CHAPTER TWELVE CLEVELAND I drifted down to Mexico. I stayed there for awhile until the LSD I had with me was finished. I had come to some conclusions. Drugs like LSD could be a catalyst into the future. However staying high on LSD or anything else can not change reality. You can perhaps escape reality for awhile but sooner or later it catches up with you. My childhood friends were running away from reality, although they thought they were beating the system sometimes. I had realised that the politics of the streets, was basically based on hate and desperation. My friends thought that they were changing the world. However the system they were fighting was far better organised then they were. There politics were doomed from the beginning. Just as later on the politics of "burn baby burn" in the ghettos were doomed. As my money was coming to and end I moved to Los Angeles. There I got odd jobs as an extra in Hollywood films. I made enough money to start drifting again. I went to Florida to visit an old friend from the Navy days. He was married and had children. We went for long walks on the beaches. We talked many hours about life for working-class people. His position was that we haven't got a chance to change this fucking world we live in so try and make the best of it. I began to think that perhaps he was right. I met my first wife or mother to my three first children on a beach in Florida. I was walkingon the beach and she was suddenly just there. It said click and before I new what was happening I was on my way to Cleveland where she was living. I got a job driving trucks loaded with machinery. We got married and started having kids. I think I was a good father, however I should let others judge that. My basic position was that my kids would never have to live like I did when I was little. Then I got a job at the Allison division of general motors. It was a defence plant and general motors was making tanks for the government I was and active member of the union the UAW. I had and old car. We had bought a house on a G.I. loan and I thought well this I guess is the best one can expect from this system. So do your best and live life the best you can. However this was not to be. I had tried to build a little nest of security around my family. That the black ghettos had started to burn I tried to ignore. Christ I was so busy working shift at the plant getting money to feed the kids and pay the bills that I was not interested in anything else. The American government got more and more involved in Vietnam and more and more people were getting involved. I tried to ignore it but it would not leave me alone.. It finally came to a head when I received a leaflet, at the plant gate, sometime in 68, with a picture of a little Vietnamese girl running down a highway some where in Vietnam with napalm burning holes in her little body. It was a leaflet about Dow Chemicals production of napalm and how it was used. That leaflet announced a meeting to be held to discuss how to get Dow to stop producing this stuff. That leaflet also caused my brain real problems. Something just snabbt inside my head on numerous levels. One level was it could of been my kids running down the highway. Another was it was a couple of Catholic priests had given out the leaflet. In New York City, at least in my neighbourhood, everybody was Catholic. I was never religious. But it was the church who helped poor people in the slums when I was a kid. But probably the fact that the leaflet talked about a company! made me see red... All my life it was the company and the unions. In Cuba it was the United Fruit Company and the sugar company. They represented everything that made my life miserable and always it had to do with the company making more money at the expense of poor and working class people. My whole fucking life these kind of companies were trying to get me or my friends killed. I realised that these companies were never going to let poor people alone. There was no running away from them. There is no hiding from them that sooner or later they would get your ass or some other poor slobs ass. So I just said to myself No! not one more fucking kid will I allow you to take without a fight. No, not one more poor and working class kid. That is what this little girls picture did. By this time also they were recruiting alot of kids to be shipped off to Vietnam. Working class kids. Because by this time most of the middle-class kids were smoking pot, listening to music, and running off to Canada to dodge the draft. So I felt that I was forced with a choice. Start working politically to stop the rich from getting kids like myself or turn my back and creep in a closet somewhere and hide. So I went to that meeting. At this meeting I met some other people who wanted to stop these corporations and the government. However we strongly disagreed on tactics. There were priests and lots of collage kids at these meetings. They must of thought me a factory worker coming to there meetings was like having somebody from outerspace walk in the door. Not one ofthem new where I had come from, nor my past historical experiences. In fact if they were to read the previous chapters written here they will probably be surprised. But I believed that they wanted to stop the war and I did to. But I think also that my reasons for stopping the war were entirely different from there's. They were talking about some sort of middle class utopia that I never could relate too. One of the big differences I had with these people was that it is one thing to be a student or a priest and take part in some action. But if factory workers like myself were to do the same thing they the government would put my ass away for ever. The police and the government when I was a kid sided with the strike-breakers and not the guys on the picket line. These people are the deadly enemies of poor and working-class people. So right from the beginning most of the people in the peace movement who talked about utopian peace and love, and I