I was for it.  After all, we were America, the superpower, and if the President said we had to fight inconsequential people in a faraway land to stop Communism, we needed to do it.  Who knew better than the government?

That was back in ’65.  Or ’66.  When a military career was still an option.  I remember visiting the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and my dad saying he had a connection, maybe he could get me in.  My dad always said he knew someone.  But it was rarely the right person.

But by time I was ready to go to college, my parents had done a 180.  They didn’t want their little boy’s ass shot off.  They certainly didn’t want him to be the only Jew in a Christian school, although the truth of the Air Force Academy didn’t come out for decades.

You see it suddenly appeared the war wasn’t winnable.  And maybe the Domino Theory was wrong.  Maybe we could leave Vietnam, stop killing innocent people, and Khrushchev’s descendants would not only not bang their shoes on desks, they wouldn’t take over the world.

I can’t tell you when it happened.  Sometime in ’66 or ’67.  But I became against the war.

At first it was peer pressure.  You know, those kids in school who you think you’re friends with who suddenly have a contrary opinion? And then my mother…  She was always a liberal.

But everybody else came later.

It was such a confusing time.  With school protests.  Bombings even.  But all we knew is more and more people died and we were no closer to victory.

If you think there’s political chaos today, you didn’t live through the sixties.  It was generational then, the youngsters against the oldsters.  Today it’s about the haves versus the have-nots.

Don’t tell me protest has no power, that the youth don’t count, that musicians are purely entertainers.  All three persuaded Johnson not to run for President in ’68.  All three helped stop the war in Vietnam.

My point is we started out a divided country, and as time went by the movement became a conflagration.  Or, as Laura Nyro sang, we had to save the country, we couldn’t study war no more.

Income inequality is today’s Vietnam.  There are very few rich people.  But there are so many who believe one day they too will be rich. They don’t want to believe the opposite, because then how do they soldier on?  All they’ve got is their faith, give that up and they’ve got no hope.

But the way you create change is not by pandering to the scared and the ignorant.  It’s by standing up and educating them on the issues.  By time we hit 1970, everybody grew their hair long, when that was a political statement, war protests drew Woodstock numbers.  Hell, if you wanted to win the Presidency in the 70’s, you had to align with rock stars.

I can handle the hate.  Because statistics don’t lie.  And the mark of a smart man is someone who weighs the evidence and changes his mind when he’s wrong.

I was wrong about Vietnam.  Instead of fighting ad infinitum, I advocated bringing the boys back home.

I’m advocating a social safety net.  If we don’t take care of the poor, what kind of society do we have?

But I’m also advocating the American Dream.  I want to believe if you work hard you can be as rich as anybody, that you can live the same lifestyle.  This was true in the sixties.  Sure, a star might be able to stay in that hotel for a week instead of a night, but no one flew private and no one lived in a gated community, we were all in it together.

We’re still all in it together.  We live in a society.  And we won’t have a productive society if the best and the brightest all go into finance, a sphere that ruined the world economy and was bailed out by the government and rewarded itself with bonuses.

I can understand you disagreeing with me if you got that bonus.

But if you have no health care, if you have trouble making ends meet, maybe it’s time to realize it may not be your fault.  Maybe the game is rigged against you.

I’m not saying we should cast aside personal initiative, that we should all be compensated equally, I’m just saying that no one makes billions without having customers.  If the public is paying your bills, don’t you have a responsibility to the public?

Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don’t.

But pay attention to this issue.  It’s the defining question of our generation.

And you can read the "Vanity Fair" article here:

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

From: Jeff Angell
Subject: Re: Vietnam

From a havenot, in the early seventies a laborer on a construction site could afford a house a new car and his wife could stay home with the kids if she so desired. In the late 80’s or early 90’s an indie band could tour and make it work cause gas was less than a dollar.

Now a laborer lives in an apartment with a bunch of other laborers and they don’t have a chance. Neither does the indie band cause gas is $4 something a gallon and the clubs are paying the same as they were back then. The truth is the dollar ain’t worth anything anymore. You know what is? Time. Material things in the digital age are a lot like the dollar.

A song can say as much in three verses as a novel does in 300 pages because of what it leaves to the imagination. Imagination will always be the best thing going. I’d rather be a havenot with an imagination than some rich dude without vision.

That’s why the investors always try to move to the artsy part of town. They wish they had that imagination. Then they buy it up and what happens to the neighborhood? It becomes sterile casue all the artists can’t afford to live there anymore so they just go make some other neighborhood a better place to live.

Somebody smart said a life without struggle isnlt worth living. Here’s to the struggle.