Creative Nonfiction: The Peace Symbol Turns Fifty (October 2008)

By John C. Krieg

 

Prescript: Last night as we all lie peacefully sleeping in our beds the U.S. bombed Iran, and it sure looks like the Orange Fuhrer is going to get his war, just like Bush II got his war. This all smacks of the war that terrorized my generation which I expound upon in the piece below. This man, who pisses and moans that he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, who is spending billions on his completely unnecessary Board of Peace, who promised the populace that he would never get us involved in “endless wars” is now getting us immersed in what promises to be another endless war. President Say This and Do That, President Child Fucker (yeah I said it, and don’t say that you didn’t think it), President Hooray for Me and to Hell with Everyone Else is not doing this to help the protesting citizens of Iran, because if he really wanted to do that he would have done it sooner when he hinted that he might and before 30,000 people who believed President Lying Lips were butchered by that totalitarian government. The hubris of this monster is such that he seems to be telling the Ayatollah, “Only I am allowed to gun down my citizens in our streets. Stop stealing my sthick!” So why is he doing this now? As always, to create distraction away from his poll numbers that threaten to drop below 30% – that’s why. I fear for my 17-year-old grandson who is just starting to find his way in the world. He, like a lot of Generation Z, fails to see the threat. He doesn’t know that the sons of the rich will be protected while the sons of the poor will die in this upcoming carnage. He doesn’t even realize how poor we really are. In short, he’s a good kid who doesn’t ask for much, and the thought of him potentially losing his young promising life over a bunch of religious zealots literally turns my stomach. I would like to put this on blast to every male teenager in America: Go to college, get your deferment, don’t believe what these old white men are saying because that is what they always say. That’s what they said to me about Vietnam: “Go off to die because we said so.” I didn’t believe them then, and after 48,000 of my brothers from my generation died for nothing, I don’t believe them now. The bastards – dirty lying bastards – and don’t think for one minute that this really isn’t all about the oil because it always is with these pricks. It’s been 18 years since I wrote this piece and nobody seemed to care then. Well…perhaps it will get some attention now.

 

Happy fiftieth birthday peace symbol. Unfortunately, you've been around long enough to know that things haven't always been so peaceful. You were, in fact, born out of the desire to derail a nuclear holocaust, which would've for certain, exterminated mankind. Homo sapiens, the most intelligent animals on earth, are the only ones capable of devising a method by which to eradicate themselves. Thank goodness for the species that some people don't want to die. So they created you as an expression of their will to live.

 

You were invented in Great Britain in March of 1958 for the first Easter Sunday Aldersmaston March for nuclear disarmament and quickly thereafter you were adopted as the symbol of the ongoing campaign for nuclear disarmament (CND). By then, 340,000 people had died either of an instant or harrowingly slow death as the result of America's bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't feel my country was wrong in its actions. Estimates vary as to how long the Japanese, with their never surrender doctrine, would have fought on, but an additional two years are the most common estimates. The goal was to save American lives, and it was achieved. But once the world witnessed this awesome destructive power, there wasn't much left to the imagination as to how quickly and thoroughly the earth could be destroyed. No one would win in the event of a world-wide nuclear massacre. Hawks and doves were united on this one point. Government leaders in America and Russia, however, didn't seem to get the memo, and nuclear weapons proliferated while pompous political posturing was the stock-in-trade of the Cold War. The youth wondered how much deader someone could become once they were already dead? 

 

I spent my youth in the era of Cold War hysteria. "I like Ike," and be the first one on your block to have your own family bomb shelter. In the event of a nuclear blast, ignore your neighbors banging on the roof. Every man for himself. Desperate times called for desperate measures. Television, after all, was black and white, and so too were decisions concerning life and death. Peace symbols abounded when Sylvia Plath marched in Boston in a "ban the bomb" protest parade in 1958. The "war jitters" of the twenty-somethings of the late thirties was replaced by their "annihilation jitters" of the late fifties. No wonder her poetry was so dark.

 

Kennedy inherited Eisenhower's war. Johnson was thrust into it faster than her husband's brains dried on Jackie's blouse. A numb nation became rudderless. It was time for a change. The recoil to: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country," was "Get out now! Hell no we won't go!"

