1967 was the year of the ‘Summer of Love.’

That was a long time ago.

It is truly disheartening to see how far we have regressed as a nation since then. The reaction against the hippies still persists to this day. It’s like some kind of mantra for the alt.right. Nearly everything they find disturbing, uncomfortable, ugly, threatening and embarrassing can be rolled up into one phrase: “dirty hippies.” The sixties were a gift to the demagogues.

The myth of the “Summer of Love” is that America was uniting in opposition to the Viet Nam War. The sad fact is that the majority of the American public still supported the war until the release of the Pentagon papers in 1971.

That helps explain why so many Americans have supported every war and invasion by the USA since then, no matter how pointless or immoral. Americans will remain mindlessly bellicose, xenophobic and jingoistic until a terrible war occurs on our home soil and we understand how horrible war really is.

What I find particularly vexing is how grossly the history of the Viet Nam era has been rewritten by neocons who’ve succeeded in oversimplifying the entire campaign to one of “heroes” who served the MIC and the “cowards” who refused. Nobody under the age of 40 has the remotest concept of how close this nation was to outright civil war. Friends and families were torn apart. And they cannot understand what it was like to live with a draft that forced every young American male to deal with having their lives completely and irrevocably changed because of a war that was not only unjustified but morally wrong.

Americans have become detached and anesthetized to the violence we are committing abroad, and to the growing piles of bodies of innocent people are conveniently labeled “collateral damage.” All of our soldiers are “heroes” just for putting on a uniform, and we are expected to wave the flag and support the troops even as we know in our hearts that the wars they are fighting are as useless, unjustified, and just as wrong as the Viet Nam war.

And look: you cannot be an honorable person and volunteer to fight in dishonorable wars. Yet so many of our soldiers not only refuse to acknowledge the atrocities we are committing, they sign up for even more tours of duty. I see them as dupes who are too young and feeble of mind to think for themselves; to not realize that they are mere fodder for the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Or maybe they are simply Gung-ho, testosterone-fueled, post-pubescent Rambos who view combat as a means of proving their manhood. Whoever they are, they help sanction the hubris and imperialistic ruthlessness of this nation.

What really perplexes me is how some veterans try to justify their service as noble or heroic, as if they were really protecting our freedoms or that of the Afghans or the Iraqis or the Vietnamese. History has proven how illegitimate, unnecessary and unjustified all of our military endeavors have been since WWII.

The vets who enjoyed their time killing – mostly the bad cops and GOP warmongers now – still seethe with an inner rage at anyone who protests the government, when their rage should be directed towards the politicians and bureaucrats who so brazenly lied to them – and continue to lie – every day. They either don’t have the common sense or the objectivity to acknowledge the truth, or else they are so blinded by their false sense of patriotism that they place duty to the military above the sanctity of individual conscience.

Unfortunately, there are too many young people today who think that “patriotism” trumps individual conscience (pun intended), and they are all too willing to become cogs in the machinery of the MIC. Too many people are drunk on patriotic fervor, and they believe that it is their duty to pay tribute to these volunteer mercenaries who willingly agree to kill innocent people in this bogus “war on terror.”

Actually, the soldiers of Viet Nam deserved more respect for fighting over there because so many of them were forced to fight on account of the draft. Today, every soldier who is fighting signs up knowing full well that they are going to be forced to kill innocent people who pose no threat whatsoever to our country. And yet we call these accomplices to murder national heroes.

Protesters these days would likely be arrested for providing support to terrorists for nothing more than believing that whoever the current victim of US aggression is has a legitimate reason to resist American domination.

Ever since George W. Bush’s vile Patriot Act, we have had to deal with the loss of many of our rights thanks to Homeland Security, NSA, TSA, and a host of other government organizations that invade our privacy. We were originally told they were to keep the “terrorists” out of our country, but now they are specifically used to spy on us, and they treat us as if WE are the enemy in our own country.

We are the enemy and yet they are the ones who invade our privacy. It was only an excuse, anyway. Our leaders are deathly afraid of us.

Those in power feared, hated, infiltrated, and eventually destroyed the Peace Movement by every means available. They brought in the hard drugs, they brought in the agitators and the violence, they told lies, and they killed our heroes when they became too popular (JFK, MLK, RFK). But the wheel keeps on turning. As MLK said, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” When I think back on that period, I feel the exuberance and the great hope and positive energy from it. We truly did feel it was the “Age of Aquarius”: Something new and beautiful.

We still have that capacity to create an earthly paradise. We have the (suppressed) technology for clean energy, and with roof top solar we can all become power sources. We can grow organically and locally. We can decentralize and get back to local communities. And we will all be much safer.

The young men and women of America today have a false idea of patriotism which has been handed to them by the government. They have grown up in an era when this country has constantly been at war. They’ve never known a time when America was at peace, and they’ve been brainwashed to believe that if you wrap a flag around yourself, sing GOD BLESS AMERICA with a bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other – that’s patriotism.

No, sorry folks: that’s fascism, and our government has been connected at the hip with Wall Street and those in the Pentagon who constantly look for new places to go to war since the Second World War. We need to cut the purse strings to the MIC, point them out for all to see and let them find a new way to make a living.

It is understandable that young people want to do something to serve their country, and joining the military really should be considered a noble and selfless thing to do. But not in this age of the global MIC, in which war is a profit-making business of the kakistocracy. It is not enough to simply put on a uniform.

Today more than ever we need to think long and hard about what true patriotism really is.