Question Authority

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s I was involved in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and the fledgling environmental movement. And if there is one slogan among the many left-of-center slogans that best captures the ethos of that cultural political era known as The Sixties, that slogan is Question Authority.

My parents bought their first television in 1954 when I was five-years-old. We were living at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas where my father was completing his military service. The reason my folks bought a television was to watch the McCarthy hearings, the witch-hunt perpetrated by Senator Joe McCarthy in search of supposed communists threatening America from within.

My father subscribed to I.F. Stone Weekly, a bulletin put out by I.F. Stone, a celebrated investigative journalist who was hated by the American political establishment because he loudly and eruditely opposed the Korean War (and later the Vietnam War) and he was an advocate for fairness and honesty in the political process in response to government malfeasance. He was also a fierce critic of McCarthyism.

Just subscribing to I.F. Stone’s bulletin would have put my father in danger had Joe McCarthy prevailed (he did somewhat for some years) but my father did more than subscribe to the bulletin, he reiterated information in the I.F. Stone Weekly in letters he sent to newspapers and people in Congress. Thus the McCarthy hearings were of paramount importance to my parents. Fortunately, Joe McCarthy and his cronies in Congress were eventually exposed as crooks and cranks, and the witch-hunt collapsed.

In the early 1960s I.F. Stone informed his readers of the nascent Vietnam War and I attended my first anti-war march with my father in 1962 when I was thirteen. We marched up Market Street in San Francisco with hundreds of other protestors at a time when most Americans had never heard of Vietnam or about America’s involvement there.

Most people today don’t know that John F. Kennedy began the American military buildup in Vietnam in the early 1960s by sending 10,000 military “advisers” to “advise” the incredibly corrupt South Vietnamese military regime. And most people don’t know that Robert F. Kennedy was Joe McCarthy’s assistant counsel at the height of the witch-hunt in the 1950s.

Also in the early 1960s my father was part of a group of citizens advocating for the integration of our local schools. I attended several protest rallies urging city councils and school boards to take appropriate action to address our segregated schools. Yes, even in progressive California many of our schools were rigorously segregated until the late 1960s and 1970s.

My parents joined the Sierra Club when I was a boy, which meant the historic conservation battle led by the Sierra Club to stop the building of the Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell was a strong influence on my thinking about the world. Now, as both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are about to go dry, the folly of those water projects looms as forty million people in the American southwest are soon to be without water. Los Angeles gets half their water from Lake Mead. Las Vegas gets all their water from Lake Mead. 

By the time I went to college in 1967, I was well aware that mainstream media was not to be trusted. I knew that our local, state, and national governments did not serve everyone equally, and I was keenly aware that our environment was under siege by corporations large and larger.

But when I took two required courses for Freshmen at UC Santa Cruz – The American Dream and Stability and Change in the USSR from 1917 to the Present – I read many books and articles explicating with unassailable facts that virtually everything I had learned in school about the history of the United States and Russia and the rest of the world was false.

And I knew why. The powers that be don’t want us to know the truth: the better and easier to control us once we’ve thoroughly swallowed their lies.

Today, as the United States continues various wars of aggression around the world, with both Democrats and Republicans voting to fund the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and in Lebanon, and the dominant media narrative continues to demonize Iran and Russia and China, I am saddened but not surprised. I learned long ago that Democrats and Republicans are two names for a group of greedy small-minded people in service to the Israeli lobby and multinational corporations and a consortium of rich people hell bent on destroying the world for short-term gain.

Questioning authority is certainly the first step to learning the truth. But then what do we do with the truth in a world where so few people want to know the truth?

I’m happy to report the following truth: I have a new CONTACT/SUBSCRIBE button on my web site should you or anyone you know wish to subscribe or contact me.

fin

Trouble piano solo from Todd’s album 43 short piano improvisations