Today, a new political movement is alive and growing…from a different direction. New American “radicals” operate from painful duress and dire necessity; they are the people hit hardest by the war in Iraq and global warming. They are the folks denied access to a decent education, affordable housing, effective healthcare, or a meaningful culture. Social change coming from the downtrodden? Sound naïve? Bleak? Hopeless? Hardly. Because those people…are us. All of us.
As it shakes, rattles, and rolls through its first decade, the new American century is rattling everyone’s cage. Even the middle class is recognizing that, during crisis, people can respond quickly, resolutely, and collectively across race, gender, culture, and class, without being organized or “taught.” As with the radicals and hippies of the 1960s, Americans today can resonate to Bob Dylan’s universal lyric: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Ain’t Gonna Study War No More
During the Vietnam war, parents who fought in World War II often expected their baby-boomer children to defend democracy against communism as they had fought “the good fight” against fascism in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific. Most Vietnam-era kids didn’t go for it.
Antiwar sentiment has spread far beyond its usual haunts on campuses and coastal cities. Edward Luce, Washington bureau chief for London’s Financial Times, points out that “white, small-town America pays the price in Iraq.” Combat soldiers are overwhelmingly from small towns in the Midwest and the South. South Dakota leads the list of Iraq war casualties per capita, with Nebraska and Louisiana coming next.
Military families, traditionally supportive of U.S. war efforts are treating Iraq differently. According to a new Bloomberg/LATimes study, 57 percent of military families polled disapprove of the way the Bush Administration has run the war in Iraq. After suffering the loss or prolonged absence of family members and workers who have been ordered on second and third tours of duty, nobody needs to prompt middle-Americans to shout “Hell, no, we won’t go.” They aren’t going. Last June (2007), the U.S. Army missed its recruiting goals by 16 percent.
In addition, a nationwide CBS/Times poll found that 55 percent of all Americans describe Operation Iraqi Freedom as “a disaster.” Fifty-nine percent of those polled want Americans to “leave Iraq immediately,” while 62 percent would choose to “finance paying for the rebuilding of the [U.S.] Gulf Coast by cutting spending in Iraq.”
Without ever attending a demonstration or a teach-in, Americans know that we are not fighting “the good fight” in Iraq any more than we were in Vietnam.
Fossil Fuel and Treehuggers
Counter cultural movements of the late 1960s began to regard planet Earth as a living entity through the re-“discovery” of Native-American cultures. Environmental awareness spread quickly with 20 million demonstrators participating in the first Earth Day (1970).
In the decades that followed, environmental awareness and activism remained in the hands of the counterculture and those Americans who could afford earth-friendly consumption and recycling. Environmental concerns and public-policy initiatives were often overshadowed by the demand for jobs and the momentum of the still-booming American industrial economy.
“Tree huggers,” a phrase coined for Ronald Reagan by his script writers was seconded only by his observation that “…You’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen ‘em all.”
Jobs-first pragmatism and cavalier attitudes about the fragility of the planet allowed Americans to ignore symptoms of pollution and global warming until the end of the century. In 2001, a University of Illinois study revealed that the United States was "among the most [environmentally] misinformed of the developed nations surveyed." The same study found that only 15 percent of those questioned could identify the burning of fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming.
Today – despite governmental tinkering with scientific data and a timid, non-committal media – Americans being forced to recognize the causes and consequences of two centuries of industrialization.
A Zogby poll, conducted a year after hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, found that 70 percent of participants believed “global warming was having … a major effect on weather extremes.” The same poll found that “personal experience has convinced the American people that climate change is occurring.”
When mega tornadoes, supercharged hurricanes, and abnormal flooding descend on whole communities, global warming can’t be ignored or shoved under the media carpet. As with the war in Iraq, personal experience has led to political awareness. People want their children to inherit a green planet.
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