Forking Roads

When enough is enough, what then?

What then, you ask? We will follow the same footsteps of our protestors that took the difficult fork in the road from the past. It is not like we have not had to take that fork in the road before. We have. We tend to forget about when and how. We also forget the harshness, the cruelty, and the blood that we shed in those not-so-distant times:

• Segregation protests 1954-1968. Blood was shed in that fork in the road.

• Vietnam War protests 1965-1973. Blood was shed in that fork in the road.

• George Floyd Murder and BLM protests in 2020-2021. Blood was shed in that fork in the road.

We will escalate when it is required, to the point of bloodshed. Make no mistake about this. Blood will be shed again in his land. We will take that fork in the road.

In the year 1967, the right had escalated drastically into a useless and expanding overseas war. The peaceful flower children from San Francisco had spread the anti-war protest across the land. The Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam organized a protest to get national visibility for the anti-war movement. Those protestors at the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday morning, October 21, 1967, spun off later to the Pentagon. They took over the facility as they took that fork in the road.

The day's activities began with a rally at the Lincoln Memorial. There were 50,000 protesters, armed with flowers. They were there to protest the war. At 5:40 p.m., some 35,000 of those protestors took the fork in the road that headed for the Pentagon.

Some 500 U.S. Army Military Police (MPs) stood at 10-foot intervals around the nearly 1-mile perimeter of the Pentagon. Within the circle of MP's, 300 U.S. Deputy Marshals had spent the day waiting. The Deputies were on hand to make any necessary arrests, not an authority of the military.

U.S. Marshals arrived at the Pentagon at 6:00 am Saturday morning. Throughout most of the day the Marshals relaxed. Many stored their head-cracking nightsticks and field packs along the Pentagon walls and lay in the grass, their heads pillowed on their white helmets.

A smaller segment of protestors at the front stormed forward, scaled the walls, and forced their way into the Pentagon. Far out numbered, deputies and soldiers were taunted and assaulted with vegetables, rocks, and bottles.

There were inside the Pentagon over 5,000 regular U.S. Army troops armed with rifles and bayonets standing ready. The troops inside the Pentagon rushed outside as the violence escalated. A full-scale riot, 35,000 against 6,000 erupted for many hours—through the evening and all night. A total of 682 people (2%) were arrested. There were 47 injured (0.1%) (demonstrators, soldiers, and U.S. Marshals).

By 8:00 am Sunday morning, most of the protesters had left that fork in the road; only 200 remained. Note the white helmets of U.S. Marshals, and, at the bottom of the photo, the white gloved MPs and the regular troops.

Sunday morning, workmen began to clean up the rubble of a riot. All around them, a few determined demonstrators remained the rest of the day in an exhausted cry for peace. This was a long fork in the road.

There was some graffiti sprayed on Pentagon walls. No one was shot. Discipline in regular troops held. As the photo shows MPs and regular troops stood back while the lagging-behind civilians mingled.

So if you want to know if we can muster the numbers to hold a protest rally at a fork in the road, go ahead. Ask me. And if you want to know if we will fight all night at a fork in the road, in the streets or in the Pentagon against armed troops for a just cause, go ahead. Ask me.

Because of our past and of events in my life, I know that we will not be able to keep injuries and bloodshed from happening. Forks in the road are not easy. I fully expect to see the likes of the massacre that happened at Kent State, May 4, 1970. There was a planned rally opposing the expanding, top secret involvement of the Vietnam War into Cambodia by United States military forces. The Ohio governor called out the national guard on May 3rd. They arrived on campus at 10:00 pm. The next morning there was escalating student dissent, protesting the National Guard’s presence on a peaceful campus. Students sensed a fork in the road.

Ohio National Guard called out for a poor reason, a peaceful student rally. Yes, Red State governors are that stupid.

That fork-in-the-road bloodshed was also in a Red State. Fired upon with tear gas, students fought back at that fork in the road.

The students sent the tear gas right back. That was the high water mark of nonviolent student protest, but not of the National Guard’s.

The Ohio National Guard’s 28 troops fired 67 rounds at college protestors over 13 seconds. That was unnecessary force escalation, uncalled for and wrong. Four students were killed. Nine were wounded, one of which was paralyzed for life.

Those troops fired on unarmed students. An outrage. We can expect similar events to unfold.

I do not expect rigid military discipline from Red State national guard’s weekend warriors. I also note that Donald Trump will try to invoke a fight to avail himself of the use of the Insurrection Act. Hence, he will try to get a Red State governor to do the dirty work by their calling in the state National Guard. In that manner, the cold, calculating, secretly instigating, psychopath Trump can be seen later as “coming to the rescue” with the regular U.S. Army.

At another and similar major fork in the road, Dwight Eisenhower had the good sense to send immediately the highly trained and elite 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock in 1957. You do not mess with the 101st. There:

• Before September 1957, nine African American students enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. There was a needed fork in the road toward desegregation.

• On September 2, 1957 the night prior to what was to be the teens' first day in Central High classrooms, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state's National Guard to block their entrance.

Arkansas National Guard blocks black enrollees on September 2, 1957.

• On September 23, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10730, which put the Arkansas National Guard under federal authority.

• On September 25, 1957, President Eisenhower ordered 1,000 troops of the 101st Airborne Division (from Fort Campbell, KY) to Little Rock.

