When I woke up on the ground in Potomac Park and rolled over in my sleeping bag, it took me a moment to realize the lub-dub I felt was not my heart but helicopters overhead.

I’d ridden in the back of a U-Haul truck for twelve hours with 20 other people to get to Washington, DC. When we finally crawled out of the truck into the sunlight, it was Saturday, a beautiful day, a festive day. Under the obelisk of the Washington Monument, in what had been rechristened Peace Park, a sea of some 35,000 bodies sprawled out on blankets in a blue haze of pot smoke. Phil Ochs was there, and the Beach Boys, and Country Joe and the Fish (“One, two, three, what are we fighting for?”).

“If the government doesn’t stop the war, we will stop the government” was the protest slogan for May Day 1971. The plan was to bring the city to its knees on Monday morning, to snarl traffic and cripple the war machine. Larger than any civil action organized by Ghandi or Martin Luther King, the demonstration had been brought on by events the previous year that made it seem to me and everyone else I knew that the Vietnam War would never end.

Nixon had authorized the invasion of Cambodia in May of 1970, escalating the conflict and ensuring the continued procession of body bags. And later that month, at Kent State, National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. Ten days after that, two more students were dead and twelve wounded at Jackson State. By the end of 1970, most of the country’s student population had taken to the streets in protest.

 

 That Sunday morning as we slept in Potomac Park, Nixon preemptively sent in the helicopters, along with a heavily armed force of metro police and National Guard in numbers more in line with an invasion of Hanoi than with the dispersal of student demonstrators. Nearly half of the protesters fled that Sunday morning, and I fled, too. Who was I to bring down the government? I was nobody—just a little hippie chick who worked in the kitchen of a hippie restaurant, washing dishes and frying up vegetables to put over the brown rice.

So now . . . it’s the Fourth of July. My skinny son is in the parade, in the high school marching band. He plays the sousaphone, that most cheerful of instruments. As I wait in the crowd, the antique cars and the Shriners on their clownish motorcycles go by, and the Recycling Brigade and the Gay Pride group with their colorful banner. Little kids fly after the candy politicians throw into the crowd from their convertibles and squeal when the fire fighters shoot them with squirt guns. The float carrying the Veterans of Foreign Wars passes by, and the flag, again and again.

Whenever I see any kind of martial display, I can’t help thinking of the National Guard in my own home town, blockading the main street through campus with their jeeps and concertina wire. I can’t help thinking of the helicopters and police in full riot gear in Potomac Park. I know what I know--that governments can and do kill their own children for speaking out, and that when they do, it’s wrong. It was wrong to shoot students at Kent State, and it was wrong to send tanks into Tiananmen Square. It’s wrong right now, to club young people over the head in the streets of Tehran.

But today I'm not looking for trouble.  So as the flag goes by and I hear the national anthem, I pretend that I am a visitor from a foreign country, a stranger in a strange land. I show respect, but I do not believe. I stand, but I do not sing. Instead, I stare straight ahead as the parade passes, yearning to see the glint off the bell of the sousaphone, hoping to catch just a glimpse of my son.

  

U P D A T E

The Washington Post reports that Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, died this morning, July 6, at age 93. McNamara is considered the chief architect of the war--though in a later memoir, he expressed profound regret for his role. He is the subject of the brilliant documentary The Fog of War. I highly recommend it.