With the elections roughly 6 months ago, we would do well to remember that that an anti-fascist, anti-Trump election coalition includes Liz Cheney on one end and Angela Davis on the other and tens of millions of people in between. It isn’t a coaliton of the left or a coalition of the left and progressives or a coalition of left, progressive, and liberal people.

To narrow its reach is to a prescription for defeat in November. Of course, struggle within this broad and diverse coalition goes on. It would be politically harmful if that were not the case. But this dynamic should take place in the context of the unity imperative if we hope to win in November and advance class and democratic interests beyond November.

Memorial Day(I post this on my blog every Memorial Day to remember my two friends who died in the Vietnam War. SW)

Today, I will again drink a glass of beer in memory of my two friends and their comrades who died in Vietnam.

I honor them without honoring the unjust war in which they fought. I don’t know their reasons for joining the military, maybe it was simply that the draft gave them no choice, but it really doesn’t matter now. What I do know is that their lives were cruelly cut short.

As a young peace activist in the late 60s, I probably didn’t always make a distinction between the soldiers fighting the war and the war itself. The soldier and the general were equally responsible as I saw it. But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and, when necessary, make war.

Ricky and Cotter were near the bottom of the food chain of war making, nothing but cannon fodder. They were working class kids whose lives didn’t count for much in our government’s war plans. Neither was born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is why they ended up with a gun in their hands, far away from their hometowns.

I will always wonder what kind of lives they would have lived had they safely returned. With no hero’s welcome, no counseling waiting for them, no easy slide into a well paying job, I can’t help but wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

After all, they were not that much different than me, and I have no confidence that I could have. It was hard enough to grow up at that time without a tour of duty in Vietnam on my emotional resume. I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish their lives hadn’t been senselessly erased doing things that no one should do. I wish they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies.”

I wish they could join me for a beer today, although knowing them a single beer wouldn’t quite satisfy them. Or me.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well their comrades who also never made it back from Vietnam. Both deserve to be honored.

Finally, I like to think that the three of us could clink glasses to the people of Vietnam who suffered so much during and after the war, and are now rebuilding their country in conditions of peace. Maybe that would be too much to expect. Unfortunately, I will never know. They will join me only in memory this afternoon, as I wash down a glass of beer.

The brazen bullying of the Trump administration toward Cuba makes me wistful for the days — the era — of the Soviet Union. It acted as a counterweight to the aggression of U.S. imperialism toward states pursuing a non-capitalist path of development — Cuba, Vietnam and others — and movements fighting for national liberation in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

The decision of the Roberts’ Court striking down a voting map in Louisiana that allowed Black people a smidgen of political representation in Congress — similar challenges are going on in other Southern States — should be an obvious and instructive example of how the struggle for Black equality, political and otherwise, should be a political imperative of the larger working class and democratic movement if those movements hope to restrain and ultimately decisively defeat Trump and the entire MAGA movement and move to higher ground.

And yet that isn’t always the case. For some on the left it is considered enough to speak the language of class, working class, and class struggle in their commentary at the present conjuncture. The special role of Black workers, Black people, and the struggle for Black equality in the present moment, not to mention at every stage of class and democratic struggle up to and including the struggle for socialism, too often goes unmentioned. And that is a moral, strategic, and ultimately self defeating mistake.