by Jack Lee
Another Memorial Day has come and gone and we were reminded once again of the high price paid to have this country with all its freedoms. Funny thing about freedom, it’s like air, you really don’t appreciate it until you don’t have it anymore. In America I think too many of us take our freedoms for granted. Like free speech, freedom of religion, freedom to associate with whom we choose, freedom of the press or even freedom to vote. The latter one gets less frequently used with every passing election, I’m not sure if that is an abuse or a neglect of freedom, but whatever it is it’s not helping us be a better representative democracy.
Ironically few inalienable rights get abused more than our every day freedoms we take for granted; some people are always pushing the limits, for instance… the freedom of radicals to protest and make arces out of themselves while calling for the downfall of things we hold dear. Seems like we wind up spending more time defending the abusers of freedom than we ever do supporting the defenders of freedom. We like to say as long as the abusers are around then we know we’re still free. Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.
The older and wiser among us aren’t usually given to abusing freedom, have you noticed? That’s the job of fools and youth. I guess the older folks have lived long enough to have learned from their mistakes and seen enough of life to know when not to abuse their freedoms; you hardly ever see old people hurling rocks at a police line or carrying a signs that say “Impeach Bush” or “No Blood for Oil”! (If pump prices keep going up I think that last one will be changed to, “Take Their #@% Oil”)
I have a healthy respect for our freedoms and I always have. I was raised after WWII in the baby boomer generation. We grew up under the guidance of people who just won the greatest war in human history and we lived in the richest nation in history with the highest achievements in education, science and domestic production. It was a good time back then, like the movie “Happy Days”, fast cars, cheap gas and rock and roll. We didn’t even hear about marijuana until I was a senior in high school. Then a war started in a Southeast Asian in a little country called Vietnam. We never heard of that either, but we were about learn and learn we did, about a lot of things; the age of innocence was over.
Many of my friends came back from this war scared forever, others just never came back. During a small part of this time I served on a couple of Navy ships, one was actually headed for Vietnam and we got as far as open water just outside San Francisco and the darn thing blew a main water line, so we turned around with our cargo of nervous young soldiers and headed back to port. They took a plane over and we stayed with the ship. I couldn’t wait to get off that rust bucket and so I took a transfer to a “Special Projects” ship that patrolled the DEW line in the Pacific, we didn’t do anything except make a hole in the water. I should have stayed on the troop ship.
But, back to freedom or more appropriately the abuse thereof, that was the 60’s and if you’re not old enough to have lived it, let me tell you it was just as wild as what you’ve heard. We had too much of everything and appreciated almost nothing. It was a time of excesses, Timothy Leary told us, “Tune in, turn on and drop out” and many did and never came back. We had a lot of causalities in the 60s’ and not just from war.
Most of the people my age were in college, dodging the draft or in the military, LSD was everywhere, free love was in too and AIDS, well, AIDS wasn’t to show up for almost another 15-20 years! This was a time of experimentation and the age of revolution, we had the “Black Panthers”, Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, etc. They were in the headlines any given week and these guys were certified bomb throwers and worse! We also had “The Weather Underground”, “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS), oh and that particular group was anything but democratic! They were basically anarchists, socialist or communists looking for a fight with “the man”. Our freedoms gave them cover so they could do more damage than they should have in a less tolerant, less free country.
So, it’s safe to say I saw my fair of abuses when it came to our every day freedoms in the 60’s, from riots at Berkeley all the way to Watts. How I survived those times is a story in itself, but I did and by the early 70’s I somehow found my way back into uniform…this time as a cop. I stayed in law enforcement until I retired with injuries nearly 16 years later. That took me out of military reserves too. A lot of time passed as I healed up mentally and physically, and then we had another war, this time in Iraq. And then a return to finish what we didn’t do in the first round and you know that story. Thanks to a protracted engagement and some serious manpower shortages even an old guy like was needed. I had the right experience and the right skills. I got a medical waiver and went back in for one last time… I’m out in 2011….sound almost like a prison release date doesn’t it? But, I don’t think of it like that at all, this is privilege for me and I’m enjoying it more now than ever before.
Maybe this explains why I have such a healthy respect for our freedoms, I don’t know? Whatever it is, somehow I do feel very strongly about our freedoms, and about those who would usurp or take them away. Especially I worry about dirty politics. This is a frontal assault on our freedoms and threatens them more than any bomb toss’er of the 60’s. When it comes to writing about politics now, I’m driven by my passion and bound by my honor, to report things as I see them and thereby make the most of my freedom while I still can…while we still have them.
I’m glad I have a friend like Tina to capture feelings and mark moments like Memorial Day. Tina and I share a lot of the same life experiences and history and that’s really helpful too! Now without going into, uh… her age, I’ll just say she can barely remember the 60’s, yet she can still relate. lol I hope you’ll also read her article “As the Sun Sets on This Memorial Day 2008” I thought it was great! The funny part is we both thought of doing the same story at the same time. Well, what else would expect from like minds! lol