would tend to say things like working-class kids should turn the guns around... For some reason things just clicked in my head. I knew who the enemy was now in fact I had always known who the enemy was. Even in the leaflets and statements of responsibility with my very primitive ideology at the time. I was saying things like: "we would not accept that the government sending working class kids to kill other working class kids. " I new that the line was not the line of peace and love, no not at all, it was a class line between the rich and the poor. I began to realise that only working class people can rely on themselves and not any liberal friends who might want to help. O.K. fine if you want to help but if the working class does not become conscious of fighting for its own interests independently of liberal and bourgeois friends they are doomed. The bottom line of all this I think at least for my part was the simple fact that I was determined not to let one person like this little girl in the picture be a victim. No not one fucking more person, and even if it was only me against all them I would not let them again try to trick me into some great applepie dream. No matter what. No matter what the price, these corporate creeps had to be stopped! Much of what was going on in Cleveland at the time I can't unfortunately take up here. The problem with this is that a secret grand jury indicted me for a whole lot of stuff. They , the government wanted to put me away for a very long time for. As far as I know these indictments still stand as of today. So unfortunately I can not take up this stuff. It would endanger a lot of people's lives. However I can say that my activities did not go unnoticed by the government. I held a lot of press conferences at the time "taking responsibility" for my actions. This really pissed the government off. A working class kid sticking up his nose and saying we would not allow them to take one more working class kid off to this fucking war. Federal agents for example came to my job at the tank plant and escorted me from the plant. I was fired for being a security problem for the plant. The General Motors Corporation still owes me two weeks pay that I never received. They probably think I was sabotaging the tanks or something and feel they could get away with not sending me my paycheck. Federal agents turned up just about everywhere I tried to get a job and got me fired... Federal Agents tapped our phonelines. Federal agents hired rooms across the street from where we were living and were photographing and bugging conversations in our house with special equipment. Federal agents harassed my family. In fact Federal Agents for years after I was imprisoned and went underground to Sweden harassed my family. Federal agents turned up at my mothers funeral to see if I would show up. Federal agents even turned up here in Sweden after I received asylum. They made me understand that I was welcome back to the U.S. I was even offered a free plane ticket back to the United States at any time! So obviously my activities had pissed off the government. But they never realised how pissed off I was. Someday perhaps all of this will be able to be put down in a book. Let us hope so. In fact we did stop the production of Napalm and we did stop the draft. We won some great victories. But we did not win the war. Today it is not Vietnamese kids running down highways, there little bodies burned by napalm. Today it is little kids getting killed on Bougainville. The Corporation is RTZ who are responsible for these deaths. The RTZ has the Australian government inback of them. The names might have changed but the victims are still poor and working class people and the corporation are the one's responsible for there deaths. It is the same fucking war that we were fighting back then.The fight to stop greedy corporate creeps and their lackeys from committing genocide against innocent people on the island of Bougainville for profits! And the so called PNG. If I were to give any advice to the PNG soldiers or their Australian advisors I honestly would have to say.. Turn the guns around. Arrest the Australian politicians responsible and get the leadership of the RTZ and put them against a wall.. There politics are war crimes against innocent people trying to defend the island which has belong to them until the RTZ discovered gold and copper deposits and the possibilities of big profits. RTZ is prepared to kill every person on Bougainville if necessary in order to open the mine. They will use you PNG, soldiers and Australian advisors to accomplish their goals. Well, in reality the PNG soldiers are shooting down innocent people for the mining company. The mining companies in the United States used scabs brought in from the outside to keep the mines open. Well the PNG are scabs. The Australians are colonialists! Is that what you want to be a scab or a tool for colonial interests. If that is so, well you deserve anything you get. If not turn the guns around and help the Bougainvillians defend their island. Think how it would be if all the poor slobs in the PNG turned it around. In Vietnam there were kids who started turning it around. Fraggings of officers by enlisted men became a routine towards the end of the war. These kids began to realise that there only chance was to join up with the oppressed against their oppressors. This had probably happened to the Australians in Vietnam also. These kids began to realise that the enemy was not the Vietnamese, no not at all, it was their own leaders and the profit hungry corporations behind them, that had tricked them into a war against innocent people. The poor slobs in the PNG are sent off to die on Bougainville while the Australian government and the mining company are sitting back on there fat asses just waiting to move in. Well, if the poor slobs in the PNG had any real intelligence they would go over to the Bougainvillians.Then the assholes in the government and the mining company would not be laughing.