Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [78]
“I don’t want to end up under one of those crosses,” I told her.
The following year, junior year, the war still raging, the hair a bit longer, the anger burning more intensely. With the draft lottery for me now less than twelve months away, it was time for decisive action.
I had heard of guys doing things the night before their draft physical like drinking a gallon of coffee to raise their blood pressure or firing a BB pellet into their groin. That seemed a bit dramatic, and painful. Others forged doctor’s notes, some tried to act mentally retarded.
As I saw it, I had but three choices:
Sign up as a conscientious objector. This would require me not only to denounce all wars past and present but to promise that I would stand by and do nothing as my grandmother was raped and murdered. If they were convinced of my sincerity that I’d remain nonviolent while a ninety-year-old woman was being butchered, I would be assigned to full-time hospital work for two years.
Go to jail. This made no sense. “So, I’m not going to ’Nam, I’m not going to push a broom in a hospital—I’d rather have the broom handle shoved up my ass.” No thanks.
Escape to Canada. The Canadian government had agreed to give American draft dodgers and deserters a safe haven. This was a remarkable gesture for a country that spent most of its time trying to be our polite neighbor. We had many things in common, the Canadians and us, but the one place where we seemed to part ways was in the business of invading other countries. For some reason, the Canadians had little interest in imposing their quiet selves onto others. Why some of our hubris hadn’t rubbed off on them was a mystery to me, but they didn’t want much to do with killing people ten thousand miles away, let alone each other.
Though I lived an hour from the border, I knew little of Canada. I had not spent any time there as a child. My mother’s father was a Canadian, but as a young man he left Canada for Michigan, and so our contact with his native land was limited.
Our Canadian relatives would make the occasional jaunt over to see us, and we would go over there less. Maybe our parents were worried we weren’t ready for international travel? Maybe Canada didn’t have indoor plumbing yet? I dunno. It was a distant land, it was “foreign,” and the Queen of England was on their money. Beyond that, we never gave it another thought.
Because borders can’t stop airwaves (television used to be transmitted free of charge through the air), we got to watch a lot of Canadian TV on CKLW, Channel 9, from Windsor, Ontario. Most of the programming on the Canadian Broadcasting Channel consisted of nature documentaries and comedy shows in black-and-white with ironic humor we didn’t understand. There were Mounties and lumberjacks and lots of shots of prairies. They had a great Sunday afternoon classic movie show, there was the thrilling Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night, and there was the Canadian news.
And it was there, one night as a youngster, that I stumbled across the truth. I paused on Channel 9 as I was turning the dial, and the news was on. They were covering the Vietnam War, but there was something wrong with what they were showing. They were broadcasting images, not from South Vietnam but from North Vietnam! The enemy! Why were they doing that? They were showing the destruction caused by our bombing civilian villages. One elderly woman was in tears showing her hut, which “the American planes had bombed.” No we didn