I grew up in small-town America. Specifically, in a place where my family was a tiny minority. Agree with the stereotype or not, Jews in that town were

Photo by Peggy Sue Zinn

I grew up in small-town America. Specifically, in a place where my family was a tiny minority. Agree with the stereotype or not, Jews in that town were primarily occupied running small retail shops of one kind or another. These shops ran the gamut from a small retail store with pretty much empty shelves to very successful clothing stores. Our small community within a town that had depended on textiles to provide jobs for workers had already seen an exodus of a few of its second-generation children leaving for more prosperous settings and occupations that required advanced educations of different kinds. The textile industry left for the US South and then for Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Far East.

My mother, Sylvia (Tales of an American Shtetl, 2011), who was a very political person, was the cochair of two presidential campaigns at the state-wide level. There was a card-playing group that met in a round robin kind of setting at bridge players members’ homes. One of my first recollections of any hostility and the clash of values within that group, made up entirely of women, was a next-door neighbor, whose son was a psychologist, and went on to become an advisor to a national daytime television show that had a segment on which children appeared.

I don’t know the exact year of the clash, but I recall that it was over the Vietnam War. Our neighbor and bridge player defended the war and my mother was vehemently opposed to it. Looking back across all of these decades, it seems likely that the success our neighbor’s son had achieved in the television industry put that neighbor firmly on the side of US war policy. I can’t remember the issue of communism coming up around the disagreement, but the fallout lasted for at least a period of several months or more before my mother and our neighbor made amends and the bridge club was back to its full complement of players.

My mother’s opposition to the war carried over to my family’s coffee shop located in the downtown section of our community. Another family member observed that she believed my mother went into the shop to fight over the war and some of the arguments I remember were quite heated. The town was a working-class town, and wide opposition to the war was years away, and in any case, a guess is that a sizable part of the people in town supported the war through its end in 1975. I’m surprised looking back that there was no retaliation against my mother’s anti-war views, but a guess is that my family had been part of the community for so long that her opponents may have had a live and let live view of her. Her frequent letters-to-the-editor, commentary pieces, interviews, and especially the political office she set up during the McCarthy for President campaign in 1968, never brought a reaction greater than those heated coffee-shop disagreements. One member of the local police force harassed teens hanging out at the McCarthy headquarters and even arrested my next-door neighbor. My mother was furious and rushed to the police station to win the release of our neighbor.

It was during the McGovern campaign for president in 1972, that Sylvia brought her ability as a political organizer to her role of getting McGovern elected, at least in our small corner of the world. My childhood home was filled with voter computer sheets from the campaign. The Nixon campaign portrayed George McGovern as a radical, while political reality was on the side of traditional New Deal liberalism. Years before, as a kid, I saw Sylvia’s early skills as an organizer in PTA activities. Our home, sometime in either the very late 1950s or early 1960s, was filled with huge sacks of peanuts of every conceivable variety as she took school fundraising very seriously.

Sylvia’s electoral activism had roots in street protest. She was visible at local marches in support of the United Farm Workers grape strike (1965-1970). I remember her at marches and rallies such as the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in October 1969, when 10,000 people gathered at the state house in Providence, Rhode Island to push back against the Vietnam War.

My family’s liberalism was as far from contemporary neoliberalism as the Earth is from the most distant light coming from galaxies at the edge of the visible universe.

Fast forward to today with an eye in the rearview mirror of history. The US was one of two superpowers during the Vietnam War, the other being the former Soviet Union. The US role as an imperial empire grew following the post-World War II era with the so-called military-industrial complex rising exponentially. When I look back at the town where I grew up, it seems incongruous that the dictates of empire could affect the people there, but it did in very real ways. The US government took less than one generation for Ronald Reagan to bring back war. Of course there were always clandestine operations such as the CIA carried out. But Reagan got the war ball rolling once again with low-intensity warfare in Central America that has implications today in immigration. It was Reagan’s vice president, then President George H.W. Bush who destroyed the Vietnam Syndrome, the hesitancy of the general populace of the US to send troops far away to fight wars. His success in the First Gulf War led to a series of wars, many of those proxy wars as in Syria, and in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Libya, the former Yugoslavia, Lebanon, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Few would buy the argument that it was the US proxy war fighting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, in answer to the Soviet presence there, that led in a straight line to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Many people in the US don’t want to hear any of those facts, and since few had skin in the “game,” few cared outside of rousing patriotic music and hero worship. The recent murder of a National Guard soldier and the wounding of another in Washington, D.C., had direct links to the nearly two-decade old US war in Afghanistan and the blowback that is part of US military operations, both direct and through proxies. I’ve often cited the late William Blum, whose work, Killing Hope (1995 and later editions), covers US direct and proxy wars around the globe making the world safe for a dictator like Trump, who in all likelihood, cannot even find the places quickly on a map where we have wars or plan for war. It’s the price of US imperialism and empire and we have many who are willing to give aid in the epic battles of our empire.

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