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Viet Nam and IraqApril 4 2006My junior year in high school, early '70s in Fort Collins Colorado, was in the brand-new Rocky Mountain High School. We didn't have a school mascot, administration wanted us students to pick one. My friends and I proposed the Oysters. Think about it...the "Rocky Mountain Oysters". Administration didn't even let us on the ballot, despite their claims of an open & democratic process. Oh well, we were just long-haired freaks. The HS quickly became "The Lobos". The Vietnam War was on, the culture of the sixties was beginning to end, young people of my generation venerated independence, irreverance, and pot was seemingly still approved of by mainstream culture, even if the "Silent Majority" wasn't on board. One day my really cool History teacher, a long-haired blond guy, invited us to debate current issues. We started with, should we be in Vietnam? Each "side" would get an opening, then 2 rebuttals, and each side needed to select someone to speak for the opening and each rebuttal, and yes we could switch people for each "argument". I was against the war, but I had conflicting feelings. Because I'm somewhat ornery and also a ham, I joined the pro-war side, suspecting there wouldn't be many of my fellow students there, and I could stand out. The teacher also sat down on the pro-war side, perhaps thinking (correctly) that there might not be many students there. One other guy joined Teach & I, he quickly confessed he was anti-war but that he mainly wanted to piss people off; he was a typical archetype of The Rebel. Teach wouldn't say if he was pro or con. The other 20-plus students were on the opposite side of the room. The three of us put our heads together. The Rebel didn't have much to contribute, Teach mostly grinned and helped draw more ideas out of me. We had our opening argument, and I committed myself to justify a war that I actually opposed. We "the pro side" went first. "We need to be in Vietnam. The Domino Theory might be right or wrong, but more importantly, we need to stand up for Freedom. "The North Vietnam government is supressing their people's free speech, control over their own lives, their ability to earn a living. It is a dictatorship. "We stood by in the opening years of World War II and we later discovered the Holocaust, the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews, Gypsies, and others. Maybe standing up for the rights of human beings in Vietnam is a bad strategic move, the wrong place or the wrong time, but I do not want to let dictatorships continue to suppress and murder their peoples. "We are free in the United States. We even get to debate things like, should we fight this war? The Vietnamese people can't do that. "Again--this might be the wrong time and place. But we have to try." I had something like four minutes, so obviously I said a lot more words than the above. But you've got the essence. The anti-war spokesperson, a tall, slender, attractive young blonde woman sporting hip-hugger jeans and a bare midriff came forward to give the anti-war viewpoint. Her mouth opened...then closed...then did both again. She whirled back to face the 20-plus students behind her. "I can't argue against that!" she shouted. I won't and maybe can't describe the pandemonium that ensued. A good portion of their four minute opening time disappeared in heated discussion, and none of their rebuttal spokespersons made a dent in our pro-war arguments. I just kept repeating myself each time it was "our turn". Those folks never recovered from their initial spokesperson's reaction to my opening. Here's today's crazy maker. I am very anti-Bush and anti-Iraq-war, but as I write this column, I'm wondering. We have a huge cultural clash, and I believe a huge evolution in humanity, happening. Some hundreds of years ago, the Islam world was much more spiritually advanced than the Christian world; now I think it's reversed. Our attack on Iraq may not be a very wise tactical move (wrong place, wrong time), but I believe "The West" and this conflict is humanity's way to open up Islam culture. "Bull In A China Shop" fashion, oh yeah. I won't accuse Bush or his people of showing intelligence or enlightenment. Clumsy or not, this war could be part of a cultural reassessment within the Moslem world. The U.S. is losing significant military personnel, but it's much less than the normal, innocent Iraqi civilian population being ravaged by the terrorists. Does the blame lie on the terrorists, or the U.S. intervention? As clumsy as U.S. intervention is, I have to say the terrorists are responsible for the civilian deaths. And on the other hand, this war seems to help the Moslem radicals to enroll new adherents and fine-tune terrorist tactics. I saw a great bumper sticker recently. "We are making enemies faster than we can kill them." Time will tell. It don't look good right now, but at least we may have initiated an internal debate within the Moselm world. |
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