Fourth Universalist Society in the City of New York

by Jim Saslow, Fourth Universalist Member

November 11, 2008

     As we all waited breathlessly to see which speech Barack Obama would be delivering to the packed crowd in his hometown of Chicago, TV commentators kept pointing out that Grant Park was the same place where, exactly 40 years ago, young activists during another charged and pivotal campaign had angrily confronted the Democratic candidates — and the riot police. I didn’t need reminding; I’m a veteran of that long-ago crowd, with the memories of tear-gas and shattering glass to show for it. I’m not sorry I went; in the wake of the King and Kennedy murders and the My Lai massacre, someone had to speak up for an alternative to pointless, partisan violence in both Memphis and the Mekong delta. But the unintended consequences of that protest movement have haunted me ever since: we got rid of hawkish Lyndon Johnson, only to see his replacement lose to Richard Nixon. The Aquarian Age of peace and love that we had hoped to usher in turned out a cruel illusion, as the right wing — triumphing in part by whipping up public fears of godless, unpatriotic hippies — assembled the “moral majority” that would shadow the nation’s destiny for most of the next four decades, and ultimately run the country into the ground.
     So there’s a moving symmetry in what happened in Grant Park this week: the acceptance speech, not only of the first president of African descent, but someone who won on an anti-war platform and on the ideal of bringing us all together for the common good. If the past 40 years have been dovish liberalism’s wandering in the biblical desert, Obama has turned out to be Moses, bringing us closer to the promised land of national decency and unity than we’ve been since the Red Sea of intolerance, fear, militarism, and denial closed behind us and cut us off from the corridors of power. Something at least of what my generation struggled for in ‘68 has, at long last, come to pass, and I can scarcely believe I’m no longer the mocked and feared minority.
     I’m a veteran in another sense — and there, too, there’s been an unexpected bit of closure lately, a letting go of some of the sense of banishment and anger that for so long has defined the mood of my deeply disappointed baby-boomer cohort. As the Vietnam War dragged on, I applied for conscientious objector status, on the grounds of both my Jewish upbringing and my adopted UUism, and the army sent me to a rehab hospital in Boston (where I joined Arlington Street, the UU mother church, but that’s another story). So last month I bought a “Veterans for Obama” button. Some would quarrel with my right to use the term, since most of the mailings I get from the Veterans Administration are for things I can’t have. The Supreme Court ruled back during the war that we pacifists weren’t eligible for the GI Bill or other major benefits, because they were a reward for risking one’s life, not a thank-you for years of national service. Never mind that plenty of “real” GIs spent their stints at a stateside desk job, and that the sole dissenter in the case, the famously liberal Justice William O. Douglas, railed that this was the grossest form of religious discrimination.
     But the latest mailing was an application for membership in a discount club called Veterans Advantage, ostensibly open to all ex-service personnel. I sent it in with my Selective Service data and a write-in under “branch of service” as “alternative service, c.o., hospital,” half-figuring that all I’d get for my excluded category would be a nasty note protesting my sissy presumption — but a week later a benefits booklet was in my mailbox. I still can’t get used to flashing this card, prominently labeled “VA,” for special savings at places like Amtrak and Home Depot. I have to keep pinching myself that I’m not, as the Court and the “real” VA have long insisted, an impostor and a shirker, that I did serve my country — by acts of healing rather than hurting — and that for the first time in four decades, I feel just a little bit accepted for who I was then and acknowledged for my modest contribution of time and talent to society. 

      Fifteen percent off national rail tickets ain’t exactly lifetime VA hospital care, but it’s my first few crumbs from a system that now seems a little more able to integrate the kinds of minority values, experiences, and life stories that were once beneath notice and beyond the pale. This election, African Americans feel an unfamiliar elation, a sense of returning to the fold, of finally being welcome for who they are everywhere in our national family. So, in his own individual way, does this onetime campus SDS member and Nursing Assistant. Being a veteran feels good, if the cause you fought for was a good one, and you’ve had some success. I could get used to this. I hope we all do.