 

Along came the mid-sixties and the young people's revolt against the repression of the fifties, against materialism, against authority, against an "adult" mentality that persisted and perpetuated the "nuclear arms race." Who would cross the finish line first? And, what was the prize? We looked at the leadership abilities of our leaders and determined that the inmates were running the asylum. Peace symbols became a point of fashion, especially with the youth. They were sewn onto bell-bottom jeans and army/navy surplus jackets, and stretched across the cleavage of young women's peek-a-boo blouses. Groovy! "Make Love Not War," came to a head at Woodstock. Joni Mitchell penned the namesake song from a hotel room in Manhattan because she couldn't get out to the concert site as the governor of New York declared it a disaster area and blocked the roads. The bombers did become, “butterflies above our nation.”₁ We had the blueprint for how to live right to show to the older and future generations. We were full of ourselves then. It all came crashing down four months later at Altamont. The Rolling Stones, with the Hell's Angels acting as their body guards, performed "Sympathy for The Devil" as a black man was murdered in the audience for dancing with a white woman. The devil comes to kill, steal, and destroy; and, his mission was accomplished when National Guard rifle shots penetrated the spring air at Kent State University on May 4^th, 1970. “Four dead in O-hi-o.”₂ The end. The complete and utter end. It was hard to wear you on the back of our jean jackets then peace symbol. Didn't see you around much after that. As Simon and Garfunkel sang "The Sounds of Silence" my generation did become silent. What was the point? Nixon and his “tin soldiers”₂ had won, and we all knew it. Redemption came with Watergate. 

 

Peace symbols began to appear again as we took hope with Carter who wallowed in ineptitude. Then came Ronnie Ray Gun and "Star Wars," and any hope for peace seemed utterly doomed. An anomaly of contradictions was our Hollywood president. In October 1988, he seized the peace initiative speaking at the Berlin Wall and saying, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Amazingly, 13 months later, it was torn down. The peace symbol infiltrated the eastern bloc countries and swept across Russia. It's hard to keep a good idea down.

 

While the peace symbol flourished with glasnost, its popularity faded on American soil. I didn't see it around anymore. I hardly even thought about the peace symbol until I walked into a bookstore and saw the hardcover coffee table book: Peace: 50 Years of Protest (2008) by Barry Miles prominently displayed. I went to it like a moth to a flame. It was like spending time with an old and trusted friend. It caused me to question where my life had been and where it is going. What happened to me? Just where and when did the idealism die? And, more importantly, why did I allow it?

 

So: happy birthday peace symbol. I wish I had lived the life that you represented so many years ago. But I didn't and I can't change that. You never changed. What you represent is the higher ground for mankind. I often wonder – is mankind capable of achieving it? Time will tell. So, happy birthday peace symbol. We sure need the idealism to come back to American soil.

 

The book contained a stick-on peace symbol. I felt a little uneasy putting it on the back windshield of the family SUV. But why? What's wrong with promoting a little peace in today's world? It's there to remind me that the path I've taken was too rigid and narrow. That I should expect more from myself. To expect more from our leaders. To expect more from mankind. So, happy birthday peace symbol, and may you have many more.

 

Postscript: I know from whence I speak. I graduated high school in 1970, and being number 65 in the draft lottery would have been headed to Vietnam save for my college deferment. I saw friends who weren't so lucky buried. And for what? For what?

Song Lyrics Quoted:

1.) “Woodstock”: Ladies of the Canyon. Joni Mitchell, 1970.

2.) “Ohio”: Déjà vu’. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, 1970.

John C. Krieg is a retired landscape architect and land planner who formerly practiced in Arizona, California, and Nevada. He is also retired as an International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) certified arborist and currently holds seven active categories of California state contracting licenses, including the highest category of Class A General Engineering. He has written a college textbook entitled Desert Landscape Architecture (1999, CRC Press). John’s most recent collection of bios and reviews is: Lines & Lyrics: Glimpses of the Writing Life (2019, Adelaide Books). John’s most recent collection of fictional novellas is: Zingers: Five Novellas Blowing Like Dust on the Desert Wind (2020, Anaphora Literary Press). John’s environmentally oriented middle grade and young adult illustrated book entitled: Luke the Legendary Bloodhound has recently been picked up by Level Best Books.