Protest: Living day to day

Susan Benjamin



This year marks the 40th anniversary of a watershed in the Vietnam War: the Gulf of Tonkin attack that led President Lyndon Johnson to escalate America's involvement in Vietnam. It also marks the 40th anniversary of historic protest efforts — the anti-war march on the Pentagon; Arlo Guthrie's protest anthem, "Alice's Restaurant"; the birth of the human rights group, Amnesty International; and Dr. Martin Luther King's speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence."

Dr. King said, in part: "If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play."

Now, 40 years later, and into the fourth year of the unpopular Iraq War, it's a good time to ask: Did the protests of the '60s really make a difference? And, where have the protesters gone?

I broached the subject with perennial activist Tom Hayden, who I recently interviewed for a radio show on the subject. According to Hayden, yes, the activists were effective, but many of the changes are so embedded in our society, we don't notice them. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, evolved from the '60s environmental activism, and sexual harassment, once fodder for cartoon strips, is now a serious offense thanks, in part, to the so-called women's liberation movement ...

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