Lessons Learned At The DNC

The memories of the 2008 Democratic National Convention here in Denver are many. The most memorable thing was the color blue that pervasively poisoned the air of my hometown, Denver. Cops in blue, to be more specific. I learned once again I live in a nation based on the lie all men are created equal and there is freedom of speech.
It is memorable at the time we have a black man nominated for the Presidency, we are further away from the truth of equality and freedom of speech than anytime during my sixty years on earth.

And, being more a citizen of the world than just a citizen of a nation blind to the plight of the rest of the world, I fear the struggle for Martin’s “dream” still has many miles to go with many struggles and disappointments ahead. But we must persist to resist.

I’m a hiker because I live in a state with more mountains 13,000 and 14,000 feet in elevation than any other state in North America. When I hike there are some amazing people I meet along the way up or dragging ass back down.

People say hello to each other, support each other and are friendly and relaxed almost all the time on the trails. Except for the lunatic that menaced my wife and me with a knife on one trail. That was the only time I’ve ever felt a threat from another human on a trail.

On one particular trail to the hardest 14,000 peak in the state, Long’s Peak, we met an elderly gentleman who was snowshoeing back down toward the trail head. He greeted us with a distinctive German accent and praised us for being well prepared for the winter conditions. We talked with him for some time. We discovered he was a retired forest ranger and had guided hikers to the top of Long’s Peak many times in over twenty years of being assigned there. At that time he was 68. He had topped the hardest peak in Colorado over 100 times. His latest trip had been when he turned 68.

I asked him how he managed to scale such a difficult peak so many times and for so long. He smiled with a look of amusement. “Perseverance”, he told me, “perseverance”. We’ve met Max several more times in winter and summer. He’s in his seventies now and still climbing up that mountain.

When I stood with the IVAW on Wednesday night at the DNC with riot police about to light us up with gas and God only knows what else, I thought of Max’s “perseverance” comment. I was standing near Ron Kovic who had “marched” the full four miles with us. A young man had assisted Ron with his chair the entire way.

Ron Kovic is an example of perseverance. I saw him all over the DNC demonstrations. I marched four times in five days and every time Ron showed up with us. And he came out of his hotel on Monday when very young activists were being brutalized by the riot police.

Perseverance. IVAW members persevered Wednesday in the face of danger. They persevered on Operation First Casualty on patrol through the busiest part of Denver on the 16th Street Mall.

They reenacted the daily horror of their life in Iraq and Afghanistan to demonstrate to an apathetic nation what goes on in their war every day and what nightmares linger in their tortured souls.

It would have been easier to hide behind the flag or in some veteran’s club like VFW to tell war stories.

It would have been easier to have convinced themselves they took part in an “honorable’ war.

It would have been easier to go to their “four cornered room” to self medicate and try to forget.

The act of testifying about war and reenacting the war that torments you already is one of the most patriotic acts a veteran can do. Winter Soldiers’ Investigation and OFC are acts of courage few understand. I do understand.

When I was young I took part in street theater and testified about another war. I still testify forty years later. Ron Kovic still testifies forty years later. I’m 60 but when I go to a college to tell about my experience in Vietnam when I was 18 and 19, I dissociate back to 1968 and become 18 and 19.

When I finish and return home I’m drained and sleep even less than the normal four hours. I pray to God the vets of IVAW won’t have to continue testifying forty years later but I feel confident they will do so if they have to.

It pains me greatly to watch the members of IVAW as they do what they know they have to do. I see their pain and like a parent I want to console them. But, as a parent, I have my sons to console.

As a veteran of another war I understand the troops of IVAW better than they think.

But I also know they need to do what they do without interference from me. Now is the time for them to come to the forefront as patriots to defend their nation from the dangers within their own government.

They need to be with each other without my interference, just as we Vietnam vets kept to ourselves when we returned. Affinity and intense common experiences make their unity necessary and admirable.

Many try to interject themselves into that bond of veterans but they can’t any more than those who tried to join the resistance of Vietnam veteran brothers and sisters but weren't veterans.

