March 22
1621
The Pilgrims and Massasoit Indians agree on a league of friendship.
1873
Slavery is abolished in Puerto Rico.
1974
The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress. The amendment, giving women full equality under law, was never ratified by the required 3/4 of the 50 states.
1980
30,000 marched in Washington, DC against reintroduction of draft registration.
Denise Levertov’s lines from her poem,
A Speech for Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980”
“…Let our different dream,
and more than dream, our acts
of constructive refusal generate
struggle. And love. We must dare to win
not wars, but a future
in which to live.”
Entire Poem:
As our planet swings and sways
into its new decade
under the raped moon’s weary glance,
I’ve heard the voices
of high-school kids on the bus home to the projects,
of college students (some of them female, this time)
in the swimmingpool locker room, saying,
‘If there’s a war -‘ ‘If there’s a war -‘
‘I don’t want to get drafted but
if there’s a war I’ll go’ – ‘If there’s a war
I’d like to fight’ ‘If there’s a war
I’ll get pregnant’
‘Bomb Tehran’ – ‘Bomb Moscow’ I heard them say.
Ach! They’re the same ones, male and female, who ask,
‘Which came first, Vietnam or Korea?’
‘What was My Lai?’ The same kids who think
Ayatollah Khomeini’s a, quote, ‘Commie.’ Who think
World War Two was fought against, quote, ‘Reds,’ namely
Hitler and some Japs.
No violence they’ve seen
on the flickering living-room screen familiar since infancy
or the movies of adolescent dates, the dark
so much fuller of themselves, of each other’s presence than of history (and the history anyway
twisted – not that they have a way to know that) –
the dark
vibrant with themselves, with warm breath,
half suppressed mirth, the wonder
of being alive, terrified, entranced
by sexual fragrance each give off
among popcorn, clumsy
gestures, the weird
response of laughter when on that screen
death’s happening, Wow, unreal, and people
suffer, or dream aloud … None of that spoon-fed
violence
prepares them. The disgusting routine horror of war
eludes them. They think
they would die for something they call America,
vague, as true dreams are not; something they call
freedom, the Free World, without ever knowing
what freedom means, what torture means, what relative
means.
They are free to spray walls with crude
assertions – numbers, pathetic names; free
to disco, to disagree – if they’re in school –
with the professor. Great. They don’t know
that’s not enough, they don’t know
ass from elbow, blood from ketchup, that knowledge
is kept from them, they’ve been taught to assume
if there’s a war there’s
also a future, they know
not only nothing,
in their criminally neglected imaginations, about
the way war always meant
not only dying but killing,
not only killing but seeing
not only your buddy dying but
your buddy in the act of killing, not nice,
not only
your buddy killing but the dying
of those you
killed yourself, not always
quick, and
not always soldiers.
Yes, not only do draft-age people mostly
not know how that kind of war’s become almost a pastoral
compared to new war, the kind
in which they may find themselves (while the usual
pinkfaced men, smoothshaved, overfed, placed in power
by the parents of those expendable young, continue
to make the decisions they are programmed for) but also
they know nothing at all about radiation
nothing at all about lasers
nothing at all about how the bombs
the Pentagon sits on like some grotesque
chicken caged in its nest and fed
cancerous hormones, exceed and exceed and exceed
Hiroshima, over and over and over, in weight
in power
in horror
of genocide.
When they say
‘If there’s a war,
I’ll go,’ they don’t know
they would be going to kill
themselves
their mamas and papas,
brothers and sisters
lovers.
When they say, ‘If there’s a war, I’ll get pregnant,’
they don’t seem to know
that war would destroy that baby.
When they say, ‘I’d like to fight,’
for quote, ‘freedom,’
for quote, the ‘Free World,’
for quote, ‘America,’ –
for whatever they think they’d be fighting for,
those children
those children with braces on their teeth,
fears in their notebooks,
acne on their cheeks,
dreams in their
inarticulate hearts
whom the powerful men at their desks
designate as the age group suitable for registration,
they don’t know they’d be fighting
very briefly, very
successfully,
quite conclusively,
for the destruction of this small
lurching planet, this confused
lump of
rock and soil, ocean and air,
on which our songs, cathedrals, gestures
of faith and splendor
have grown like delicate moss, and now
may or may not survive
the heavy footsteps of our inexcusable ignorance,
the chemical sprays of our rapacious idiocy,
our minds that are big enough
to imagine love, imagine peace, imagine
community – but may not
be big enough to learn in time
how to say no.
My dear
fellow-humans, friends, strangers who would be friends
if there were time –
let us make time, let us unite to say
NO to the drift to war, the drift
to take care of little disasters by making a
big disaster and then
the last disaster,
from which
no witness will rise
no seeds.
Let us unite to tell
all we have learned about old-fashioned war’s
vomit and shit, about new fashioned war’s
abrupt end to all hope –
unite to tell what we know to the wholebodied young,
unwitting victims lined up ready already
like calves at the pen for slaughter;
share what we know, until no more
young voices talk of ‘If there’s a war,’ but all say
No, and again no to the draft, and no to war,
and no to the sacrifice
of anyone’s blood to the corporate beast that dreams
it can always somehow
save its own skin.
Let our different dream,
and more than dream, our acts
of constructive refusal generate
struggle. And love. We must dare to win
not wars, but a future
in which to live.
1987
A boat piled with 3,168 tons of garbage begins a 162-day, 6,000-mile search for a port willing to take its load. After being rebuffed by 6 states & 3 countries, New York City agrees to burn the trash.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 