I now sleep as a pacifist.

I was sixteen when I knew I was a pacifist. That summer I spent painting houses in an American Friends Service Committee work camp far from my white, middle class home. During then, I attended a vigil at Grant Park on Hiroshima Day and vowed to myself to never be a part of that sort of killing. Later I told my girlfriend should Vietnam intrude I would NOT go there.

Later I taught disadvantaged in the inner city. That was my “service” so I thought and promised by President Johnson’s “War on Poverty”. But then I wondered why it was that my eight grade students that next year should be drafted, and I the middle class white guy who’d gone to college should be exempt.

So I volunteered for Vietnam.

Today I am a pacifist, embarrassed that the best our leaders can produce in their foreign policy is a hammer to treat every one not us like a nail. I am disappointed that after all of these seventy years of mine, there are so many innocents shot down while they merely try to get through the day. I feel betrayed that so many good intentions, mine but mostly others, have been allowed to die, trampled by the boots of greed, avarice and ignorance.

And beneath the feelings of betrayal, disappointments and embarrassments does coma a seething anger anesthetized by so much cultural failure.

But I do sleep now as a pacifist as there is no real reason for me to fight anything.

And I fervently hope no one wrongly awakens me for I fear it will not go well for them.