This era’s encampments carry echoes of the “teach-ins” on campuses during the Vietnam War era.
One of the roles we old folks fall into is to wish we could painlessly and conveniently give young people the useful wisdom life has taught us so they won’t have to learn it the hard way.
As a secondary debate swirls up around free speech and how much of it should be allowed — and in what fashion — I see reactions as rude as the walk-out by protesting students before Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement speech at Duke and as violent as the mass arrests at the University of Texas. So did “literature tables” and sign-up sheets for anti-war petitions and other causes in a decade known for its abundance of causes.
Whether the protests ended the Vietnam War any sooner than it would have otherwise remains a subject for vigorous debate. But at least they helped a lot of us to make better arguments. We were fighting, in accordance with the prevailing wisdom, a war against the global spread of communism. But our enemy was fighting what to to them was only the latest stage of more than a century of battles for independence from outside invaders, who by the time I was dragged into it as an Army draftee, had become us.
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