What One Veteran Said
Vietnam veteran Wayne Smith: We were broken. I had so much anger and pain. I was crushed. I left like I had blood on my hands. I resisted calling the Vietnamese gooks and dinks, but…
Category: Activists
Touching a Nerve
According to my FBI documents, [President Richard] Nixon was more obsessed with me than with the president of Russia. He was obsessed with this movie star that was working with the GIs. –Jane Fonda, from…
From Thirty Years Ago: Thich Nhat Hanh
Many of us worry about the world situation. We don’t know when the bombs will explode. We feel that we are on the edge of time. As individuals, we feel helpless, despairing. The situation is so…
Elie Wiesel and Worthy Remembrance
See, Wiesel has often made this claim quite explicit: I am above politics, my message is so precious and pure it cannot afford to be sullied by compromise. Such is the transcendent dignity of the…
Share the Wealth with Julia Brucks: What Happens after an Eat-Pray-Love-esque Trip?
There is something about the light and air in France. Matisse spoke of the “Silver clarity of the light in Nice.” Van Gogh said, “The air in France brightens the thoughts and is good for…
From Thich Nhat Hanh’s First Book Published in the USA, 1967
The more American troops sent to Vietnam, the more the anti-American campaign led by the NLF becomes successful. Anger and hatred rise in the hearts of the peasants as they see their villages burned, their…
What Some Americans Say (1970)
The Vietnamese and we have indelibly stamped each other with our marks. We have destroyed beyond hope of remaking parts of their ancient culture; they have destroyed our innocence and belief in our own goodness….
Let’s Not Wait Till We’re Dead
Over poetry, you didn’t gush. You read it. You read it with the tongue. You lived it. You felt how it moved you, changed you. How it contributed to giving your own life a form,…
A Little Grace Lee Boggs Is in Order These Days
In the days ahead, everyone who loves this country enough to change it will have many opportunities both to reflect on and to practice the radical revolution in values that [Martin Luther] King projected and…
Dear Randa
6 September 2009 Dear Randa, Given how busy you must be, I can’t imagine that you would have brought along with you Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. I…