Protesting, Part II

I BELIEVE I WAS IN ninth grade, the same year I joined the "ecology club", when the seniors at our high school staged a walk out in protest of the Viet Nam War. This was when every night on the national news there were films and stories about anti-Viet Nam War protests all over the country, everyday, at some university or other. When it finally came to our high school in conservative, patriotic mid America, I knew we had finally reached the mountain top, and I wanted bady to be there. Problem is, if my parents found out about it, i would be, quite literally, toast, as we say these days. And then to, I had a conservative, patriotic big sister in the same school building, in the twelfth grade. Protesting the Viet Nam War, much as I yearned to do it, simply wasn't in my cards...or genes. I spent the next several decades wondering whether Iwoul ever get my chance to become a war protestor; a silly, needless concern, really, if you consider the frequency and utter reliability with which the United States pursues foreign wars of aggression/imperialism. My chance finally came in early 1991, when the U.S. bluffed its way into a holy war for oil in Kuwait-Iraq. By this time I was teaching college, and felt some of the same old dread of being discovered and reviled, but this time, I said to hell with it, I'll take my chances, and may the devil take the hindmost, as they used to say. I wasn't disappointed. There was a large crowd of us Gulf War protestors, many members of a campus ad hoc group I had formed called "S.A.G.E. (Students Against Gulf Engagement), plus a large number of counter demonstrators,police, and even a few BFI agensts on adjacent rooftops with lapel pins and binoculars. That time, I almost got into a fight, ut that, as they say, is another story...My two all time favorite protests occurred in recent years, and everyone older than grade school will remember them both: The famous (infamous) "Occupy Wall Street" movement of fall, twenty eleven, and the "Black Lives Matter" protests of summer, twenty twenty, inspired by the murder of George Floyd. I loved, and will always love these events because they both were noble crusades against wrong, as all protests should be. And, once again, I participated in both, though not extensively. My fondest desire is that the popular protests ongoing in Iran and China would coalesce and grow into a world wide protest movement against the status quo - the status quo wherein a few ultra wealthy folks possess most of the world's wealth, while millions of people go hungry, the environment continues to collapse, and war, violence, and disease run rampant. And so forth. That status quo.