Zen Buddhism and Martial Arts
Home » Literature Archives » A Possible Reason For Commemorating Highway Signs
A POSSIBLE REASON FOR COMMEMORATING HIGHWAY SIGNS - PART 2
by Ming Zhen Shakya
After France had taken the French out of "French-Indo-China" the political situation in South Vietnam steadily worsened. The Roman Catholic leaders of South Vietnam persecuted Buddhists; and Buddhist priests protested the harsh treatment by immolating themselves at street corners. The images were stunning, but we did not understand the martyrdom. In the U.S., Roman Catholic priests were protesting American support of Roman Catholic South Vietnamese government officials who were persecuting Buddhists whose priests were so spiritually evolved that in calling the world's attention to the people's suffering could calmly enter Nirvana without so much as a twitch. Something was wrong with the image, but in the Sixties, something was wrong with every image.
Segregationists in southern states bombed black churches while children were inside; civil rights leaders were murdered, and dogs and water cannons were turned on kids trying to go to school.
In June of 1962 the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formally stated their intention to liberalize the Democrat Party by way of uniting civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and workers' justice groups. By 1965 the SDS movement had spread to most universities. Their rhetoric grew more strident as their goals expanded from previous positions. Disarmament became a movement against the Vietnam War, the Draft, the military-industrial complex; and worker's justice veered towards a revolutionary labor ascension to power, too close to communism for anyone's comfort.
Dr. Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights' movement's most articulate spokesman, had gone to India in 1959 to explore the principles of Satyagraha, Gandhi's strategy of nonviolent opposition. Impressed by its power to persuade, he adopted Gandhi's method and returned to the U.S. to lead the movement against racial discrimination. He considered himself a follower of Mahatma Gandhi who, ironically, had been assassinated in 1948.
In 1963 Dr. King began his campaign of nonviolent marches, the most notable of which was the quarter-million Civil Rights' assembly in Washington. It was then that he gave his "I have a dream" speech. In 1964 he would be awarded the Nobel Peace prize.
Also that year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the U.S. began to bomb North Vietnam.
In 1965, President Johnson proposed his Great Society programs and declared War on Poverty . We also sent troops to Viet Nam in support of the South's Christian Elitist government which the South's ordinary citizens, i.e., the Buddhists, did not appreciate. Nobody understood that we had effectively declared war on both sides. Bombing the North wasn't doing much for the containment policy; but since the north was fully supported by the Soviets, our strategy soon changed to a dollar versus ruble poker game - the winner being the one with money left in the treasury. The Soviets were feeling the financial effects of mismanaged economies and rusting iron curtains and men and materiel needed to hold the Republics in serfdom. They were also supplying Egypt and other Middle-East states with military equipment to use against Israel. (In the 1967 6-Day War Israel destroyed 300 Russian made planes and an uncountable number of tanks.) Nuclear bombs and space flight offered only expensive prestige and not a nickel's worth of profit.
Few countries cared about the future of the land masses that lay between the South China and Coral Seas. That Japan was above them and Australia below them did not seem of much importance to the international community. The world was focussed on condemning American aggression in the Pacific. Australia, no more wanting to see the former French Indo China in communist hands than it wanted to see the former the Dutch East Indies in communist hands, sent troops to South Vietnam.
The United Nations was worse than useless. The vision that had created the body proved myopic. Although the organization's original members were still there, the European powers had been forced to divest themselves of their African and Pacific colonies. Between l945 and l960, the membership of the U.N. had more than doubled. It did not take the newcomers long to understand the concept of voting blocks. They would band together in support of any "big" country that would act in their interests. Previously, they had complained of the tyranny of the majority; and now, as a kind of vengeful junta, they picked their pet projects, disdained their debts, sent us the bill, and as they "laughed all the way to the bank" showed us the tyranny of the minority.
The war in Vietnam was going badly. We did not understand the religious base of the conflict. To Americans, religion was something that had to do with the Old and New Testaments - differences could be resolved by page-turning. It did not occur to anyone that class-consciousness could be the difference in awareness between rich powerful Christians who wore Paris fashions to their cathedrals and spoke French and English to their servants and poor working Buddhists who wore homemade cotton clothes and went to their village temples to light incense and chant the Buddha's name. Our Christian allies - those whom we kept in the style to which they had become accustomed and who seemed so very much like us - scoffed at the Buddhist martyrs. The wife of South Vietnam's president called them "barbecues." and offered to toss a match onto the next monk that doused himself with gasoline. We were told that the Buddhists were communists, but it wasn't making sense. We were also told that a true Buddhist would never resort to physical violence (which is nonsense), and that the Vietnamese people who fought against us were ignorant and godless rabble who had been indoctrinated by communist propaganda. And then Ed Adams' photograph of one of our Christian allies calmly blowing the brains out of a bound peasant "V.C. suspect" on a city street won the Pulitzer Prize. We and our soldiers in the field were told so many things that didn't make sense that we actually did not know who the enemy was. It truly became impossible to distinguish friend from foe.
