November 20, 2002

In this issue

ONE DAY A long, long time ago, when my hair was even longer and more scraggly than it is today and when I used to wear a really beat-up motorcycle jacket and Grateful Dead T-shirts, I was sitting on the 22 Fillmore when some guy in a suit started looking at me and making nasty comments about how "you goddamn hippies should get a job" – and across the aisle, out of nowhere, this woman with white hair who looked like a grandmother told him to shut up.

"Don't be insulting the hippies," she said, loudly, smiling at me. "Those hippies stopped the Vietnam War."

Well, it's a little more complicated that that, and I certainly can't take any credit: In 1972, I was just graduating from eighth grade.

But the woman had a point, and it's one that gets lost a lot: the antiwar movement of the 1960s, which frustrated a lot of activists at the time because it didn't seem to be ending the war right that moment, and which has been criticized since then by a thousand commentators for a thousand reasons (too violent, too peaceful, too wild, too tame, too radical, too disorganized, too this, too that) ... well, when all is said and done, it eventually stopped the war.

There were a lot of factors involved in ending the Vietnam War, and not everything the New Left of that era did was successful, or even helpful. But over time the visible actions against the war – everything from bumper stickers to letter-writing campaigns to giant marches and rallies to, yeah, violence and bomb throwing – had the effect of waking up the news media and then the politicians to the fact that a majority of the people who lived and voted in this country didn't like what was going on.

I remember hearing George Wald, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and professor, speak at a Concord, N.H., rally against the draft in 1980 and remind the tiny crowd of cold college students that in 1964 antidraft rallies and antiwar rallies typically attracted about 50 people. A few years later, numbers like that had four zeros after them.

And already, today, as we report in this issue, there are crowds of as many as 100,000 marching against a war that hasn't even started. It's not all perfect, and there's lots to criticize, but let's remember: it's an amazing start. And anyone who studies history knows that resistance is not futile.