At the Rear of the Sears Department Store

 

                                                                        

A nice afternoon in Santa Monica, as captured by Daniel Alonzo

     “If you criticize the Republicans, you are a ‘card-carrying liberal.’ If you criticize the Democrats, you are a ‘reactionary, fascist.’ If you criticize both parties, you are a traitor to the country.” Pepe Rios III, Los Angeles, CA.

     It was the end of 1970. Richard Nixon was campaigning for a second term as president, promising to end the Vietnam War. People believed him. A year earlier, I had finished a three-year stint in the Army, one year in Vietnam, a front-row seat to one of the U.S.’s most tragic calamities. I had a chip on my shoulder because I'd seen the "Lie." I was jaded. I had no choice but to try to get my life together, de-institutionalizing my brain. It wasn’t so easy.

     I’d gotten caught up in the 1960s drug, sex, rock ‘n roll culture, working part-time in my cousin’s gardening-landscape business, and attending community college classes on the G.I. Bill. I was out hunting for new clothes, something a little more modern than what I’d worn in high school back in 1965. I entered the rear entrance to the Sears department store in downtown Santa Monica. A young woman approached me. She asked if I was registered to vote, I said, “No. I’ve never voted.”

     “Why?”

     “I wasn’t old enough.” That was true. In 1967, during the last election, I was in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, serving with an artillery battery. I was only 19, not old enough to vote.

     “What about now?”

     “I’m 22.”

     “That’s old enough.”

     “Yeah, but I don’t vote.”

     “Why?”

     “Because it won’t change anything.”

     I could see by the look on her face she was scandalized. “But if you don’t vote,” she said, or something to that effect, “you don’t have the right to complain about what’s going on in the country.”

     I didn’t mention anything about the military. None of the guys I knew who had been in Vietnam talked about it, not even to each other. We wanted to get on with our lives. Besides, we knew what people thought if we said we’d been to Vietnam, after all the images they’d seen on television. We were the dupes who couldn’t beat the draft. We hadn’t gone to college. Our parents didn’t have connections with the local draft boards, so we went.

     The war and the protests on the streets were still raging. Regardless of what she said, I figured I had as much right to complain about this country’s problems as anybody, whether I put my mark on a voting ballot or not.

     She wouldn’t give up. We went back and forth for a while. I could tell she was from the better part of town, probably north of Wilshire, just something about her. “Class” was pretty easy to detect, even in the ‘70’s when people tried to disguise it, the upper-class trying to pass themselves off as working-class or poor, hipper than they really were, the high school Beach Boy crowd who’d gotten turned on to weed, Led Zeplin, and Black Sabbath along the way.

     I don’t know how, but she finally got me to register, even if I didn’t vote. She gave me the form and asked if I was Republican or Democrat. That got me. I’d never had to choose a political party. My working-class folk were Democrats. I’d hear them talk about how if it wasn’t for Democrats, we wouldn’t have labor unions, an eight-hour workday or five-day work week, and my dad wouldn’t have his retirement or health insurance.

     The only Republican I knew was an older man, a family friend, a manager with a wheelchair manufacturer who worked his way up from mid-management, mainly by filling the production line with ex-cons who grew up in the neighborhood and were glad to have jobs. Actually, he was the only one of my dad’s friends who talked politics openly. He’d often get frustrated. My dad cracked jokes about politicians, both parties, and easy targets for a man with my dad’s quick wit.

     No verbal slouch, my dad devoured three newspapers each day, watched the news on television, and read books like William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, the WWII epic, From Here to Eternity, and the history of war-time disasters, like A Bridge Too Far. By the end of their debate, after the more serious stuff, my dad had his friend laughing too hard to continue with anything serious.

     So, I told the young woman I wasn’t a Republican or a Democrat. I knew neither party had the guts to pull the plug on the war. Fighting communism and the Dominoe Theory were bunk. France, our ally in WWII, had gotten us into Vietnam, and now we had no way to get out. The Vietnamese people wanted to be left alone and live their own lives.  

     I asked her, “Aren’t there any other parties?”

