What really gets my goat, as a pacifist, is that we Americans haven’t a clue as to what war really is, what it is like to hold a broken body in your arms that was your child.  If we did, if we had even an inkling of what war really is, there would have been no Vietnam, no Contras, no Desert Storm, perhaps no Bloody, Bloody Tuesday.

     The reason for our cluelessness, the reason we can so blithely launch a thousand points of light at the Cradle of Civilization, is that we have had one hundred and forty years of innocence.  Unless you count the 1968 riots, and, since we are a (harumph) classless society, we do not formally recognize class warfare, and that was a class war.

     Don McLean equated the death of Buddy Holly and the deaths of the three civil rights workers, Michael Henry Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman with the death of innocence.

     Well, whatever wisps of vestiges of innocence survived the holocaust of the sixties were vaporized today, for good and forever, amen.

     Let us pray.

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If we continue to condone, even sponsor the killing of innocents, from the jungles of Central America to the desert of the Middle East, can we not expect to reap that which we sow?

In the summer of 1964, the deaths of the three civil rights workers, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner prompted Don McLean to mourn in song the loss of our nation's innocence.  Today I regard him as a prophet, sadly right, yet once again.  As another prophet once sang, “When will we ever learn...?”

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June 21, 1964, Mississippi –
       September 11, 2001, New York City
 

Don McLean, your epic lyric echoes in my brain,
     Haunting sadness, your refrain.
“Drove my Chevy to the levee,
     But the levee was dry....”
Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner
     Pictures burn themselves in my mind’s eye.
Innocence of youth, begone!
     Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner,
Afterimages remain,
     Haunting sadness, your refrain.

Don McLean, you sang of loss, I heard you plead to me,
     “With your music, voice my plea.”
“Drove my Chevy to the levee,
     But the levee was dry....”
Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner
     Names that ring so true in my mind’s eye.
Ate we of the fruit, now gone.
     Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner,
Painful lessons, never free
     With my song I voice your plea.

Don McLean, you feel my anger, rogue state that we are?
     Land of hope, to fall so far.
“Drove my Chevy to the levee,
     But the levee was dry....”
Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner,
     Once we felt so safe in our mind’s eye.
Ghosts of warriors live on--
     Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner,
Tried to help us be that star!
     Land of hope, to fall so far.