In 1969, I marched on the capital in Washington, D.C. with 500,000 other protesters carrying candles and pleading for peace in Vietnam. I had just returned from my tour of duty there. The war finally ended in 1975 when the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong stormed Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and took over the government. The protests made a difference.
Now, more than 50 years later, I’m still marching. This time in Traverse City (TC) with 2,000 peaceful people in response to what’s happening in the other TC (Twin Cities) – where two protesters (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) were killed by “Homeland Security” for exercising their first amendment rights
As I reflect on the last 50 years and the differences between DC and TC, I come to three conclusions:
- We don’t appear to making much progress on creating a peaceful, loving, united civilization.
- I feel less and less secure in my homeland with more and more “Homeland Security” forces.
- There seems to be far less openness to facts and more rapid reactions to violence with narratives that lack any reasonable level of impartial objectivity.
Reflecting on the last 50 years, It seems like the Vietnamese people have done a far better job of constructing a prosperous and peaceful government than what we have managed to create. Indeed, the Vietnamese seem to be evolving while we are devolving.
When the 20-year Vietnam War ended in 1975, the nation’s economy was one of the poorest in the world with stalled growth. By the mid-1980s, per capita GDP was stuck around $200, prompting the government to introduce revolutionary reforms. These social, political, and economic shifts put the country on a different path. Today, Vietnam is an emerging economic star, boasting a growth rate of approximately 7–8% and surging exports. Major global players, from Nike to Samsung, have established massive manufacturing hubs there, and unemployment remains exceptionally low. It appears they our “intervention” was for worse and our leaving was for better. Could there be a lesson in that?
The shift in human capital is even more striking. In 1975, only about 10% of the Vietnamese population held college degrees; today, roughly 25% of adults are college-educated, and 60% of the younger generation is pursuing higher education. In contrast, while nearly 50% of the U.S. population has some form of post-secondary education, the trend lines for younger generations are alarming. While 60% of young people in Vietnam and China, and 75% of young people in Canada, are pursuing higher education with upward-moving trends, the U.S. has seen a notable decline. In the last decade, the percentage of high school graduates immediately enrolling in college has dropped from roughly 70% to 62%, signaling a potential shift in the nation’s future competitiveness. Perhaps we should focus more on education and less on war.
To me, the three biggest causes of the U.S. decline over the last 50 years are changes in the diversification of the “Megaphone,” the muffling of the “Metaphone,” and the amplification of the “MAGAphone.” Let me explain.
As we all know, a megaphone is an acoustic horn used to amplify a person’s voice or other sounds and direct it in a given direction. It’s also known as a bullhorn, a blowhorn, or a loudhailer. Clearly, we are not only seeing more and more bullies and blowhards speaking loudly from every corner of the world, but we are also hearing from countries with nuclear arsenals sending strong and threatening messages in a rightward direction. The “Megaphone” has not only grown in decibels, but also in diversity. Blowhards are now blasting away from all corners of the world from a wide variety of media platforms. The purpose of a megaphone is to overwhelm with volume and velocity.
Meta is used to describe awareness of awareness. For example, when someone is making a movie about making a movie, that’s meta. For me, it’s being more conscious of who we are, why we are here, and how we live our lives. In David Brooks parting column in the New York Times, he reflects on his time as a columnist and encourages us to be more aware of how faith and values are changing in our society. To me, Brooks has served as one of the best “Metaphones” in our society. He continually asks us to be more aware of what we are aware of. I will miss his wise voice and provocative questions. We need more voices that challenge us to elevate our consciousness and to be more concerned with transcending our current chaos vs. defending our tired traditions. The purpose of the “Metaphone” is to pause and reflect. To think about how we are thinking.
Which brings us to the third cause of our decline – the “MAGAphone.” Though estimates vary, about 75% of MAGA supporters do not have a college degree. While that statement may sound to be an elitist comment about the deplorables that support far right positions, that is not my intention. The fact simply represents a larger issue underlying so much of the divides that are tearing us apart. In the book Paper Girl, Beth Macy (best selling author of Dopesick) describes how conditions have changed over the last fifty years in Urbana, Ohio, where she was raised as a child and was able to escape with the assistance of a Pell Grant. The book describes how NAFTA, in 1994, and the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization in 2004 not only gutted manufacturing in Urbana but also destroyed the lives of the people who lived there. Macy suggests that Urbana is just one example of a rural community that lost jobs as a result of free trade and immigration – the primary reasons people voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024.
