(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 aggressive and 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 so 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 killing of two young Jews, one American, the other Israeli, barely into the springtime of their lives, should be loudly condemned. As we learned from Martin Luther King, the stealing away of innocent lives, young or old, no matter what the circumstances, has no justification.

It isn’t a coincidence that this fatal attack takes place at a fraught moment in which anti-semitic attacks are rising worldwide. These attacks are, in part, but only in part, the result of the punishing genocidal war, waged by the Israeli miitary and Netenyahu government against the people of Gaza.

In any event, such deadly actions should be repudiated and the killer should be brought to justice. That Trump and the MAGA movement are demogogically and unashamedly portraying themselves as opponents of anti semitism shouldn’t take away from the reality of its growth at this moment and the imperative to challenge it wherever it arises.

In his White House meeting today with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump once again deployed white racist grievance to falsely accuse the South African government of sanctioning genocide against white South African landowners. This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last time that Trump appeals to his MAGA supporters along racist lines. It is, after all, a staple and organizing core of his (and MAGA’s) politics. Which is all the more reason that this racist spectacle and national embarrasment should be widely and unequivocally condemned.

The main fault line in politics today is between the Trump regime and a far flung multi class, peoples coalition challenging that regime. This is the strategic matrix from which everything else — allies and alliances, forms and issues of struggle, demands, etc — flows.

Such a strategy abhors political posturing and narrowly constructed politics, while insisting on sustained initiative, breadth of approach, and tactical flexibility. It is always helpful to remind ourselves that the coalition reststing Trump and the MAGA movement stretches from Angela Davis to Liz Cheney.