17. Can We Heal?

It struck me yesterday, after my obsessive first morning look at the Coronavirus world in graphs and news stories, that we have slowed the deaths just enough to allow the spread of the disease to remain rampant—or to grow. I saw the angry Texans taunting the mask wearer; they looked like they could eat him. There was a peaceful pic of San Diego tourists with a “wondering” caption—something about what is coming from Arizona. And the constant drumbeat of the many who want to get on with “opening things up.” Some forever Trumpsters follow his economic over coronavirus preaching religiously. But my gut feeling is that many of the young and healthy see no current or future personal threat in Covid-19.

There’s an irony for those my age, who remember a time when we were advised not to “trust anyone over 30.” We thought old people and their outdated ideas were in the way of new thinking on drugs, music, and war.

But the young started dying in Vietnam, and in a strange but now understandable echo of today, black and brown men were serving and dying in greater numbers than were white men. And when, because of a policy of one-year deployments, the draft deferments of young white men could no longer protect them, the old people came up with a draft lottery—the bouncing balls with birth dates on them determined who would go, and in some high numbers be wounded or killed, in Vietnam.

I think it was the women who rose then to defend their sons. I and many young people marched for peace, but there were growing numbers of moms, and soon their lawyer doctor legislator husbands were calling for peace.

Vietnam left 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese dead, and a country fractured. It seemed the old and young never really got together to heal things.

Maybe this time.

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