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Two Shadows Divide the Nation

Sunday, October 16, 2016 4:14 PM

G.I. Generation: 1900 – 1924 [Great Depression, World War II ]

Silent Generation: 1925 – 1941 [World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War]

Baby boomers: 1946 – 1964 [Vietnam War]

Generation X (Gen X): mid-1960s to the early 1980s

Millennials (Generation Y): early 1980s to the early 2000s [if born in 2000 would be 16 in 2016]

Generation Z (post millennials): early 2000s to the mid 2000s

*Boomers: 76 million

*Millennials 77 million

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*As of April 2016

1Two disparate shadows hover this moment in modern American history: The Civil War and the Vietnam War. Their ghosts have long cast a pall of ossified alienation between Americans, haunting our recent national dialogue with bigotry and incivility. Echoing in our cross-examination of one another on patriotism, national security, the role of government and the division of powers is the inheritance of “truths” passed from generation to generation. 

What has become a perennial contest between old and new-generation memes acting at cross-purposes is compounded this election cycle with a portion of the electorate supporting Donald Trump—a reckless, misogynistic, amoral pathological liar.

How we got here, quoting my book, 2Sitting with Warrior:

“In plain language … we survivors of the Vietnam War were larger than the war, larger than the common algorithms used to calculate our basic humanity. We were larger than our mission, larger than the congealing sociopolitical forces conspiring to send us into the dragon’s den. We were the arrow’s tip of a great transcendent turbulence churning through America’s centrifuge of warping self-identity, a tempest driving her into a frenzy of self-cannibalizing behavior.

“She was pushing hard to birth a new society, but miscarrying from the strain. The Great Society of L.B.J. was not ready to say ‘uncle’ yet, other than ‘Uncle Sam wants you.’ In answering Uncle’s call, we yoked ourselves to the president’s heavy war wagon—slowly pulling it over the long, painful road of public ridicule.

“But we were larger than our burden, larger than the sweep of social forces tearing the country apart. We were larger than the crush of evolutionary consciousness on our shoulders, as the individual thoughts and beliefs of collective America were jolted into speech and action over the war. Americans from all walks of life were roused to speak, to act, and—in their differences—to rage.

“But we who crossed the pond were stronger than the rage of bombs, bullets, and quick death, and more enduring than the rage of marches and demonstrations. We had to be, because Vietnam was primordial life’s quickening element for dynamic fission to inspirit the perfect ripening of higher awareness. Nam was the centrifuge for Lincoln’s call to consciousness, wherein ‘this nation, under God,’ would ‘have a new birth of freedom,’ where all its citizens would shape its dreams, fire its imagination, point its direction toward the perfected society of inspired aspiration—where ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ would ‘not perish from the earth.’ But rather it would continue as a burning ideal and living truth for seven generations into seven generations into seven generations … burning in perpetuity.

“Of course, all of this is retrospective of those tumultuous days as the returning warrior. For most of us, our bittersweet triumph over the dragon that had slain our fellow in-countrymen had done little to imply a personal sense of importance beyond our own survival. That the destiny of a nation, even a world, had crossed with our own was an idea too large to even imagine, much less grasp. My understanding that we had been swept up in a catalytic wave of irrepressible force, drawing significance and meaning to our lives far beyond the war in isolation, has been born out of my sitting at Grandfather’s feet.

“Years of reflection and emotional decompression from my war had culminated in my first of many journeys to Grandfather’s camp, where I found answers and, within them, myself. I believe I also found the soul of a country convulsing blindly over its true identity, ideological weapons drawn, groping unconsciously for Grandfather’s camp.

“Through my occasions to sit in Grandfather’s wise presence, a larger me has slowly come into view. But it has taken time to embrace this larger self’s greater role than that of warrior-citizen. As my awareness stepped into clearings of insight, I began to grow. From the small I of myself, I grew into the I of a nation into the I of a planet, and then into the I of the cosmos and on to the I of science and philosophy, of religion and spirituality. Vietnam was not simply a personal crucible. It was a crucible for human transfiguration, as are all wars and social upheavals. Unrest leaves tracks of insight that will lead to peace if we go in the right direction. It all depends on understanding the tracks and what they tell us.

“We Nam veterans missed the largeness of the part we played in the progression of sentient beings in cosmic time and space. Yet on some deep, unconscious level we knew it. We knew, in the blood and guts of Nam’s jungle terrain, that something larger was moving through us. Because of that something, we were larger than any narrow field of conventional perception. We could not be made small, even by the reduction of our own doubts and misgivings.

“Primordial perfection’s call to America for a greater realization of its “perfect union” was a sharp, insistent call that pitted Americans against Americans and set America at war with herself. No compromise, no quarter was granted by either side in responding to the call to a higher octave. America, as the living edifice of an exquisite dream, was battling tooth and nail with her perceived selfhood.

“As the focal point of all this, we returnees from that green peninsula of death came home to a lifeline of air so thin that we had to fight for every breath of self-validation. The hunt for our literal blood in one land and our virtual blood in another was merely, in retrospect, the activity of evolutionary consciousness being felt and acted upon throughout America. When Creation, the irresistible force, slammed into Dream, the immovable object, the inevitable explosion ripped asunder the veneer of tradition and exposed naked truth. It is over that contested truth that America has fought with itself, all the way into present-day Afghanistan and Iraq.”

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1As of April 2016

2Sitting with Warrior. iUniverse 2010, 2013 <http://bookstore.iuniverse.com/AdvancedSearch/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=Sitting%20with%20Warrior>

<http://www.drumtalk-hitch.com/DrumTalkBooks/Book_Sellers.html>