Trial by fire hose

By Weekly Archive On Dec 4, 2007

By
Robert C. Koehler Read Spanish Version

"This
is America, get used to it."

A
generation ago — well, two, perhaps — such a comment, surfacing
with malicious anonymity at a Deep South high school, along with
Confederate flags, swastikas and scrawled references to "white
power," would have been meant as friendly advice to uppity
integrationists and racial harmony types to shut up and wise up.

In
the 1950s and ’60s, civil rights activists endured their trial by
fire hose — and, of course, far worse — before they altered history
and made an indelible point or two about justice. They were, in the
main, nonviolent, but that doesn’t mean they were nice, or that they
won a nation over with sincerity and loving smiles. They stood their
ground and paid the price.

I
reminded myself of this the other day, when I read about the grief
and sheer boob-ignorance visited upon the "Peace Shirt
Coalition" at Cocoa Beach (Fla.) Junior-Senior High School.

At
the beginning of the school year, as reported by Orlando’s Channel 6
News, a group of kids began wearing T-shirts hand-decorated with
peace themes every Thursday. They also put peace posters up on their
lockers. Apparently such activities were controversial — like, oh,
sitting down, while black, at a Woolworth’s lunch counter once was —
and pretty soon people started ripping down the posters or defacing
them with swastikas and those other overly familiar, bizarrely
racist-edged expressions of hate. The school corridors became
gauntlets of derision for the "peace kids" — some broke
down in tears — and eventually a counter-group started wearing
Confederate flags to school.

At
first I could hardly manage a thought more articulate than: huh? But
even as I felt a centrifugal spin of incredulity, anger and despair
— how come people hate the idea of peace so much? — I also felt
some deeper click of, oh yeah, this is how it is.

Then
I thought about the young soldier I wrote about last week, Sgt. Brad
Gaskins, whose severe post-traumatic stress disorder, brought on by
two tours of duty in Iraq, went unacknowledged by the military on his
return and drove him to go AWOL. When he was interviewed, finally, by
a psychotherapist, he made a comment I continue to find haunting, and
which sends an echo through the corridors of Cocoa Beach
Junior-Senior High School, whether the peace hecklers know it or not.

"He
wonders," wrote psychotherapist Rosemary Masters, "if God
is punishing him because before he joined the Army he thought of war
as something fun and exciting."

If
this is true, punishment is pending for a few others as well. Our
collective emotional cauldron bubbles with fear and hatred just as it
did 50 years ago. And we remain a victory-smitten, warrior-wannabe
society, seduced and pumped up by the thought of loosing those
emotions and gloriously having it out with some baddie, no matter how
inanely B-movie the notion or how ugly the reality.

The
peace kids innocently tapped into that cauldron. Thus a "Wage
Peace" sign was torn down and replaced with "I Love
America, Because America Loves War." And ominously accompanying
the outbreak of Confederate-flagwear at the school was the slogan,
"This is America, get used to it."

What
a failure of education. Somebody needs to talk to these kids. Not me,
but people like Brad Gaskins and other vets, who have internalized
the hell of war, found themselves being eaten alive with guilt and
unbearable memories and, far too often, have encountered official
indifference and worse on their return home.

For
instance, another story that recently went off like white phosphorous
concerned wounded vets’ receiving bills from the Army for a portion
of their $10,000 enlistment bonuses — because they hadn’t served out
their full terms.

The
Department of Defense, which a few years ago acknowledged (as noted
in a 2003 article in the San Francisco Chronicle) that "it
couldn’t account for more than a trillion dollars in financial
transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes,"
was threatening wounded vets with interest charges on the "unearned"
portions of their bonuses, at least until media attention forced an
embarrassed spokesman to call the whole thing a "snafu."

Well,
this is America. Get used to it.

But
at least that comment cuts two ways. There is a peace movement, and
it won’t go away. This is also America. And when a few kids in peace
T-shirts are able to scare up the undead racism of past generations
and expose the deep irrationality that constitutes much of the
public’s support of war, we may once again be witnessing the
beginning of profound change.

Robert
Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at
Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can
respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site
at commonwonders.com.