How I Became “Mentally Ill” from JFK to Today

I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves.
Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies, but above all, from our own misguided policies—and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best, hope of man.

There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America.

~ Robert F. Kennedy, from a speech during his Presidential campaign, Kansas State University, March 18, 1968

Due to my continuing advocacy against nuclear extinction, apparently profoundly irritating to those I constantly “hector,” some have concluded I am “mentally ill,” because I “just won’t let it go.”

Perhaps I am one of the few sane ones living in an asylum run by the inmates. Here is how I got to where I am:
I followed JFK even though I was only in 6th grade, because our teachers back then thought it important to teach us civics so we could be good citizens when we grew up. One of our more insightful teachers had us read JFK’s American University speech on peace given June 10, 1963.

This followed JFK’s learning experience in the Cuban Missile crisis for 13 days in 1962. As I recall, most of us kids were scared to death because our parents and the parents of our friends were scared to death.

When on November 22, 1963, JFK, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated, I was in the 6th grade, and it seemed like the whole world stopped in dread. The great advocate for peace was gone and it was soon followed by an election in 1964 between LBJ and Barry Goldwater, who seemed to want a nuclear war, and who LBJ defeated by using a TV ad known as “Daisy.”

It is considered one of the most important factors in Johnson’s landslide victory over the Republican Party’s candidate, Barry Goldwater. When you saw that ad, as a kid, it shook you up, and when you saw your parents’ faces turn gray watching it, it confirmed your fears that without JFK the world was balanced on a knife point between nuclear war and life.

By the time MLK was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, I was a sophomore in high school contemplating being drafted to go kill yellow people in Vietnam (I now have grandkids who are Chinese) who had done nothing to me. I heard MLK speak against war and tell the truth that “our nation” was the “greatest purveyor of violence on the planet,” contrary to JFK’s hope America would lead the world to peace.

With MLK gone, I followed RFK who seemed most promising to promote the drive to peace of JFK and MLK. On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. The wave of assassinations, or killings, seemed suspicious to me. Only those promoting peace were killed; those promoting killing were being promoted.

Having been involved in studying JFK, MLK, RFK and others, including Vietnam Veterans against the War and Staughton Lynd, the Quaker History Professor, about where the world had gone since November 22, 1963, I decided to go to the Democratic Convention of 1968 which was held August 26-29 in Chicago, Illinois, to see what I could learn. I ended up in the tidal wave of the “Police Riot,” where the police pretty much beat the hell out of anyone and everyone for having the temerity of opposing killing the yellow man.

As a result, I got involved with the trial of the Chicago Conspiracy 8. I would go to Chicago and watch the farce of a “fair trial” in the courtroom of “Judge” Julius Hoffman during the day and then attend talks by Abby Hoffman, Tom Hayden or their lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass in evenings and on weekends.

The disjunct between what I heard from them and what I heard from US Army Recruiting Officers and our congressional “leaders” was as though they described two different worlds. I noted the former promoted peace, the latter killing, including weapons of mass murder. I concluded the former were advancing JFK’s vision, the latter a world devolving into hell on earth.

Since those halcyon days, the degeneration into all war all the time everywhere has continued to enjoy more and more widespread support among the American people I encounter. JFK’s vision is deprecated. MLK is just the name of a street here and there. RFK has been sideswiped by his own kid. The descent into moral depravity has not yet resulted in nuclear war, but many seem to be working on it.

I spent the intervening years trying to use the “rule of law” to resurrect JFK’s path to peace by doing “pro bono publico” work defending peaceable resisters to nuclear weapons by proving in court nuclear weapons are criminal, as they are, under both US law and the law of nations. As JFK proposed in his speech at American University:

Meanwhile, we seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system — a system capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can finally be abolished.

It was a futile endeavor. Rather than law enforcing peace, wars of aggression became “legal” as Bush II invaded other nations based on lies. Torture became “legal” so-long as it was renamed “enhanced interrogation.” Imprisonment without trial became “legal” for decades at Guantanamo.

America abandoned the vision of JFK and became indistinguishable from its “enemies.” Then our “hope and change” President Obama authorized building “more and more useable nuclear weapons” to the tune of $1.3 trillion and implicitly encouraging Russian President Putin, China’s Xi, North Korea and others to follow the US example!

Obama announced in May 2016, as reported by NPR, that this was the way to end nuclear weapons:

And a president who has opposed nuclear weapons all his life has wound up asking Congress to fund a new class of ballistic missile submarine, a new stealth bomber, upgrades to the current stock of nuclear weapons, a new cruise missile and billions of dollars of other programs.

This type of “double think,” I thought, as my mind broke apart, sounds more like former heads of the USSR than a Nobel Peace Prize laureate US President. I wondered, are we becoming our enemy? Following this “Forever President” Trump withdrew the US from nuclear weapons treaties with Russia and even Iran. So, more useable nuclear weapons, combined with fewer treaties restricting use, again reminiscent more of the “Evil Empire” USSR than JFK’s “Camelot.”

I suspect JFK, MLK and RFK, would all condemn becoming the enemy to defeat them. If you become the enemy, that is clearly the worst form of defeat, not victory. In fact, as JFK said about the communist “enemy”:

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue. As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity. But we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture and in acts of courage.

Rather than the juvenile “us v them” propaganda dominating American “thought” today, JFK recognized the profound truth that humanity is all one:

So, let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

Having achieved scientific knowledge sufficient to kill the human world, JFK contended we could use that same knowledge to defeat our human species true enemies: disease, starvation, natural disasters, even dinosaur extinction-level asteroids, if we stopped fighting among ourselves and united in a combined effort to build a better future.

Sadly, many profit from division, war and death and will not release their dead hands from the levers of extinction. They are those whom Bob Dylan “immortalized” in his song “Masters of War.”

Such are the enemy of all humankind, as even President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his “Farewell Address,” indicting the “military industrial complex” of America.

As a kid, though frightened at the prospect of nuclear annihilation, I took solace from the fact the grownups seemed equally concerned and were working to carry forward the peace goal of JFK.

Today many good people unite to still seek that noble end. But too many are willing to profit from death and they must be repudiated, shunned and excluded from power. As MLK put it, “the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” This is only true if moral people stand forth, reject the evil, and bend it towards the good.

That’s what I think, and if that makes me “mentally ill,” I embrace it.

I have seen something so I am saying something, ain’t that what we are supposed to do? Or does that only apply to the mote in the eye of the other? Perhaps, being “mentally ill” myself, I can offer an expert opinion on who is truly insane. I stand ready to so testify.

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