During the civil rights campaign, there were debates about tactics that concerned how arrests were removing leadership from the campaign and potentially injuring its effectiveness. Of course, we were blessed with Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but things were not always that clear or successful.

I do have my arrest record and seek to make it meaningful and empowering. I am in a position to speak publically, and this can be a valuable part of my witness. But I am very careful with arrest, and continue to address the balance between its usefulness for the movement or its becoming simply attention getting and ego involvement.

(The above was taken from my Comment on http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/04/making-our-arrests-count/  )

A key issue for Washington and the Founding Fathers was to avoid any standing professional army, in contradistinction to the British Empire.  We were volunteer citizen soldiers, pulled temporally away from the plow. Incidentally, these bonuses were paid in Continental currency and cost the government money they did not have, so that eventually the government defaulted on its debt to these soldiers. However, as professional soldiers registered for the duration of the war, they had no legal recourse and were not free to leave. But eventually the revolutionaries won at Yorktown, with the help of the French, and the war was over. Or, as the British and Europeans would say, the French won at Yorktown with the help of the revolutionaries, and the war was over. The solders eventually were paid with land that the government acquired by the Treaty of Paris.

So now it’s 2012 and visitors get a revised history touting the value of a professional standing army to win and defend our freedom. What a propaganda piece for our current endless war and the war on terrorism.

Well, duh…of course. As was later revealed, this was all done under the orders of the President, with the requirement that there be “plausible denial” when the truth was revealed.  This was when I realized that Presidents not only can lie as much as anyone, but that, in order to become President, it helps to be an effective liar. And that’s when I began to lose confidence in what had become of our “American Way” of government.  This, in conjunction with My Lai (pronounced My Lie) –and the lies told Congress regarding the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that justified the start of the Vietnam War, led me to understand that , in war, the first casualty is truth. And today we have a state of permanent war and thus a government of lies that includes spying on those who might reveal these lies in the service of truth. Government by the people is impossible without the truth – voting becomes simply a sham.

Incidentally, when Nixon later bombed North Vietnam prior to the 1973 Peace Settlement, he justified the bombing by saying that it showed resolve and brought the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table in Paris. Well, yes, except that the negotiations continued with no significant concessions offered by the North Vietnamese and that we accepted the Paris Peace Settlements under essentially the same terms that had been offered prior to the bombing. The bombing was for the United States public, to show that we could act tough (ah, the American Way, again), and contributed nothing significant to the final settlement. But that’s not how Nixon would spin it.

References available.

My life?? I came of age when the Space Race was going full tilt. There was an enormous amount of new money and a raft of new science programs proposing to spend it. The University I attended as an undergraduate was in the middle of this wild race, and as in any uncontrolled new race, there were many accidents and mis-endeavors. In my experience these new science and research endeavors were so badly executed that this came close to turning me off to education all together. On the other hand, while doing my graduate work I was totally supported through my mentor’s grants, coming from the NSF and the U.S. Navy. The interesting thing is that, at the time, I had no idea of how my life was being affected/manipulated by the politics of the Cold War. Was it just chance that my physics and calculus courses seemed to be full of examples that involved intercepting space vehicles?  I was offered an opportunity to do my own research for NASA after receiving my Ph.D , but by then I had finally begun to understand what was happening and declined.

Oh, and just to make clear what this Education Act was really all about (the cold war, national defense and all that), a major feature of the Act was the (in)famous Loyalty Oath that was required of all those who directly received these grants.

JUST SAY NO. If I’m cut or broken, they get a chance to patch me up, but that’s it. My recent Facebook post on this article was the following:   I remember an occasion as a child when I witnessed a curmudgeonly old family friend saying he avoided doctors and pills. He grew his own vegetables, ran the Boston marathon annually, and lived into his 90’s. It seemed amusing then. Now I sort of idolize him. I could say something very similar about my grandfather, except unfortunately he didn’t live in Boston, but fortunately he was still chasing the girls (to the embarrassment of my aunts) into his 90’s. Maybe that’s what did him in prematurely (he didn’t make it to 100), but that’s okay under those circumstances.