Thanks, Ed, for dredging up this little blast from the past, to consider its significance in the dim light of our shared boomer experience, as compared to the dark confusion of this present confrontation.

We wanted to Make American Peace. . . MAP.

But now the tRumpians want to make Make America Donald's. . . MAD.

I too have been reflecting on those sepia-tinged memories of our boomer youth, those days of anti-war intensity and non-violent protest.

My recollection has taken the form of a novel, King of Soul . . . a story told, from a southern perspective, of what happened to America during that Vietnam war . . . a story of how anti-war activists had not yet figured out how to effectively confront the military industrial complex . . . until . . . in the summer of '64, a bunch of starry-eyed activists went down south and got a reality check when they saw what black folk were up against and what it would take . . . blood, sweat and tears . . . to make a difference in this racist, bellicose nation.

1964, in the aftermath of Medgar Evers' assassination in his own front yard after his D-Day service to the cause of freedom and his subsequent return Stateside, only to be told when he got home to Mississippi to . . . go to the back of the bus . . . after all that and after Dallas Dealey Plaza and the wreck of the Edmund Pettus bridge. . .That's when black folk showed the starry-eyed honky kids from up nawth and out west . . . what was really going on down south and even as far away as . . . down in the southeast Asian jungles . . . and what kind of blood sacrifice was necessarily extracted by the Make America White Again establishment before Peace and Love could make a dent in their hegemony of Power.

But nowadays the shoe's on the other foot and the racist rabble are trying to shift the tide of history back to the way it was way down yonder in the land of cotton cuz ole times there are not forgotten. . . look away, look away . . . donald-land.

But we won't let it happen!

Peace and Love, brother!