A New Kind of McCarthyism

The label of Leftist has followed me most of my adult life. That’s not only okay with me, but the truth. During the past winter, I began receiving emails from someone I did not know in the area where I live asking that we meet at a local coffee shop. He included an article that he had read that supported Israel over the Palestinians in the Gaza war and also mentioned that one of his wife’s relatives had read some of my articles at CounterPunch, liked them, and also wanted to meet.

I was uncomfortable with the article he sent me, but agreed to meet at some point and that opportunity came in June. We met at a local coffee shop that had recently seen a brouhaha about an employee who was fired, and according to the owners, two of whom were Jewish, the employee would not stop discussing the Gaza war with customers. The issue sounded like an employment/labor issue, but took on added significance when a pro-Palestinian demonstration targeted the business, with some signs noting two of the owners were Jewish. I have heard nothing since that incident.

The coffee shop incident reminded me of how my mother, a staunch antiwar activist during the Vietnam era, would get into heated debates about the war with customers at my parents’ coffee and lunch shop. Looking back I wondered how my parents were not singled out in the small town where we lived because of those debates. I think it may have been because they were accepted in our community with both my father’s and mother’s families having deep roots in our town.

We sat across from each other in the coffee shop. It seemed to me that our conversation was congenial. The person who had originally contacted me was accompanied by his wife and we spoke about our shared experiences during the Vietnam antiwar era and our experiences with protest during those years. I have not received any communication from the person who originally contacted me, and it seems that my discussion of the arrest I had from the Vietnam era must have hit a sour note. I don’t know who may have become uncomfortable with our discussion, but it was obvious that discomfort was there, although I will never learn what actually happened.

The end of communications reminded me of my experiences in a suburban school district in the late 1980s, when I noted my objections to being asked by a school principal to lead the school in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance during the school’s Flag Day commemoration. The principal ranted at me when I noted that I don’t recite the Pledge, and haven’t since the Vietnam War era. I mentioned that only a few miles from the school’s location was a ghetto that was marked by poverty and racism. The principal began harassing me and I filed a labor grievance with my union and the fallout was significant. People who I considered friends or acquaintances supported the principal following the incident. All the teachers in that school and support staff signed a greeting card in support of the principal before the labor grievance hearing. When I asked an acquaintance who was a member of the school’s support staff why she hadn’t sent me a greeting card as the labor hearing neared, she commented: “What do you think, that I’m nuts?”

Although the Left has been often tossed in the dustbin of history in recent decades in the US, or at least until the Gaza and Ukraine wars and perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement, the same or similar narratives take place as did during the Vietnam era and beyond. There is so little space for countering the right-wing juggernaut of the military-industrial complex and a global economy that has left so many on the sidelines of history and the environment in shambles. When protest does reach the street level, as it did and does during the protests against the genocide in Gaza, protesters are often beaten by militarized police.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).