|
|
|
|
Jack Dresser, Ph.D.
Capt., Medical Service Corps, USAR (1962-65)
A Veteran for KerryThe infamous Swift Boat ad attacking Sen. Kerry appeals to the least swift among the voting public. These same limp-souled people – dredged up by the current Bush campaign – were recruited 33 years ago by Nixon and Kissinger, who had identified Lt. Kerry as a dangerously articulate and “Kennedy-like” spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who were camping en masse on the Washington Mall to exercise their well-earned First Amendment rights. Lt. Kerry was one of several leaders, judged the most impressive and invited to testify on behalf of the VVAW by Sen. William Fulbright, a former Rhodes scholar and one of America’s great southern statesmen, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Years later, the same unprincipled right wing propaganda machine attacked John McCain's Vietnam service during his primary contest with Mr. Bush in South Carolina and Max Cleland's patriotism – including his Vietnam service that left him without three of his four limbs – during his Georgia senatorial campaign.
What brazen temerity exhibited by people who both evaded personal risk during the Vietnam war and were AWOL from the moral debate surrounding it! Kerry, McCain and Cleland put their lives on the line while Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and most of the other neo-conservatives hid behind the safety barriers provided them by economic privilege.
Moreover, Lt. Kerry returned to take a strong, unequivocal, highly public moral position on the war, while those in the current administration remained invisible during this tumultuous period of American self-examination. Kerry’s testimony served to accelerate U.S. disengagement from that disastrous war and undoubtedly saved many thousands of lives, both American and Vietnamese, while Mr. Bush remained physically safe and morally disengaged, drinking in an Alabama bar somewhere, having dental work done at public expense, and campaigning for a forgotten Alabama politician. What more do we need to know about the character of the candidates?
There are fundamental psychological differences between those who choose or decline to face self defining challenges. In his book, The Superpower Syndrome, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes the exaggerated aggression with which people may respond to "death guilt" or "survivor guilt" - the knowledge that facing a common challenge others died while you didn't. This is often associated with a sense of "failed enactment" at the moment of truth. When such a wound to self esteem is suppressed, it often becomes “transformed into impulses toward further violence." This may well unconsciously haunt our entire tough talking Republican leadership who hid out while others died in Vietnam.
It is extremely dangerous for the world that history's most destructive military apparatus is in the hands of people lacking in both self awareness and what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a civil war veteran, called "The incommunicable experience of war."
|
to be notified of Museum updates and additions |
and click on submit button |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |