I won’t pretend to know why China’s leader Xi Jinping is tightening control over Hong Kong at this moment, but it strikes me as wrongheaded and shortsighted for any number of reasons, not least making global cooperation more difficult at a moment when a pandemic and economic implosion, a warming planet, and the danger of new round of nuclear weapons buildup are begging for such cooperation.

I would add that China in its own interest should do nothing that might give Trump an issue to reverse his falling polling numbers in his match up against Joe Biden. Nothing good for China will come from a second Trump term.

One final thing: actions and policies that reinforce the perception that socialism is anti-democratic and authoritarian are harmful to socialism’s prospect here and elsewhere. Gorbachev was right years ago when he said “more democracy, more socialism.”

Much more could be said, but I’m sure others who follow China much more closely than I do will shed light on this matter.

Move on up

He ain’t human, he ain’t kind. I can’t come up with the words to capture how indecent and amoral Trump is. And to think that many people support him.

Remembering my Uncle Leo who served in the Navy in WWII. Came home at war’s end and found work in the post office. He and his wife didn’t have children so he took a special interest in his younger sister’s three children, myself and my two brothers. And when she died at a young age, he, along with my elderly grandmother, helped to fill the terrible void in a devastated family and home. He has been gone for a long time now, but he still lives in our memory. We will never forget.

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 lift a pint of ale 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 what their reasons were 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 unnecessarily 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 make war.

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 make war.

Ricky and Cotter — my two friends who lost their lives in Vietnam — 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 in no small measure they ended up with a gun in their hands so far away from where 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 if wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

I easily (perhaps unfairly) doubt it, because each of them was not that different from me, and I have no confidence at all that I could have made that transition. It was hard enough to grow up at that time, even without the ghastly and up close bloodletting of Vietnam on my emotional resume.

I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish that their lives hadn’t been cut short doing things that no one should do. I wish that they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.

I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies, my friends.” I wish they could join me at the Bronx Ale House today for a pint in their honor, although knowing them, I suspect, a single pint wouldn’t quite satisfy them, or me for that matter.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well as to their comrades who 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 who 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. I wish it were different, but I will treasure their memory anyway, as I wash down my pint of ale.