Viet Nam Protest

USA F-105's bombing North Vietnam


Vietnam Protest

The early 70's were not such a good time to be teaching at any university in America--not even in Hawaii like me.

I had a full-time job teaching Journalism and other subjects at the new Leeward Community College Campus of the University of Hawaii near Pearl City.

Normally, it would have been a dream job, but the Viet Nam War seemed to be making a nightmare of everything in America.

One sunny afternoon, one of my colleagues, a Social Studies teacher, was showing a movie to his classes. He'd invited me to see the film. This same afternoon, several of my students were protesting against the war by chaining themselves to the school's flagpole.
The movie was about the governmental repression in Germany during the Nazi time--the death camps and all of that. It was awful.

I came out of the dark room where the movie had been shown still sifting the images of the Nazi terror through my head and blinking in the bright Hawaiian sunshine.

Some police officers had come to arrest the protesting students. The police had cut the student's chains and were dragging them (mainly my Journalism students, of course) right past the movie-room then up some concrete stairs, by their feet.

I remember watching my student's heads bumping up the stairs one by one: bump, bump, bump.

I had never been political at all in my life, I think, until that moment.

I had never even considered, I think, that my government could possibly be wrong. Though I was teaching Journalism and even advising the publication of a college newspaper with more than our share of radicalised students on the staff, I had not understood, not fully realized, that the Vietnam War was really, really, really wrong and it was up to all of us, even me, to end it.

It is a frightening thing indeed, especially in a democracy, to fear your own government.

It is a very helpless feeling. It is so big. You are so very small.

Is this one of the reasons I left America?

Can I humbly--honestly say that I really was searching for Truth?

Tomasito, 2008

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