     She said, “Sure, there’s the Peace and Freedom Party.”

     “What’s that?”

     She pointed to a place on a pamphlet that described the party’s platform. It was against the Vietnam War, supported social justice, labor unions, minority, and feminine rights. In 1968, it ran Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver for president and Dr. Spock in 1972. It all sounded pretty good to me. She said, “Some people consider them socialists.”

     I checked the box, mainly because the name captured what I believed in, Peace and Freedom. I signed my name at the bottom of the form. I’d become an official member of the Peace and Freedom Party, not that I thought it had a chance to win anything but more as a protest against the two war-mongering partes in power.

     I had heard rumors about a Raza Unida Political Party, but they never got it “together” enough to make it onto the ballots in California. When the next elections rolled around in 1974, my party didn’t run a candidate, not that I would have voted if it did, which reminds me of the time, I don’t know, maybe in 1971, our college class had a discussion about the upcoming election between Nixon and McGovern. When the teacher asked me for my take on it, I told him I didn’t know. “I don’t vote.”

     It was as if I said I supported the Manson family. There was a hush, a rumbling, then an uproar, students arguing about if they heard what they thought they heard. Finally, a young girl got up and let me have it, all the usual stuff about those who don’t vote had no right to complain if things went “south,” politically. I think she ended with people like me were a threat to Democracy. I’d said, “It doesn’t make any difference. They’re all bought and paid for. The parties don’t care about us. It’s a scam, and they’ve got us fighting each other.”

     The professor sat back and listened. He was a hippy, an older liberal type. He knew I’d been to Vietnam. We’d talked about it. He liked that I stood my ground. Whether he agreed or not, I didn’t know. It was an English I class, argumentation. I realized the few students who opposed my argument were the more vocal students, the same ones who talked in class when they should have shut up, the ones who loved hearing the sound of their own voices. Most of the kids sat silent, just listening, and smiling.      

     Has any of it changed over fifty-some-odd years? One party says to raise taxes and have more programs to help people. The other party says to cut taxes and cut programs. Everybody’s arguing over the same things. Both parties have taken their shot at power. Has it gotten better?

     There are still wars and rumors of war. Some say the earth is getting warmer and others deny it. Some say we should have access to healthcare and others say it’s too expensive. Is it all about “divide and conquer?” They’ve got us fighting each other, even questioning whether the elections are rigged or not. I see friends and relative entrenching themselves on opposite sides, dashing their relationships, even if all they know they learned from their favorite political television news program, soundbites. Some people are even killing those who don’t agree with them. Yet, the richest, the truly wealthy, in the end, walk away with the spoils.

     Does any of it really matter to the families who lost sons and daughters in war, today mostly working-class kids, hell, even mothers and fathers who can't find jobs? Will the next election bring them back? Will shrewd politicos and their brain trusts, who work around the clock coming up with ways to beat the system, keep friends and families divided, destroying relationships because one votes one-way and another votes the opposite? 

     A difference in political opinion used to be just an argument in the family then back to the daily grind. Today it's all-out war. It's how the plantation owners kept the slaves in line, give one slave a little power, or a few extra cuts of meat, and he'll crack the whip on his brothers and sisters as hard as any "Bossman." They're the ones they called the "Good Slaves," the mid-level managers who never quite made it into the "house." 

     Are we all chumps, thankful for the extra strip of jerky, while playing right into their hands as they plunder the cookie jar, except now the "cookies" are worth trillions, not just billions. Hell, man, they even own spaceships and cruise the moon, but they know how to keep filling the coffers of both parties, depending which one is in power, the last two times around, two eighty-year-olds on opposite sides, who could hardly articulate a clear idea, and didn't even care about being slick enough to hide the card up their sleeves. It's out in the open, and even the trillions the new captains of industry rake in, as they pollute the air and pay subsistence wages, they take offshore to avoid paying a few measly dollars in taxes. For many folk, Marie Antoinette's "cake" is starting to taste pretty good.

     I think about that young woman in front of the Sears department store whenever I vote today. Afterall, it's about the only political power we have, so maybe she had more of an impact on me than I’ll ever know.