Which War Should We Fight? A Cultural War or a Real War?

In June 1962, a bunch of college students got together at a UAW vacation retreat in Port Huron, MI and drafted a 62-page statement which became the founding missive of Students for a Democratic Society, a.k.a., SDS. You can download and read the document right here.

I wasn’t at the meeting, but like just about everyone who did attend this event, I had become radicalized by getting involved with civil rights. This included taking my first Freedom Ride to desegregate a lunch counter in Delaware in 1958.

The founding of SDS marked the beginnings of what became known as the New Left, to distinguish it from the Old Left which were the Socialist and Communist parties that had grown up as offshoots of their European counterparts before, during and after World War I.

My mother and father met at a Young Communist League meeting in New York City in 1940 and just about everyone else in SDS and the other New Left groups claimed some kind of parental or familial connection to left-wing political ideologies that challenged the mainstream status quo.

The issue which provoked most of the sentiments expressed in the Port Huron statement was the Kennedy Administration’s reaction to Castro, particularly the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the increasing Cold War tensions that led to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

I was reminded of this when Joe brought up the 1962 missile crisis after Putin made some stupid comments about…