It was the same in Flushing Meadows as it was in Saigon: an American couldn't tell if the person approaching him was getting ready to shake his hand, shake him down, or shaft him.
The same friend or foe confusion settled into the Civil Rights movement. Malcolm X, whose father had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, had joined the Nation of Islam. He preached a determined integrity that had no room for compromise. Blacks would get their justice "by any means necessary." His eloquence commanded a huge following which aroused administrative jealousy and when he broke with the organization in 1965 he was assassinated by several of its members.
In 1965, Che Guevara, charismatic and dedicated, left Cuba to export revolution throughout Latin America. His accomplishments are an open question. What is a certainty is that by the time he was killed in 1967 he had become the darling of the leftist side of the anti-war movement in the U.S.
In 1966 on every front situations deteriorated. The stock market declined by 25%, civil rights murders and anti-war protests grew more violent. The Soviets had made a soft landing on the moon and had achieved the first photographed contact with the surface of Venus. Their cosmonauts, some of whom were women, were doing space walks. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) grew increasingly violent in its protests, alienating many supporters. The right to free speech was sorely challenged when John Lennon proclaimed the Beatles to be more popular than Jesus Christ.
In 1967 our space program was seriously setback by a fire inside the Apollo I spacecraft which killed the crew of 3 astronauts. While we worked to redesign the faulty systems, the French launched a satellite and the Russians continued to pile up space successes.
We, meanwhile, were careening into disaster. Viet Nam was a military abyss. By the end of the year American combat and support personnel totaled nearly half a million. And growing.
Campus unrest was approaching campus anarchy. Draft evasion became a national industry in the mold of the Civil War's Underground Railroad. Army ROTC no longer meant Reserve Officers' Training Corps it meant Run Off To Canada.
Numerous groups came into existence to thwart the war effort. SDS archives, for example, contain the following document:
"#16. World Historians Opposed to Racism and Exploitation (W.H.O.R.E.). Meeting notice to bury a copy of the U.S. Constitution, [no date]" It need not be said that anyone who remembers the date the WHOREs met to bury the U.S. Constitution should definitely contact http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/4may70/box107/107.html
Meanwhile we had to survive the Burn Baby Burn phenomenon.
The cause of Civil Rights had gained momentum as we saw the violence employed to defeat desegregation measures and the dignity which proponents demonstrated: sit-ins; boycotts; peaceful marches by hundreds of thousands of people protesting racial injustice; and the galvanizing speeches of Dr. King.
But now Martin Luther King's non-violent protest strategy was deemed Uncle Tomism and the riot-inciting rhetoric of the newly formed Black Panther Party eroded much of the good will previously accorded the Civil Rights movement.
The stormy rhetoric of Malcolm X, the violence-prone Black Panthers, and the SDS began to erode sympathetic and supportive public opinion.
The post-WWII Baby Boom had become a very real and terrifying population explosion; and it was global. The increase in kids which prosperity delivered to us was brought to China via Chairman Mao's 1950 directive, "China's strength is in its people. You should all have bigger families!" And did they ever. But in the stagnation of the Chinese economy those Chinese kids could find little education and no employment. Constituting a bizarre Leisure Class of eleven million Red Guard thugs, this feral elite devoted itself to memorizing Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, and in the name of egalitarianism, attacked teachers, clerics, and merchants, re-educating the ones they didn't murder in manual labor. They looted and burned countless temples, including thousand year old Yun Men (Ummon) Monastery. (They also burned text books and succeeded in closing all of China's universities from 1966 to 1970.)
In 1967, when they forced the removal of all Soviet diplomatic personnel from Beijing, they even (as I recall) urinated on them as they waited to board the departing airplanes).
Our youthful Leisure Class cultural revolutionaries were educated but just as vain. And in their hubris actually imagined, as the Red Guards did, that they were shaping present and future foreign and domestic policies. "Don't trust anyone over thirty," were words to live by by those who evidently assumed they would never reach that age. It never occurred to them, when they jeered the American soldier's assertion that he had to "destroy a village in order to save it" that they were employing the same cockeyed logic when they, in the name of peace, bombed buildings, shot police, and robbed banks.
What had begun as sexual freedom via the Pill and the legitimate goals of the Woman's Liberation movement also started to degenerate into a revolt against family structure. Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, which was intended to raise families from poverty, had already begun to create more poverty by granting welfare benefits to unwed mothers. The illegitimacy rate soared along with teenage pregnancy. (We would have had to go back to the stone age to find so many families in which the children were related only through the mother.)
Forward to Part 3 
