End of the March

The shift from love to hate, from pacifism to violence, was sharply visible in Manhattan. TIME Contributing Editor Mayo Mohs observed one line of the New York Moratorium March:

ALMOST at once I could sense that these marchers were different. There was a fresh new hate in them, a bitterness hurled indiscriminately at the world around them. At one corner a black cop, patient but looking terribly weary, stood with his fellow officers holding back the crowd while the traffic went through. The front line of protesters was shouting the old chant "1-2-3-4--we don't want your ---- war"; one girl--she could not have been more than 15--was taking particular delight in shrieking the obscene adjective loudly at the cop. The word was hardly new, but her strangely misdirected rage was. It was surely not his war.

The Viet Cong flag passed, and I knew what the kids must have been told. Some of the older Vietnamese have been fighting one enemy or another for 30 years, and their despair must be huge. But that banner was no flag of peace for me.

Then came a Cuban flag, bold and bright, for a moment reminding me that once, when Castro was still in the hills, he looked like a hero to many of us. Then I remembered "'Al paredon [To the Wall]!" and the betrayals that came before the sugar cane. But the kids could not remember--these wispy-bearded caricatures of the sainted Che.

I watched four blocks of the parade pass. Panther flags. Shouts of "Off the pigs!" The Youth Against War and Fascism under a red banner emblazoned with Lenin's portrait. Maybe they had not heard of the early, ugly Party tyranny that broke the heart of Lenin's romantic young American follower, John Reed. Behind them came another, newer cause, something more to cloud the main issue: "Abolish all abortion laws." That's it, kids. A reverence for life.

I stood on the curb, caught on the knife edge between two unhappy and possibly hopeless worlds. Behind me was a bank window, offering joyless, useless prizes for opening an account. Across the street were the kids, ramming their way into the mad jumble of Bryant Park. Later, the militants--the YAWFs, the Progressive Labor S.D.S. wing and others--fought their way onto the platform and kept off speakers they did not approve of. If that was the future, it, too, would be a joyless prize.

What had we come to march against? The war? Which war? And against whom?

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