has been praying for from time immemorial.
oh, and take note : Our pronoun is WE, OUR and US in the U.S. of A-holes.
Whoops, is that too derogatory ? If you are with Us
4 Palestine NOW
4 Peace NOW
4 Planet NOW
4 People NOW
then You are US and like any draft proposition, edit away. We movement elders have a template for transforming the Matrix aimed at voting Peace into Power. Now = SOONER THAN YOU THINK...and 'they' don't see this coming. 'They' unfortunately are right, that it is not coming unless We old campfire Yippies Kindle Y-our Young Flame...and you build the fire...
May your tinder be ever dry
General Her/She
SDS '69
This is no Joke, but when fools become Jokers
they Run Wilde
.......tbc
If you would like to reach out, please shoot an email to tanforanv@reed.edu, and we can put you in connection with Orfu!