Response to McCarthy column
I spent a sleepless night thanks to Daniel McCarthy’s latest column. My head was filled with memories of the Hippie days, both the hope and the horror. He dredged up three revolutionaries orbiting 1970 . I had not thought of the Black Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, or the Black Panther party for decades. All three were involved in political violence that led to people’s deaths, though the Weathermen only managed to blow themselves up and Angela Davis was acquitted of all charges at her trial. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale did go to war with the police after illegal harassment by the FBI and killed several policemen. I thought at the time that they were all nuts.
Time has softened my views (Mr. McCarthy might say, softened my head). For one thing, I was strongly against the war in Vietnam even while I was fighting it. Most of us were, except for the kill-all-the-gooks racists among us. It was obvious even to enlisted men in the mid-sixties that the war, as it was being prosecuted, was going nowhere. The prevailing view was that it was just a way to use up munitions and enrich munition makers (We dropped more bombs on tiny Vietnam than were dropped by all the powers in World War Two). We joked that the two most common features of the Vietnamese landscape were bomb craters and wrecked helicopters. Opposition to the war was joined to the agony of people living with no legal protections. When the law does not protect you; when, in fact, it is often an existential threat, people protect themselves. In this country that means guns. In the three cases that Mr. McCarthy mentions, it meant lashing out with violence, in what they probably knew was a forlorn hope, to achieve political equality, or end the war, or just amplify a scream of rage.
Bill Ayers admits to being a small C communist. Angela Davis was a Marxist. Shakur fled to Cuba, so she must have claimed to be a communist. Radical left wing indeed, so, I suppose, their actions were radical left-wing violence. Among them, they caused the death of one person, plus three of their own. They did damage a bunch of buildings, though none seriously.
Being left wing is kind of the default position if you are trying for social justice. The right sees a narrow field of acceptable people. The schools at which Dr. Ayers and Dr. Davis taught honor their efforts to improve the lives of the desperate, both American and Vietnamese. Neither killed anyone. Shakur possibly did not kill anyone either. She claimed that her police-inflicted wound prevented her from shooting, but she was in the car and the jury did not believe her.
At about this same time, Dr. King was murdered; Malcolm X was murdered; RFK was murdered; Kent State students were shot; Harvey Milk was murdered. Twenty years later, a real building bombing occurred in Oklahoma City.
Mr. McCarthy writes that we are in a “wave” of left-wing political violence. Let me see, a guy shot at Trump, another guy was found hiding in the weeds with a rifle at a Trump golf course, and a guy killed Charlie Kirk. Oh, and a CEO was killed. Even if we assume all were left- wing guys, no surfer would open his eyes for that wave.
Bill Gillmore
Columbus
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