The academic underpinnings that reinforce the messages in Macy’s personal story about Urbana are thoroughly documented in the book, Rural versus Urban divide by Suzanne Mettler and Trevor Brown. I had the pleasure of hearing Suzanne interviewed at the National Writers Series in Traverse City recently. Dr. Mettler shared how her research supports the hypothesis that America is more divided by geography than by pedigree. She traces the beginning of our divides to the New Deal in the 1930s. The policies that Roosevelt implemented in the decade following the Great Depression sent a strong message to rural residents and farmers that they were seen, heard and included in the benefits being offered by the democrats. What those same people experienced in the 1990s and early 2000s with free trade agreements with Mexico, Canada, and China was a sense of loss. While urban areas benefitted from lower prices and higher corporate profits, rural areas lost jobs and security. What I took from Dr. Mettler’s message was that the primary driver for our current divide was an experience of exclusion vs. inclusion. The urban elites won; the rural workers and farmers lost. And, from the rural residents point of view, the urban democrats not only caused the problem, but were condescending to the people who experienced the greatest losses through no fault of their own.
And that is why the “MAGAphone” is powered by so much anger, fear, bitterness, and hate. It’s purpose is to enrage and divide.
Since we are using 1975 as a baseline year for changes and reflecting on what has happened over the past 50 years, let me use 75 as a baseline year for the changes in my life that got me from DC to TC.
When I turned 75, I took up playing the guitar as a way to grow older with the calming comfort of music. I needed an antidote to the toxic politics that were poisoning my mind. I can now play and sing 40 songs that give me great pleasure and therapeutic release. About a month ago, I wrote my first song – a Road to Joy based on the lyrics from Bob Dylan’s classic: A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall. It’s meant to memorialize my life from Vietnam to Traverse City. Here’s the first stanza:
Where have you been my blue eyed boy
Where have you been that helped you find joy.
I served as a soldier in Ho Chi Minh City
I went full of duty, came home full of pity.
I risked my life in a patriot’s role
I saw too much killin, it wounded my soul.
I went to win hearts, but I changed my own mind
They told us success was the dead Cong we find.
It was a lie
It was lie
It was just a lie
But I did not die
And here we are. Desperately looking for hope and joy when we are deluged with images that stir our rage. Looking for truth when we are inundated with lies. Searching for ways to love in the midst of all the hate pervading the media. Wanting to win hearts without losing our minds or wounding our souls.
So returning to the three conclusions I made on the road from DC to TC, I hope the reasoning for the first conclusion is fairly clear re: why we don’t seem to be making progress on unity and harmony. Conclusions 2 and 3 – feeling less secure with more Homeland Security and seeing a bigger gap between narratives and facts and less openness to seeking the truth – can be addressed quite quickly without going into a deep dive.
All we need to do is follow the money. Department of Homeland Security oversees 22 agencies, 260,000 employees, and has a total budget of over $100 billion. Meanwhile, local police departments are struggling with funding and resources. In Michigan, nearly half of local police chiefs and county sheriffs reported insufficient funds to provide for public safety. In addition, a 2025 report highlights the termination of hundreds of grants from the U.S. Department of Justice forcing local agencies to scramble for replacements. Having armed and masked soldiers in the streets does not make me feel more secure.
As for conclusion 3, when we listen to the news and watch the videos that describe in detail what happened in any given incident, it’s impossible to miss the gaping divide between observable facts and subjective spin. Good and Pretti were not domestic terrorists. One was a poet and mom. The other was an ICU nurse. Their murders paint a chilling vision of the problem we are all facing as a nation.
At the end of the National Writers Series event with Dr. Mettler, she was asked the question, “So, what’s the solution?” Her response was essentially: humanize, don’t demonize; personalize don’t stereotype; ask, don’t assume. That feels like wise advice for all of us.
When I marched in DC, I was invested. I was still serving the last year of my tour of duty in the military. When I march in TC, I’m inspired by all the amazing, community leaders stepping up and doing their best to find solutions to the problems we are facing – like the National Writers Series inspiring people to read and write. When communities come together to make a difference, there is a chance of creating a culture of peace and prosperity for all.
I’m hoping we can survive this madness and restore our souls. I’m hoping we can notice the assumptions we make about our rural neighbors and suspend those assumptions long enough to listen. Most importantly, I hoping that we can expand the gap in time between events and conclusions, and that we can reduce the gap in “truth” between facts and lies. I’m hoping our Metaphones can help us turn down the volume on our Megaphones and MAGAphones. May it be so.
