Litlebritdifrnt2 wrote:
...
ETA The most powerful song I remember from Ms. Saigon.
In one of the Broadway productions, the first thing after the intermission was a preacher telling the story of the bui doi and asking for contributions to help them (not for real). Its impact on me was as great as this song. I don't know whether it was a variant of this song or an addition to it. I'm not even sure that the sermon was not sung.
In any event, I realized that I had never acknowledged how many children of American fathers are scattered all over the globe. I suppose that this was also true of Roman armies and the Greeks before them. I also suppose that some of their children were treated as nothing more than dust because they were so easily identifiable.
Children are often the victims of war in many more ways than loss of their parents, maiming, or death. When they grow up, why do they not curse us? Instead, they also often go to war.
The
Port Huron Statement was 50 years old just a few days ago. Tom Hayden wrote about it in the Guardian,
"What the Port Huron Statement still has to say, 50 years on: The hopes of Students for a Democratic Society stalled as the 1960s soured. But our ethos of participatory democracy survives". Its opening words still ring for me:
Quote:
We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.
When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people--these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.
As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.
While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal..." rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.
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