DO PROTESTORS MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Have you ever participated in any kind of a protest march before?   If not, was it because you doubted you could make a difference by doing so?  Or have you gone through life satisfied with the state of our world’s people and assumed even our own government is doing, well, the best it can?

If you assume the latter, you may as well stop reading now.   It will otherwise disgust you to find that this post rests on my own assumption that our government is now doing the worst it can.   Or at least close enough.

Sue and I will be participating in a protest march this Saturday, April 5th, and it brings to mind the days of our youth as far back as 1970.  Yep.  We are that old.  

We had been married about 3 years at the time and the news broke that the US government had, in our name as supposed owners of said government per the 1968 POTUS election of Richard M. Nixon, begun a wide-spread bombing campaign in the sovereign nation of Cambodia, across the border from where our “peoples’ government of the USA” was engaging in an illegal and unjust war to stop the people of Vietnam from uniting around their own version of Gen. George Washington as their President, a General named Ho Chi Minh who professed a belief in communism.

In case you’re wondering about the effects of our bombing in Cambodia, it killed so many innocent civilians, mostly rural farmers, thus evoking widespread protests by the poorest of all Cambodians and leading to the communist overthrow of their existing government.  The new government party of Khmer Rouge then began a campaign of genocide against anyone sympathetic to the previous government that agreed to the bombing.   By 1978, this genocide had killed roughly 2 million people, including their most educated citizens.  For additional information, you may check out https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf

As a seminary student myself back in 1970, having a draft deferment for the practice of Christian ministry was the near equivalent of having a doctor who could defer me for bone spurs.   Especially since my draft lottery number was #11.  That’s right.   Out of 366 days to have been born, counting those lucky leap year guys, my birthday came up #11 in the U.S. Selective Service lottery drawing.   Lucky 11. 

My problem was a theological one.   I could no longer pretend to be a candidate for Christian ministry.  I found the institutional Church complicit in our American foreign policy and saw no way I could serve the God of justice and peace and an American military sent to commit indiscriminate bombing campaigns in southeast Asia.  I joined in protest marches in 1970 and then went one step farther.   I dropped out of seminary and arranged to take a Social Service position in Vancouver, BC in the early part of January, 1971.  I was Canada-bound!

Then an interesting thing happened. 

So massive were the American protests against the bombing of Cambodia, particularly on our college campuses, that Nixon did what he thought would pacify the protestors.  He declared a “90-day Selective Service moratorium on the draft” to begin January 1, 1971.   The powers that decided such matters then opted to dismiss all the numbers that would have been called for the draft during Jan-Mar of that year.  My #11 was now placed at the end of the end, in case more than 366 days worth of draftees were needed.

I didn’t take the Canada job, stayed here in Dayton, OH and………the rest is history no American should be expected to “cover up.”  

Nor should any American be expected to avoid protesting wrongful policy in our federal government if either foreign or domestic injustice results.   Protests matter.  Protestors do make a difference.   No, in 1970 we did not prevent the Cambodian genocide that came about because of our horrific bombing of their sovereign people.   But en masse our protestors then did matter immensely. Kept me from leaving the country of my birth some 54 years ago now. Call it Lucky 11, but protestors made a big difference in my own life!