Push back

No stranger to push back.

To divisiveness. First, it’s French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam).

Then within Vietnam, North, Central and South (except for Cape St Jacques and Dalat for the Madames to escape scorching heat while hubbies slept with mistresses). Then 1954 partition of North and South at the 17th parallel (even today, North and South Korea are starring at each other through those “binos”).

All of that before my time. Then, the oligarchs and autocrats, bringing the whole entourage (all in white suits – as opposed to N Korea’s all-Mao look) including Madame Nhu (unelected, yet yielded a lot of power). Then the brothers- elder one who donned his Signor robe to reign in Central region while her husband, our RfK, was in charge of security.

What Buddhist? Suppress them.

“Can we just shoot ‘m?”. “Let’s take a walk across the street to St John” – for a photo op, to show some strength.

Don Jr was pale in comparison to Asian cronysm like Clarence Thomas vs Thurgood Marshall (per Maureen Dowd), zeroes vs heroes…

I am no stranger to clashes and conflicts: splintered extended families, parental overblown crisis (makes me a border-line schizoid), civil demonstrations that brought out women and children – even monks and nuns (who were supposed to denounce all things worldliness). I can still recall the smokes and smells of tear gas, in ample supplies to suppress marchers (for religious freedom). We used nylon bags and lemon wedges for countermeasures.

Please view my other blog on the burning monk.

For now, it’s hot again here in the middle of America (the red line, where to exercise woman’s rights, assumed for the past 5 decades, one has to travel at least 400 miles out of state). It was hot back in 1963 near my neighborhood. Then topped it all with flick of the zippo. No hair smell. Just the smell of burned monk robe and flesh.

My first eyewitness of conscientious objection (on the other side of the pond, a Quaker guy from PA with young daughter nearby also lit a match , a self immolated protest at the steps of the Pentagon against another member of his sect: Nixon/Mc Namara. (Nixon was orginally a Quaker).

Not all Republican believe in the same thing. Not all Evangelical follow the same path. But of late, they have been subverted and re-directed by the likes of Proud Boys and PAC’s. More than 50 years of brewing. Sore losers and liars.

Plotting and planning a return of the King, of Theocratic reign of a thousand years (pre-mil).

Everyone forgets Love. Everyone forgets that for a life to be happy, we need relationships, healthy and hopefully friction-free.

Yet we are called to be all-out, take no prisoners…text in coded warring words… “stacking” “lynching”, “hanging” (stop short of “crucifying”).

The “kill” mentality. Death, destruction and reigning over the ashes.

Rome. Constantinople and Christ (to counter Romanov and Russian Orthodox). Cold war and Hot war. Back to selling arms and using arms. Carrying and concealing.

All the ammo and ammunition that characterize our current climate.

Rewinding the clock. Undoing the 60’s. Law and order (except this time, the Law i.e. Judges, is on our side). In the heat of the night once again w/out Sidney Poitier.

I am just passing through. Waiting for my connection. Just like that burning monk. This world is not for me, for him, for you. I long for yesterday, with only half left in my body and memory (“I am half a man I used to be”).

Memory of a burning monk, of protest by women (in Ao Dai) and children in blue/white uniform. Like a song “can’t get it out of my head”…. Do I have to do everything myself now….

Where are the Gretas of this world? if any left for them after all these showdowns. Spent cases and casualties of war.

Now, that’s another reason for Roe. Why bother to bring the likes of me to this hot world and its wars which I-others- did not ask for, and have no say to begin with.

F**k the French and their post-Colonial face-saving. Their beige suits and left-behind half-breeds. Alain Delon and La Rousse waning influence in Indochine. Yet today you can still find some remnants that stoke in-fighting among fellow Vietnamese American on facebook about artists and our equivalents of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, whose generations started all this, only to see it flips right back in J.D. Vance, and Matt Gaetz. Hilly Billies pissing on Kent State graves.

In 83 we didn’t smell hair burning. Only had I jumped out into the middle of that fateful intersection and sat down next to the burning monk.

Forgive me. I was only 7 at the time, with burning eyes courtesy of Monsieur Nhu, who married then student he tutored, who was unelected yet yielded a lot of power (enough to call out our National Guards to suppress our J6 equivalent).

Push them back, push them back, way back…