Humid summer night in Peoria,
crickets and locusts hissing and cussing, 1970, just before leaving for college out East far from my Midwestern roots. Who did I
think I was? No beagles in tow?
Walking alone – mom and dad (too young for World War II)
asking what in the hell did I think I was doing? – two younger sisters and two little brothers not sure what was happening – down Abington Street hill between woods where an abandoned cave was
said to have an old piano from Speakeasy Prohibition Days, we neighborhood eighth-grade boys having years ago crawled into
that tunnel looking for xxhistory, knowing our uncles had fought Nazis in worse places once upon a time.
On the other side – wondering how my inquisition would go when
I got down the hill – Glen Oak Park, not knowing then (before
moving to New York years later) of it being Frederick Law Olmstead’s design – (zoo of tigers, lions, peacocks, beasts from
afar, and lagoon to be skated in winter, hugged by tonight’s muggy forest with old, abandoned Bear Caves back in the hill where it was dangerous for us kids to wander under threat of being mugged, or
– as we said – “jumped by hoods”) and a little museum of local fossils next to a Chinese Victorian pagoda hosting summer band concerts some people – like my grandparents – just listened to
from their cars, honking in approval at concert’s end.
Glancing left to the Sunken Garden with fountain memorial to
locally-claimed, national philosopher Robert Ingersoll where we
grew up hunting Easter Eggs, I crossed to the little brick Selective Service office building.
I had been walking down that hill, alone, telling my Draft Board…No, I won’t go and I won’t accept a student deferment. The
Vietnam War is wrong. You can draft me if you want. But I play
by the rules, willing to go to jail. And I’ve written about this in the school newspaper, referring to St. Augustine and theory of Just War. Read it.
They all thought I was crazy, including the doctor who delivered
me at birth, not understanding why I was refusing my student 2S college deferment which they gave me anyway and I sent back
burned.
Go to Canada, some said. I said No. And I’m no hero.
This has forever stayed with me, no flight, as my cousin was then drafted and sent to Vietnam, coming back intact. And my lottery number 120 never came up.
Some years later I received a letter from the Illinois State Selective Service Appeals Board announcing they had deemed me to be
a legitimate Conscientious Objector, long after my case had been heard and the draft was ended.
It was this engagement over my adolescence and early life as an
adult that led me to forever – beyond elementary school Civics
with my Dominican nun teachers – respect what is now called the
Deep State.