Lies must die

It was 40 years ago that I began to awaken, politically, in 1968, the year I graduated from my Minnesota high school. The war in Vietnam was a truly stupid, destructive background to my life from when I was in eighth grade and reading in the newspaper about the domino effect, and why the US needed to stop communism from spreading in Asia any worse than it already had. Some had seen the disaster waiting to happen--certainly John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby were two in American national politics, along with Mark Hatfield from a state that, in those days, I only heard about as spectacularly beautiful--Oregon.

So John Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago and Bobby was taken out 40 years ago this week. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, was Bobby's killer, and the motivation was ultimately attributed to his fixation on Kennedy's vote for some arms sale to Israel. Sirhan Sirhan's journals were found with obsessively repetitive mantra: "RFK must die. RFK must die. RFK must die."

Sirhan Sirhan may have killed a US politician who voted for a military sale to Israel, but he also contributed to a general US citizenry distrust, dislike and disgust for Palestinians who support their armed struggle. Geez, by their standards, Obama should be shot too. Violence can "win" in the short run and lose big overall.

Bobby Kennedy was a good man who was flawed. He worked to elevate the lives of regular folks, he would have ended the Vietnam debacle, he would have worked to more effectively raise economic levels in black communities (which is where I was as a 17-year-old volunteer in Chicago when Kennedy was killed), he was liked and trusted in Native American communities, and he fasted with Cesar Chavez to help strengthen the United Farmworkers Union.

So this year, like every year, is a good year to work to expose the lies and unelect the politicians whose patterns of voting support US wars. This is why I personally am determined to do what tiny bit I can to work against Gordon Smith, who would have been against the war in Vietnam ONLY after the regular citizenry finally rejected the lies of the Lyndon Johnson regime and only symbolically. Smith would have been the antithesis of Bobby Kennedy and Mark Hatfield; he plays at his image of compassionate conservative but the compassionate part is reserved for self-aggrandizing acts of cheap and cynical political theater, such as calling the parents of Oregonians killed as they illegally occupy another country--in a war that Gordon Smith has voted for on virtually every occasion where his vote meant anything.

I guess I'm like a nonviolent Sirhan Sirhan: The lies must die. The lies must die. The lies must die.