Today always seems unique and in many ways every day is totally different from every other "day" since the Big Bang. But there are similarities as history repeats itself as farce over and over again.

There are however parallels within the lifetime of us Baby Boomers. The draft and the attempt to defend the government of "South Vietnam" split the country to its core. I was on the anti-war side at the time and I can report to younger people that it was a very lonely position to take as of 1967. Polling from the 60s and 70s showed a consistent majority in support of the idea of fighting communism in Vietnam, with some dissent arguing that we were not committing ENOUGH force to win the war.

The most bitter reality of the era is that once Nixon curtailed and eventually ended the draft, opposition to the war evaporated. I participated in the McGovern campaign and I was a delegate to the Texas State Democratic Convention and worked as a campaign drudge as a student in Austin. Nixon won with 60% of the vote. Yet the war ended and never started back up. The draft is long gone.

So, how did the minority prevail on policy while failing miserably in politics? There are many mysteries within the dreamscape of Organizing -- the effort to change reality through cooperation among individuals.
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The Counter Culture

Martin Luther King lost his life as he tried to merge the struggle of black people for the basic rights of citizenship with the anti-war movement. That potential alliance between people of color and the portion of white people who want a peaceful world has not yet been cemented -- and it seems to me that one of the perennial objectives of the super rich is to keep that from ever happening.

The anti-war movement was based in a brief social boomlet that was called, "The Counter Culture."

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Dallas Notes - Wikipedia

Dallas Notes was a biweekly underground newspaper published in Dallas, Texas from 1967 to 1970, and edited by Stoney Burns (penname of Brent Lasalle Stein; 1942–2011), whose father owned a printing company in Dallas. Initially founded by Doug Baker[1] at Southern Methodist University in March 1967, under the title NOTES from the Underground, the first issues were run off after hours on a copy machine at Texas Instruments.[2][3]

With a blend of New Left political activism, hippie/drug counterculture, and underground comix and graphics, the paper developed a growing citywide and regional readership, and starting with Vol. 1, No. 26 (Feb. 16-29, 1968) the paper changed its banner to Dallas Notes.
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During its existence Dallas Notes was subjected to repeated police raids and harassment. Thorne Dreyer wrote at The Rag Blog that Notes editor Burns "was incessantly harassed by the Dallas authorities, who charged him with obscenity, beat him mercilessly, tore up his offices, and confiscated his equipment." Burns later learned that many of the office tear-ups and equipment thefts were carried out by his father and his father's trusted assistant.

The obscenity case against the paper "went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where Justice William O. Douglas commented on the cops' ransacking of the Dallas Notes offices: 'It would be difficult to find in our books a more lawless search-and-destroy raid.'"[5]

In a widely publicized case former editor Burns was sentenced to prison in 1972 for 10 years and a day for possession of marijuana,[6] but the sentence was commuted by Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe. Time magazine reported that, "The law in Dallas, from all appearances, had been bent on getting Stoney Burns for years."[7]

In his book, Unamerican Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press, Geoffrey Rips wrote that the "persistent persecution of Burns stemmed in part from [his] 1967 investigative report in Dallas Notes about Texas Congressman Joe Pool's arrest for drunken driving, after his car hit a carload of soldiers at a red light." Pool was released and the arrest records destroyed, and the story was ignored by the Dallas daily newspapers. Pool, who was a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, called for an investigation of the underground papers.[8]

Even then?

I grew up in Dallas and went to college in Austin where I met a longer lasting Underground Newspaper:

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The Rag - Wikipedia

The Rag was an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas from 1966–1977. The weekly paper covered political and cultural topics that the conventional press ignored, such as the growing antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, gay liberation, and the drug culture. The Rag encouraged these political constituencies and countercultural communities to coalesce into a significant political force in Austin.[1] As the sixth member of the Underground Press Syndicate and the first underground paper in the South, The Rag helped shape a flourishing national underground press.

According to historian and publisher Paul Buhle, The Rag was "one of the first, the most long-lasting and most influential" of the Sixties underground papers.[2] In his 1972 book, The Paper Revolutionaries, Laurence Leamer called The Rag "one of the few legendary undergrounds."[3]

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The Rag was one of the most influential of the early underground papers and, according to historian John McMillian, it served as a model for many papers that followed.[11] The Rag was credited with being the first underground paper to successfully combine the radical politics of the New Left with the spirit of the burgeoning alternative culture. Abe Peck, editor of the Chicago Seed and author of Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, wrote that "The Rag was the first independent undergrounder to represent... the participatory democracy, community organizing and synthesis of politics and culture that the New Left of the midsixties was trying to develop."[12] The Austin Chronicle's Kevin Brass called the paper "a firebrand little troublemaker" that was "a seminal influence in the national underground press movement."[13]

Many of the forces behind the founding of The Rag later played major roles in developing other alternative media. Thorne Dreyer worked with Liberation News Service and, along with The Rag's Dennis and Judy Fitzgerald, started Space City News (later Space City!) in Houston. Carol Neiman later edited New Left Notes, the national SDS newspaper. Dreyer, Gary Thiher, and Jeff Shero (later known as Jeff Nightbyrd) worked with KPFT-FM, the Pacifica radio station in Houston. Shero started Rat in New York, where he was joined by Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, and later published the alternative Austin Sun.

The Rag held a reunion on September 1–4, 2005, which was attended by over 70 former staff members who came in from all over the United States for Rag art and photography exhibits, a rousing retro-rock concert, and a series of group discussions. Many had not been in touch for 35-40 years. The reunion resulted in a renewed alliance among many of the ex-Ragstaffers and birthed a group of websites including The Rag Blog, The Rag archives site, which includes full scans of the early issues, a Rag Reunion site and a Rag Authors’ Page. And several Rag vets have reunited in Austin and are once more involved in political activism through the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS/Austin), associated with the newly revived SDS.

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Any Underground Movement is by definition a minority. That is strength rather than weakness. We can have a single goal whereas everybody else has other fish to fry.

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A Creeping Doubt: Public Support for Vietnam in 1967 | Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (cornell.edu)

Protests against involvement in the war began to increase in size and frequency during 1967, culminating in 100,000 people gathering in Washington DC in October. Demonstrations were also ramping up on college campuses across the nation. Polling in 1967 itself rarely addressed these protests, though the exception indicated approval was likely low. In a December Harris poll, 40% of Americans didn’t think people who were against the war in Vietnam even had the right to undertake peaceful demonstrations against the war. The next year, as protests continued, polls addressed the issue more frequently. An April NORCE poll found 60% thought that college protests were not a healthy sign for America. More dramatically, 56% in a 1968 Gallup poll approved of Chicago police beating anti-war protestors at the Democratic National Convention that summer. While this discontent would soon lead to President Johnson’s stunning decision not to run for re-election in 1968, polling clearly indicates how deeply divided the nation was on the subject of Vietnam and makes Nixon’s victory amid promises to swiftly end the conflict unsurprising.

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There never was a majority in favor of just giving up on the goal of keeping the government of South Vietnam in power. Like Walther Cronkite, people were fine with the idea of killing communists so long as we win by a large majority.

Yet we got out of the war and we ended the draft.

Lesson – majority is not necessary to change public policy. The powers that be do not care about elections and they care less about your opinion. But they do have to keep the lights on. A committed minority will always defeat a scared and lethargic majority.

First of a series on Organizing.