May 21, 2015

Dear Nation,

I know this too long to publish, I'm not even sure if I want it published. But I had to get it off my chest; Eric Alterman is giving me a stomach ache.

I was a student at Columbia U 1966-70 (and after), and a good number of the people who went on to form the Weather Underground were my friends. I came to Columbia as an Army veteran, determined to work against the dark turn taken by the United States while I was in the army: the invasion of the Dominican Republic and the massive escalation of the Vietnam war, both in 1965. We protested, we signed petitions, we withheld federal tax. Some people immolated themselves in public, like Vietnamese monks. Many burned their draft cards. Many fled to Canada. We marched, we demonstrated, we had teach-ins, we marched some more, we went to Washington, we were gassed, beaten, chased. We marched some more, sometimes a quarter-million strong, more likely twice that. At Columbia we occupied buildings on campus (largely because of the university's complicity in the war), we were beaten and arrested, we were charged with felonies, we were jailed. More marches, Kent State, on and on and on.

Why were we so upset? Our own country was killing people, thousands every day, people who simply wanted to live in their own country and be left alone. Bombs were raining down on them, along with Agent Orange and vicious delayed-action anti-personnel weapons. They are still exploding today, and Agent Orange is still taking a horrific toll.

Killing is wrong. Invading other countries is almost always wrong. It goes against everything we were taught in school and Sunday school in the postwar years. Children of the Golden Rule, we were deeply ashamed of our country and felt a terrible guilt about the death of what came to be several million children, women, and men.

How do citizens get their government to stop committing atrocities? All of our protests came to nothing. The war went on and on, it grew, it metastasized. Massive carpet bombing of population centers, utter destruction of the countryside. The Vietnamese were fighting back, but it was a small poor country — one that had never done anything to us and in fact was our ally against Japan in WWII — struggling to defend itself against the greatest power on earth, their puny handheld weapons against our battleships, B52s, jet fighters, helicopters, gunships, artillery, tanks, rockets, chemicals, Claymore mines, and the "Automated Battlefied".

The people who went on to form the Weather Underground wanted to wake the American people up by "bringing the war home". To give them just very small demonstration of what it must be like to have everything blowing up all around you all the time and knowing every day you or your loved ones could be killed at any moment, and nobody would ever be held accountable. They never set out to kill anybody, and to the best of my knowledge they phoned in every bomb to the police in advance. As I recall there was one unintended casualty at a midwest university who was in a building late at night that was supposed to locked and empty. Nobody wanted that to happen.

They used the rhetoric of revolution, and they believed in it because the American system itself had to change if there was ever to be peace and justice in the world, but the urgent matter at hand was to make the killing stop.

Meanwhile, I have never swallowed the story about the West 11th Street townhouse explosion, that Teddy Gold (a good friend of mine) and some others were building bombs to blow up an NCO club at Fort Dix while a dance was going on. This makes absolutely no sense. The Left in those days would never have attacked GIs, spit on them or anything else; a major part of its program was to recruit GIs and veterans into the anti-war movement. An attack like that would have totally discredited whoever did it and made them an instant pariah.

Anyway, those I knew in the Weather Underground were highly moral young people trying to find a way to Make It Stop when nothing else worked. I wasn't there and I only knew some of the ones from Columbia, so it's possible some people went over the edge, but in the end they were doing the only thing they could think of to make the US government pay a price for its wanton slaughter of innocent people and to get some media coverage so Americans might be shocked into thinking about what was going on in their name and maybe doing something about it.

You can call them idiots and crazies but I call them the only ones in this country who had the courage to put their lives and their liberty on the line to Make It Stop, while the rest of us continued the exercise-in-futility that was the antiwar movement. Maybe the Weather Underground didn't stop the war either, but at least they put all they had into it while the rest of us lived our safe lives and Vietnam was a killing field for ten long years, with "collateral damage" in neighboring countries, millions more dead, all our fault.

In 2003, when the US was about to invade Iraq, we tried to stop it. We held the largest mass demonstrations in the history of the planet and George Bush said he "didn't listen to focus groups" and went ahead with his lunatic macho project, the results of which are reverberating and snowballing to this day, hurtling the earth towards Armageddon. After the 2003 protests, it seemed like everybody just gave up because it was useless. The US government does what it wants and large swaths of the planet suffer and burn and die while we go shopping and chatter on Twitter about celebrities. The USA is universally despised and feared, and some day all that we have wrought and continue to wreak is going to come back to us and whatever happens, we deserve it.

Think about this: In 1939 Germany invaded Poland and started rounding up Jews and within a couple years Nazis were all over Europe and millions were dying. Don't you wish some German people had risen up against Hitler to Make It Stop? Would you call them idiots and crazies, even if they blew stuff up? Well, they didn't, and we call them "good Germans".

Frank da Cruz
Bronx NY