The color blue was pervasive in my mind during the DNC. I had to seek comfort in my favorite blues music to cope. I felt the depressive blues in my mind watching the pain and anger of those who struggled against the agents of the police state. I saw way too many armed men and women in blue riot gear ready to harm me and my brothers and sisters of the resistance.

Yesterday I marched with immigrants and families of immigrants wanting to become part of the America they are helping build with their labor for wages far too low. They speak in another language often. They listen to different music. Their culture is different than my white European culture. Their families once lived on this land called Colorado. It once belonged to their families. It was stolen from their families by my ancestors.

The march was peaceful, joyous and festive. The police presence was much less probably because the former mayor, Federico Pena, and the former head of the Department of Safety, which oversees police, were in the march.

The most obvious thing I witnessed was “familia” running strongly through the crowd.

And yet I left the march with a lingering sad impression. As we marched over the Colfax Avenue Bridge I looked down below into an industrial area. Four white men turned their backs to the marchers and stuck their butts in the air to signal their disapproval.

As we came to the end of the bridge, people lined the sidewalks clapping and giving thumbs up gestures except for one lonely individual. She was in her twenties and dressed very fashionably. She stood on the sidewalk with a hateful look while she gave a thumbs down gesture to the marchers.

How do we become so hateful? What threat do the immigrants pose this young woman? Or those four guys in the lumber yard? Does she believe the immigrants are the threat to her security after eight years of George W. Bush? I have no answers and fail to understand the hate she personified.

Oh, yes, I have been exposed to it. I have been part of it when I began to depersonalize the Vietnamese as “gooks” dangerous to me and my comrades. I understand the concept that led me to this hate but don’t want to understand why it lingers in so many of us.

I refuse to understand it because it is evil racism that we all seem so capable of having in the darkness of our hearts. What I need to do is stop trying to understand it and start trying to change it by resisting the hate, the violence and racism. So easy to say.

I ran across my friend, Larry, several times during the DNC. Larry is a young black activist who runs the IAC here in Denver. Larry has been harassed and beaten by the Denver Police. He walks outside his Capital Hill apartment into a gentrified neighborhood.

The affluent and mostly white residents have returned from the suburbs to be closer to downtown jobs. The housing for the poorer, like my mental health clients, has evaporated. The homeless are chased away. Black men like Larry are looked upon with suspicion by residents and the police.

Larry wears dreadlocks. He’s slightly built and weighs less than 150 pounds. He looks more like Bob Marley than a gang member or the stereotypical black male of criminal activities used by cops and racists to justify continued racist actions.

Yesterday, in the park where the immigrant march ended, I spotted Larry and talked with him. He asked me if the events of the standoff by IVAW with police were staged. I assured him they weren’t at the end of the action but the vets had worked with police for an escort and the cops knew some of the vets would risk arrest.

We talked about the outcome of the IVAW march. We both agreed it was outrageous that veterans and the other activists had to go to such extremes in order to access the delegates and candidates of any political party. Neither of us was satisfied with just a campaign promise to consider just three points the IVAW wanted to discuss.

Larry correctly pointed out the press was quick to jump on an assault by the police on a white Code Pink activist but failed to go into the case of the young Latino who had been arrested and roughly treated for getting into an argument with gay bashers trying to interrupt a peaceful march. The hate-mongers who were white weren’t arrested.

Larry correctly pointed out young and mostly minority activists had been encircled and gassed, maced, and roughly treated by police on Monday without reasonable warning. All video and eyewitness accounts deny police allegations the young activists were throwing rocks and other objects at police.

A video aired by Amy Goodman shows police spraying mace and shooting gas into an encircled group of activists. The police wouldn’t allow them to leave the scene. The police didn’t have badge numbers or names on their riot gear. No warning was given. They were anonymous goons of the state at that point.

Larry is about the oppressed. He is the oppressed. He has right to be cynical about returning veterans getting a more reasonable response from police than he would or the groups he represent would. He and I both know the police would have violently ended the standoff Wednesday night if it had been anybody but the IVAW standing up to them.

