During the Vietnam years, it wasn't unusual for fathers and sons to stop talking to each other over issues connected with the war and military service. Most often the father, usually a veteran who'd served in World War II, couldn't understand or accept the son who felt his conscience dictated leaving the country or faking an illness.
Now the worm has turned.
Certain fathers--perhaps in some cases those very same sons of long ago--are rejecting children who enlist:
My brother is an Army Ranger in Afghanistan...His choice to join after 9/11 was not easy. He was one year away from graduating from ASU with a law degree, and he believed the nation needed another soldier more than it needed another lawyer. His choice did not come without consequences, though.
His choice was not supported by our father, and his reaction to my brother's choice was typical of a 1960s throwback; my brother is no longer welcome in my parent's home.
My brother told me that he can understand our father's reaction to the decision. They come from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
There are many tragedies in war, and one of them is this estrangement of the generations. Note that in this particular case, the son seems to have an unusually mature--you might almost say "liberal," in the generic sense of the word--reaction to the father.
[ADDENDUM: Austin Bay, whose radio request for responses from military members to John Kerry's recent gaffe led to the letter I've quoted in this post, has written an eloquent soliloquy on Kerry. Hint: Austin is not one of Kerry's biggest fans.]
If you haven't seen it yet, Victor Davis Hanson puts more nails in the coffin in his column entitled: "Kerryism". Here's the link:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson110506.html
Early in 1854 my GG grandfather, a prosperous Richmond hardware merchant, married some of the bluest of Old Dominion blue blood -- cousin to two Presidents and Robert E. Lee, and well bred out of Randolphs, Carters, and Harrisons.
Later in 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and thereby pulled one of the trip-ropes for the Civil War. A decade later the young bride (not yet 30) was trying to get her husband and his family hung as traitors.
Her family were ardent Confederates. Her brother was one of only a few dozen that had enlisted with Lee early in 1861 and were still alive to surrender with him at Appomatox. The battle of Malvern Hill was fought in her parents' front yard.
Meantime, from 1862 onward my GG grandfather's sister Elizabeth was running a very effective Union spy operation out of the family home. My GG grandmother fled with the children and her husband arranged to have the kids kidnapped back.
In the end no-one believed my GG grandmother about the spying because, as the judge said "Everyone in this city knows the Van Lews are northern sympathizers, so they couldn't possibly be spies."
Grant wrote that the Van Lew ring was "most valuable of all" -- they even had an operative waiting table in the Jefferson Davis household -- and my GG grandparents never saw each other again. Nor did their families ever speak to each other again. My GG grandfather lost his hardware business (boycott) and Elizabeth died alone as an aged spinster, shunned for nearly 40 years.
Each of them said it was worth it.
Let's try that link again:
Kerryism
This seems to be a piece of the recent NY Times article on estrangement over the invasion of Iraq and President Bush in that those doing the estrangement are all in the same political faction.
re: #2
James Butler Hickock (aka "Wild Bill") was the son of a Quaker-style abolitionist. In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Hickock and his brother abandoned pacifism and fought for Kansas in the Kansas-Missouri war, and later the Civil War.
There are thousands of stories about fathers and sons, north and south, who split over the Civil War - with the son generally favoring the more militant approach.
This has happened time and time again in history. The idea that old men start wars and young men protest against them is pretty much backwards. This idea is a relic of the Sixties generation that regarded its own aberrations as laws of nature.
But then, the "pacifism" of the 60s - mixed with riots, Viet Cong flags, and amateur terrorism - was more than half hypocrisy. And it still is.
This is one of the few times I have agreed, even a little, with Glen Wishard [#5]:
bq. "The idea that old men start wars and young men protest against them is pretty much backwards."
In general, I believe the young are more violent and the old are wiser about the limits of what violence can accomplish. The great thing about the '60s was the kids who had grown up with Mutual Assured Destruction, and realized that there must be another way.
They didn't get everything right, certainly, but a lot more good than bad has come from the '60s.
They didn't get everything right, certainly, but a lot more good than bad has come from the '60s.
Wow. I could hardly disagree more.