1407 How anti-war people kill

In the early 1980s I worked for a young Jewish woman on a JTPA (Job Training Partnership Act) Grant. She was a Republican and I was a Democrat, but that didn't bother either one of us because we had certain things in common--she was my aerobics instructor and I was accustomed to following her orders. I can't remember exactly what my job title was--something about program--but basically I wrote government documents. I even wrote speeches for her boss (later killed in an airplane crash). It was one of the best jobs I ever had, and she was an outstanding boss.

Her family comes to mind when I hear and see the anti-war protestors, all those dear folk who want to "bring the troops home" because "Bush lied." The naive do-gooders who light candles and string origami birds to take down to the lakefront on hot summer nights. The information that led us into this war was disseminated in the 1990s--I've seen John Kerry and John Edwards and Bill Clinton's names attached to WMD memos. But, that's not as important to me (if it was misinformation in 2002, it was misinformation in 1999) as the number of lives President Bush has saved and the number he as liberated from tyranny.

The protests bring to my mind those of the 1930s--before my time, of course. But I love old journals, and our public library had old bound volumes of Life, Look and Time, and the university too had acres of old musty journals, some unabashedly socialist and communist. It's possible they are gone now--replaced by unbrowsable digital formats where the agonized faces of those fleeing Hitler long before the US entered the war aren't so moving.

"Student organizing was one of the American Left's most successful areas of political activity during the Great Depression. Under the leadership of Communist and Socialist undergraduates, the campus activists of the 1930s built the first mass student protest movement in American history. During its peak years, from spring 1936 to spring 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 collegians (about half of the American student body) in annual one-hour strikes against war. The movement also organized students on behalf of an extensive reform agenda, which included federal aid to education, government job programs for youth, abolition of the compulsory Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), academic freedom, racial equality, and collective bargaining rights." Encyc. of American Left

Yes, "we" Americans knew what was going on--our press was covering it, but our anti-war forces were very powerful. Just like today. Our politicians were timid and concerned about their legacies. Just like today. We all know what is behind their protests, don't we? Sort of a self-hatred, isn't it? Hitler was marching into poor little Poland the month I was born. I'm sure my 27 year old mom read about it in the newspapers as she wondered what was going to happen to her little brood (then three), because you see, everyone knew. It was no secret.

Fast forward to my 1983 job and my great boss. She told me one time that her in-laws had each lost four children and a spouse in Nazi death camps. They met (widowed and childless) after the war in a camp awaiting relocation to the United States. They married, resettled here, started a new life and had two more children. They have a lot to be thankful for, no thanks to the anti-war protesters of the 1930s.

And so I think about those two brave people (I met them once at their grandson's bris) when you light your protest candle.