I have to agree with Larry when he points out media makes more out of a white activist being man-handled than if it were a black or Latino activist. I go even further to say veterans sometimes become ambivalent about things. They want to treat riot police with respect and some have actually been part of the police department before joining the military.

Veterans are often ambivalent about the wars they have participated in. Some aren’t so much against the war as they are against the way it is executed. Some still have a military mindset that makes them comply and obey orders and laws even if they’re wrong and immoral laws and orders.

I don’t just include the young veterans in this commentary. I often talk with Vietnam veterans who are against the war they were in and the wars going on now. But the same veterans talk wistfully about those days of combat and the comradeship. Some seem to never leave the jungle or the desert. And I have to include myself if I stay around veterans too long.

The truly oppressed Larry represents have no such ambivalence. They have been beaten and harassed with frequency. They have been redlined and passed over.

They are more frequently sentenced to prison for minor drug violations.

They are more frequently injured or killed by police.

They have higher unemployment, poorer housing and less healthcare benefits. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the oppressed people of New Orleans weren’t worthy of Bush’s compassionate conservatism.

The hurricane season is back and New Orleans once again sits prepared for the storm. Government promises to act quicker this time. But those promises ring hollow since over one third of the Katrina survivors have yet to return to their homes in New Orleans. There are no homes to return to. The promise of rebuilding New Orleans and the lower 9th Ward in particular has become the Big Easy’s big lie.

Veterans and survivors marched together in March of 2006 to symbolize the negligence of the government toward both groups. The march was to symbolize a bomb dropped in Iraq was a bomb dropped on the shores of the Gulf.

If the DNC gave us any lessons this week it has been the fact there remains a caste system in America. Big money will continue to beat the hand of the Big Easy for every big pot.

The IVAW had to risk being assaulted, tear-gassed and maced to even warrant a possible meeting with an Obama staff member to voice their concerns about the war. Captain Morgan, the mascot of the rum with the same name, was inside the Pepsi Center with reporters talking to him and the playmates with him.

Secretive corporate dinners were held in fancy suites of high-priced hotels for the upper crust of the Democratic Party all the time the DNC was in town. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, was whooping it up with the CEO’s of large corporate sponsors of the party.

Larry and the groups he represented were considered threats to the Democratic Party because they had valid complaints about the balance of power and wealth in this nation. They had information the alleged representatives of democracy didn’t want to hear.

The delegates and the party hacks of the Democratic Party came to Denver to celebrate and party in honor of the first black Presidential candidate. They didn’t want to hear from a young black man with dreadlocks and a serious affect. His message was a truthful but disturbing message they didn't want to hear.

The delegates and party hacks are “satisfied” with the symbolism of the black Presidential candidate. And if he wins they will be satisfied with a black President.

IVAW cannot and will not be satisfied with either candidate when they are elected. Obama will continue the war in Afghanistan even if and when he withdraws in a “reasonable manner” from Iraq.

Larry and his groups cannot and will not be satisfied to see the next President continue to drain the tax dollars that should go toward education, healthcare, housing, job creation (other than military based jobs) and all the many social programs to continue war in the nation that finally broke the back of the USSR.

Environmentalists cannot be happy to hear about drilling for natural gas in wilderness areas of the West. They cannot be happy to hear about “safe nuclear energy” development.

The lessons of the DNC here in Denver are many but it seems the most important is the clear message that Obama may be a change in the man in the Oval Office but the same corporate government will continue to be the “shadow government” of this nation. Obama may be the first black President but he will still answer to the white plantation owners.

That message means our struggle must continue with great perseverance. The young like Larry and the IVAW must lead us but the old and divided members of the peace and justice movement must reenergize themselves like my friend, Max.

They must climb the mountain again and again no matter what the steepness and no matter what difficult obstacles they encounter. This is the hike for our children and grandchildren. And let me tell you; the summit is well worth the journey and the hardships.


Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
Denver VVAW member
Combat veteran
USMC RVN '67-'69