October 27, 2012
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Vietnam; The Great Society; American Poverty
I pray for the boys my friends, for they were my school mates, my neighbors, and the way for our country to keep two disasters happening at the same time from a collision course which, together, might have ratted out the inadquacy of President Lyndon Johnsons’s presidential time as being among the more foolish and incredulously fool hearted as American politics can get. From the school girl that I was then to the woman that I would find myself a wife and mother, then it is a searing pain which begins in your chest, then runs down the aching backs of those of us who lived the war which was not declared but was already hiding behind the LBJ’s Great Society era which added up to this, the non-scholarly abstract glimpses which are coming clearer in to view as, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” preaches the Revelations of what was going on in American cities from coast to coast.
Out were going the parental controlled households, and in would be coming a group of young people who had selective tunnel vision of what was happening. They were so young and without any understanding of where their food came from that; “Please, and help us almight God from dealing with such stupidity ever again get enough television time and bad press that the government at its highest levels had a convenient bunch of what would now be, “The old Hippies,” who were going to sing and to dance their way from the VW busses and hitch hikers heading west in an effort to bring the light to the thousands of mothers, fathers, troops, and the few politicians who had already not been corrupted by money, but the peace nicks, freak nicks, folksingers, tambourines, and sharing a joint out in Hiaght and Ashbury were all joining up to, “Spread The Truth, Man,” staging love ins, trampling any hint that some kids had gone off to the jungle to be merciless killing machines — But, :”Peace,” you uneducated masses, for all of this war, hate, and the political nightmare was going to be over as soon as we all, :Quit our jobs, spoke ill of our parents, and, “Just like, :Really Loved!”
I saw so much of this in Washington which I shared in, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” how the young elitist, honest to God, thought they were going to bring an end to The War In Vietnam, and meanwhile their foolish friends back home who were not the college sprivileged in their home towns were out there with our country boys dealing with foot rot, PTSD, fighting with drug addictions and alcohol, and why? — Because it was the only way they could keep from blowing each other’s brains out, for they could get the news from back home of, “Earth Mama,” and Captain Stone Ass dancing around, having great fun and, “Bonding,” with all of that love which was going to stop the war called, “Vietnam.” In retrospect, I saw myself as a peace nick, but I was a woman of The Appalachians who were always the first out there to volunteer. This country may as well have put up a sign then, that if you had graduated from high school, had hopes of working on the land, brought your children up in a Church; “Then, come on baby, because no one does give a damn that you are going to a country to fight in a jungle!” Nothing but an agrarian family and poorer city families dared go to The Washington Mall and burn your drift card, for if you did — You hard working country trash, then you would have just volunteered to be on the next bus out of here. You were apt to develop a liking for Asian rice and noodles in the process; And someone in your ranks could get you some pain killers for an extra week’s pay; But you were worth the price of a coffin to bring you back in, and that was, “If there was enough of your remains to bring you home.
I confess to believing in a peace movement, but I knew that it had to come from a higher place than nifty head bands, free love, and smoking dope; And I will leave your mind open to wondering which of those things I will have on my roster of sins — Just say, “I didn’t inhale.”
Next the Great Society is getting off to an amazing start, for the call to, “Ask what you can do for your country,” usually meant that you were going tto have a year or two being kept fairly safe in a land where mainly college students were going to organize and teach the world to live like us. “Building Bridges,” through youth who would volunteer either domestically or to foreign neighbors made so many mothers and fathers proud, and they were the crowning glory on any resume. VISTA as well as The Peace Corp were our nations finest youth, and by the way — Central to the peace movement, but they would learn from host families and host families from them, and pretty soon we were all going to sing in harmony — Everyone but the family’s who grieved here and in Southeast Asia. God help us! What were we thinking, or were we thinking to polarize elitist kids that much from the troops, the mother’s babies, who had been sent to war in Vietnam. This, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” who could become an ancient spirit on a forest floor was even dumb enough not to get what was going on myself.
We are poor, so let us have a great big war, put these tacky assed bunch of farm folks out there to forget those Agarian lives, and get their assses north to make some iron to make some bullets, to make some bombs. Let’s quietly take what was started in the 1950s to reorganize the population in to even more waves of want and despair. In my dark nights, I can just see Lyndon Johnson waving his hands at me and all the poor on subsistence farms; “Just leave your greassy hands down theere in those hills and hollows, and pretty soon we will have you so broke — You will head north. Pollution from the factories has still through all of these days made the river waters as such you might as well have a big swallow of pure waste, and throw in the poisons which, down the road, are going to leave you with cancer.