In the wee hours of September 25, 1957, a convoy of Army jeeps travels the 343 miles from Fort Campbell to Little Rock. This was on the QT.

• The 101st Airborne escorted the students into the school on September 25.

• The federalized Arkansas National Guard continued to guard the school and escort the students for the rest of the school year.

I write this article because I see unfold fork in the road scenarios I have watched in my life. We will escalate today’s conflict as we must to achieve the good ends we must reach as a nation.

It is rather simple, and will be as dire as it must be to meet the occasion. Another Substack author of “Quiet Part Loud”, Juan April aka “Ragecognito”, had this to say in his post Rules of Engagement:

“I realize that my tone might seem simplistic, but my goal is to help you adjust your mindset so you can navigate these complex times. Throughout my experiences in combat, politics, and life, I’ve learned two fundamental principles:

• Control what you can while preparing for what you can’t.

• Meet aggression with equal or greater aggression.”

Juan had the same thought that I have, at the very same fork-in-the-road time that I have it. Comes a time, comes to mind. Comes to mind, comes to mouth, too.

I know we will see bloodshed at forks in the road, and I do not fear that. You should not either. We have to protest like we have to grocery shop. We are Americans, after all. It is part and parcel of us. A shooting may or may not happen on that next shopping trip. We live with this danger daily—no matter what we do. Daily danger.

The narcissist-in-chief will not hesitate to order bloodshed against peaceful protestors. There is only one person in the life of a narcissist, and the psychopath is devoid of empathy. Trump is both.

Many know blood is required at a fork in the road to run off a dictator. In Iran in 1978, young men protestors donned white shirts and tore those shirts open to be shot. They marched into the guns knowing there was no other way out of totalitarianism. And willingly they sacrificed. I watched the machine gun tracer bullets downtown from my rooftop in northern Tehran with Poori, my Iranian landlady. After a burst, she would ask me, “How many?”. It became so many the soldiers could no longer shoot. By morning, the bodies had been cleared from the roads.

I departed Iran a month after the Shah, seen here departing with money and gold coins spilling out of his bags. That was January 16, 1979. I was evacuated on Pan Am’s Freedom Flight Five, February 19, 1979. I went to work for Pan Am World Services, Inc. on May 11, 1990.

I see now illogical steps the Trump administration is taking. That would be Musk. They fired on Friday 20 immigration judges without explanation, a union official informed us Saturday. (Immigration courts are backlogged with more than 3.7 million cases.)

Making room in the budget for a large tax cut undergirds Trump and Musk’s “plan”. They both face huge tax bills on bitcoin gains. I hear people exclaim how unfair this is for those kicked into unemployment. As I mentioned before, two things come to mind:

• Narcissists only care about “me”: numero uno.

• Psychopaths have no empathy: nada.

That means Trump and Musk only care about the Treasury $ dollars that they can keep unspent to fund their tax cut. That is the only part their “plan” has. Some thought it was to infill with Trump loyalists. See the two bullets, above, one more time. It is the “$ dollars reserved for a tax cut plan”.

Now get this. Trump and Musk will say that have succeeded in eliminating $300 billion a year by their actions. It is there likely they will realize $10 billion in cuts. The courts are erasing and stopping their efforts. Trump and Musk will lie about their exploits. They need to sway Congress to their ends. Trump and Musk actually don’t care if, in a tax cut, we run up another $3 trillion in deficits.

Neither of them can correlate their problem with their greed. Letting 20 judges go is a drop in their mind-bending drug-pill box. They are deluded, if you think about it. First, those judges had yet to be sworn in. Second, saving $10 million in salaries will be eaten up by incurring the separation legal fees. Plus they lost time on this nit-noid effort.

That is not to mention the election promise broken of immigration reform while a backlog of 3.7 million immigration cases await court adjudication. The backlog is due to inadequate court staffing. See how important immigration really is to the Crook-N-Chief? It is not at all important when compared to his greed. I doubt there was an internal comparison.

Where’s the Line? So where do you draw the line at the fork in the road, and pull the plug on civil obedience. There has to be a line. There has to be some occasion that flips the switch. Flipping the switch from civil to uncivil needs to have a preface of occasion, something that manifests changing normal behavior into strong, dissent behavior. The manifest for this fork in the road must carry a weight commensurate to the occasion. That is it in a nutshell. When the courts are disobeyed, we take to the streets. That is my thought. Do we burn all Teslas? Do we ransack all Musk and Trump properties? Depends on the manifest for the occasion, doesn’t it? Definitely, I see taking to the streets. I go with Jackson Browne Til I Go Down (1986) Lives in the Balance. If this link below works, I will be surprised. If it doesn’t, listen to his protest song from 40 years ago.

When Federal or State troops fire on civilians, we must continue to sacrifice ourselves in the streets until the soldiers refuse orders. (Like the 1978-79 revolution in Iran. I am an eyewitness.)

Will that fork in the road come to this? Firing on citizens already was ordered (Trump’s “Can we shoot them in the legs?”), but the military refused. The next fork in the road, no one knows what will unfold. Grab a flashlight, we are in the dark now.

Know where we are. Know what fork in the road is coming. We have serious work to do to regurgitate ourselves and overcome the coup attempt.