Attention grabs aren’t protests

In 1970, you could fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco for $19. The airline was Pacific Southwest, and flights left every hour on the hour until 1 a.m.

The 1 a.m. flights were more party than travel.

I took one of those 1 a.m. flights in 1970 at the age of 15. Arriving in San Francisco an hour later, I took a shuttle to a stop near Market Street, one the city’s main thoroughfares.

For about 20 minutes I wandered down Market Street past the homeless, the hookers and the high, looking for a specific address.

It was there, I was told, I could find a place to crash.

At the Market Street address, all was quiet as I was led upstairs to a large loft. The floor was covered with bodies, some of them in sleeping bags, some of them, like me, only in their clothes and coats.

At 7 a.m. we were awakened and given directions to the starting point of the march.

The march was a protest against the war in Vietnam. Another march was taking place in Washington, D.C., on the same day.

More and more Americans had had enough of the war and were mobilizing to voice their dissatisfaction. Even our scoundrel president, Richard Nixon, began to realize that the political tide had turned and that it was time to develop a plan to get out of Vietnam.

For those in San Francisco and Washington, the administration wasn’t moving fast enough. Each day they waited meant more GIs dying in a war whose purpose had been forgotten years before.

As we marched toward Golden Gate Park, I stopped on a hill for a few moments and watched hundreds of thousands of people crowd Lombard Street from side to side for what seemed like forever.

That was a special day. Not a shot was fired on either coast. It was just Americans exercising their right to march and protest without badgering or bullying anyone into seeing their point of view.

I think of that day more often as I read about the proposed boycott of Costa Mesa businesses that don’t toe the line against the city’s planned immigration checks on suspected criminals.

The difference between the historic 1960s and ‘70s protests against the Vietnam War and against gross polluters was that those involved had a stake in the outcome; they were ready to sacrifice everything, sometimes even their lives, because that for which they fought was so important.

Today’s boycott is not of the scope of a war. To the boycott organizers, however, the cause is a fight against racism and for equality -- noble causes to be sure.

That’s the type of cause the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi died for.

The difference between then and now is that the carpetbaggers who are organizing the boycott have no skin in the game. Should the boycott fail, they lose nothing. In fact, the argument is made here that for the out-of-towners, the boycott is a total win-win.

The goal of the carpetbaggers, you see, is not an end to so-called racist practices or unjust treatment by the city of Costa Mesa, it is to attract media attention to one organization and a few individuals.

It cannot be any other way, for taken to its extreme, the boycott could be very harmful to the people they say they want to help.

Imagine a restaurant that does not support the boycott suffering so much that it goes out of business. The staff, which may include many Latinos, will find themselves out of work.

And where have these people been for the past decade? While thousands of students languish and get left behind in Costa Mesa schools, they have done nothing. They have not offered a candidate for the school board, have not investigated unfair distribution of resources by the district and have not made a single significant suggestion on how to improve the Latino-populated Westside schools.

While members of the school board ran unopposed and furthered their non-agendas, the carpetbaggers ignored our children.

Where is their City Council candidate? Who is the person they are supporting who will be the third council vote to reverse the policy they detest so much?

There are no candidates. Organizing a political campaign and working through the system takes an investment of time and a personal sacrifice, and the carpetbaggers have neither. It’s much easier instead to pound a podium and make unsubstantiated cries of racism in order to get the quick media fix they so desperately crave.

The people who marched in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., wanted something too. They wanted the president to end the war. They organized, marched and worked tirelessly and peacefully to win in the court of public opinion.

That took years, but it was worth it.

* STEVE SMITH is a Costa Mesa resident and a freelance writer. Readers may leave a message for him on the Daily Pilot hotline at (714) 966-4664 or send story ideas to [email protected].

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