I remember back to when I was doing gynelogical tumor care in the hospital which meant horrid deaths for these women, and very few cures, I began to notice one area which popped up again and again, then we were driving back to Washington, and we went through the cities, and all the incredients were there: Chemical factories, sludge dumps, and the mills which have now gone to other worlds, for; “Are they worth saving?” There is an economic dollar figure on every life from generation to generation, but we stopped at a small restaurant there to meet, and their faces would come back to me, and I could feel them like some naked presence, and I would not, could not say a word to my family, but it was hard to eat with all of the memories, all of their faces bursting out with theich sweat, the nausia, and the horrid day when we had to put the odor machine in their room which, essentially, made their rooms smell like moth balls. I, too this day, take some comfort in that scent, for it was refreshing to them as their bodies filled with all of the necrotic tissue which was killing off all the hope they had for life on this earth. I loved those women, and, “I did feel their pain. But in the 50′s and60′s the lliving boys would trickle home, and they needed jobs, so the midwest northern cities had our fathers and brothers, for whom they saw non-union labor, poor pay checks, and all of this had a dreadful task behind it. “Pinkhoneysucle,” calls it, “The death of the Agrarian south; and each year families lost more and more. Canning wss laid aside for freezing, and cheap clothes were making it over our borders, and; the Johnsson/Nixon years would bring to us the beginning of Mega stores and the death of home stores. People who have an extra dollar now are trying to help some of these towns to compete however they can, for mega stores have left us with absolutely no service. Fast food brought us to the pnnacle of, “Death by food,” so, though you are to believe this is The Alice Waters brain child. We were preserving our food and using home goods long before she got her Christmas tricycle. Among the earliest lessons were those of gathering in the food and helping your mother can it, day in and day out. “Appalachians were so isolate that to get through the winter began with each new spring.
It happened though, within that twenty year period, that the older homes died, town centers became ghost towns in the Mountains and valleys. This is serious folks, and we need to talk about it, for if you do not think we can be manipulated in America; Just look what happened to the folks along The Appalachian trails. There is an organic farm movement back on here after half of a century.
Put the puzzle together. The rich educated kids went one way, and the upper class, they went another. We had our attention about the war taken away from the need to get out of it, for kids not even all out of high school could take over the Washington Mall and absolutely turn young service men and women in to the ogrees who caused it all.
Farms were stolen while the little towns to do business were on their last legs. We let ourselves be placed in to so many camps of half truths and sheer supidity that the history books will burst with horrer and humor over the brain dead years. We could make it to the moon during the same time, but Appalachia would become the end but of all jokes. We would look for The Great Society, and in some ways, the Reagen years gave us some of what we had lost, although we have to be the only country in the world who would let a president continue in that capacity when Alzheimers was taking its toll. I do believe that Mrs. Reagen, and the staff that loved him made it possible for President Reagen to finish out his last term.
I thank you for letting me share some of the conclusions which are said in similar ways in, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” and I am playing the race card very gently here, for I believe that even Dr. King and the black community knew that we were all being played to keep the fact that we had gotten in to another war which we could not win; So the news was peppered with domestic devestation. “What was wrong with us then?” “What is wrong now?’ I know that we are in an other war we cannot win. Our cities and towns count on stashes of Marijuana and meth horrors in the news, while we have Americans still dying abroad. It is time to get off this ship of fools and to conclude that war is evil,and it is tearing another age of young mean apart. Some how and some way, then we need to decide what is news, and it should not be a place for Mr. Anderson Cooper to come out of the closet, and it is not time to have our armed forces abroad when people are dying in the streets of America every day, for regular police can no longer handle the problem when the automatic weapons on the street and in stash aways are bigger than any of them. We are praising Lincoln for freeing the slaves when that truely was happening on its own and without all of the death; But war brings the mighty higher, buries the lowly deeper; and maybe we need a new covenant of what makes a hero.
Please, tell me if you believe the internal noise of the mid century years is understood as cover up material for the fact that the world is broke — Literally, we are owned and moved as the richest bring people to do the lowly work, then do you see similarity where we can ask of ourselves to make it clear that we are not as vauously defined again as not knowing when to face that aa world financial crisis is the time for us to make responsible decisions and to how our government we are watching, and we no longer want to be on stage == some under lights, but with most lost in the darkness. We are on alert.
By: Barbara Everett Heintz, Author of , “Pinkhoneysuckle,” Amazon, Kindle Ready, CreateSpace — And welcome all of Europe to Amazon. “Pinkhoneysuckle, the book is a shocking expose’of a 3rd World Hidden In America; Step on board to find us, and Welcome. Comments are welcomed.
