Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
June 12, 2016Even as a young child, I understood:
- The war in Vietnam was becoming increasingly unpopular
- Being on TV is a really big deal to most people
So, it was while
hanging out on the stoop with my grade school friends -- just two
blocks from the 59th Street Bridge, connecting Queens to the east side
of Manhattan -- that I hatched a cynical scheme to (supposedly)
capitalize on the above two facts.
About six of us
staged our very own anti-war protest amidst the high volume of motor
vehicles streaming down Crescent Street on their way to the city (Queens
may be one of New York’s five boroughs, but for us, only Manhattan is
and will ever be “the city”).
Mimicking the
images we saw nightly on our black-and-white TV sets, we made
rudimentary signs and posters. One of my fellow subversives wasn’t a
regular on the block. He was a little older than me, perhaps a classmate
of my big sister. I can’t remember his full name but I do recall that
his last name was Castro and that he later became notorious for ending
up in the hospital after attempting to ride a motorized mini-bike down a
flight of concrete steps.
By the time I
was in my teens, I heard a rumor that Castro had died during the
commission of a crime. Considering how many of my childhood friends
ended up in jail or dying young, this was a rumor to take at face value.
Anyway, I can still see Castro’s chastened expression when I scolded him for a misspelling on his sign: “SPOT THE WAR!” it read.
I insisted he
correct it (as if it really mattered). With or without proofreading, we
enthusiastically held up our protest posters to passing cars and trucks
and yelled “stop the war” until our pre-pubescent voices grew hoarse.
“Someone will call the news,” I promised, “and we’ll all be on TV tonight.”
Our children’s
crusade lasted maybe 20 minutes. When it neither ended the war nor
landed us on TV, we got bored. One by one, we heard our mothers’ voices
calling us to dinner from different windows in the tenement building
looming above us. Hunger trumped revolution, and the experiment was
over. I don’t believe any of us ever mentioned it again.
All the necessary lessons were right there in front of me, so many years ago, but I wasn’t ready to learn. Not even close. Nope, that part would only happen after decades had passed, many other wars were waged, and I could finally recognize street “activism” for what it really is.
Today, that same
anti-war “demo” (or rally or protest or march or whatever) would’ve had
its own social media event page. It would’ve been livestreamed. And it
would’ve been deemed a “success” if it garnered even one of us a
kick-ass profile pic for which we could use the caption: #warrior.
Lessons finally learned.
Mickey Z. can be found here.
Do you remember your first anti-war protest? by Mickey Z. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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