Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [79]
But not on this night. And I couldn’t take my eyes off the CBC after that. And I wasn’t the only one. If you lived within sixty miles of the Canadian border and had a decent antenna or set of rabbit ears you could get The Truth about the Vietnam War from the Canadians, right from the beginning. This messed me up a bit because I had no clue that our own government would lie to us. I mean, that would have been un-American. And yet, here was our boring, friendly neighbor whispering across the hedge each night that we were doing a bad, bad thing. I felt like I did when Santa Claus turned out to be just my dad, or when I learned that Cheez Whiz wasn’t really cheese—but at least both of those things still brought happiness to my childhood. This revelation was nothing like that. This was a smack across my tender sixteen-year-old face, and I didn’t like it one bit.
Thanks to the Canadian channel, I came to fear and hate this war. I felt like I was the only one in the neighborhood who had found the secret key, the buried treasure, and from then on I was hooked on never believing what I saw on American television, even if I still did dream of Jeannie or cheered for the Fugitive to get away.
By the summer of ’71, before my senior year, my mind was made up: if drafted, I would escape to Canada.
How one flees to another country and seeks asylum was not taught in Government class. But I had just attained the rank of Eagle Scout, and with that came the knowledge of many survival skills, earning merit badges in Tracking, Trailing, Animal Stalking, Marksmanship, Basketry, Plumbing, Fingerprinting, Beekeeping, Bookbinding, Signaling, Metallurgy, Masonry, Archery, Fruit and Nut Growing, and World Brotherhood. With a background like this, I could surely find my way across any border, keeping myself alive with a bow and arrow, a beehive, and some semaphore flags.
I had met Joey, Ralph, and Jacko at an antiwar demo I went to within days of receiving my driver’s license. Kent State was fresh on everyone’s mind, and Willson Park in downtown Flint was the hippie gathering place for rebels and malcontents and monthly draft card burnings. Joey was from Burton Township, where the poor white people lived; suffice it to say you didn’t find many of them at orgies of peaceniks. Although I am certain they provided more cannon fodder than any other part of Genesee County (except for the black north end of Flint). They backed the Vietnam War and President Nixon (though he was their second choice for president after Alabama governor George Wallace). Most of Burton Township was populated by families who had come from the southern states to work in the auto factories of Flint. Moving north did not dissuade them of their racial musings, and if you were not white, you knew it was best not to venture into south Burton after dark.
Joey had somehow escaped most of the attitudinal shortcomings of his neighborhood and yet had retained a pleasant hillbilly charm about himself that the city girls in Flint seemed to take a liking to. He didn’t have any particular political leanings, he just felt the war was “stoopid,” and he had no desire to see the world beyond the boundary of Maple Road.
Ralph lived in a Hispanic neighborhood on the east side of downtown Flint. His parents were from Mexico where he, too, had been born. He arrived here as a baby while his mother and father were summer crop pickers of sugar beets and blueberries.
Of the four of us, Ralph was the most intense. Angry at an early age from witnessing the treatment of his parents in an urban area that was all about black and white and no real recognition that brown played any role on the color chart. Ralph was also the strongest of us, and though he was the shortest, no one ever thought of messing with him. We assumed he carried some sort of weapon like a knife, but none of us really wanted to ask.
Jacko—we never knew what his given name was—came from a well-off family who lived in the area surrounding the community college and the Flint