Kids who visit the park in Douglasville, Georgia, just call it
“Hunter Park,” although its proper name is Hunter Memorial
Park, and most of the children running around the soccer fields and
picnic areas never stop to study the monument that pays tribute to
the park’s namesake. He was voted “Most Talented” his senior year
at Douglas County High School, where he won acclaim for his
artistic abilities, starred in the school play and was editor of
the student yearbook, but his name is not well known today, when he
would have been 70 years old.
Robert Gerald “Jerry” Hunter left his native Douglas
County to attend the Citadel, where he graduated with honors. He
joined the Air Force, became a fighter pilot, and was deployed to
Vietnam. On May 25, 1966, Hunter was on his 34th combat mission
when his F-105 jet was shot down near the Laotian border. He bailed
out — his comrades saw the parachute — and it was initially
believed that he had survived. The 25-year-old pilot was listed as
missing in action, and the Air Force promoted him from first
lieutenant to captain while rescuers searched for him. Hunter’s
family, including his young bride Laura, prayerfully waited for
word that he had been recovered safely. Seven weeks later, however,
the sad news came that his remains had been found in Laos, where he
had apparently died of injuries. First Baptist Church in
Douglasville overflowed with mourners at his funeral and local
businesses closed early that afternoon in honor of Captain Hunter,
Douglas County’s first casualty in the Vietnam War. Hunter Memorial
Park was dedicated a year later, when I was in second grade, and I
remember as a boy reading his name on the monument at the
park.
We’ve seen a lot of news lately about young men in parks,
but I doubt if folks down home would tolerate any “Occupy
Douglasville” protesters in Hunter Park. Jerry Hunter died fighting
against communism, after all, and it would be a disgrace to his
heroic memory to have the park named in his honor “occupied” by
mobs that are clearly Marxist in orientation, if not in name. And
if nobody else understands what motivates these protests, certainly
the Communists do. “An epic battle is underway for the direction of
our country,” the
Communist Party USA declared last month. “The Occupy movement
is not alone.… We stand with the courageous young people who have
sparked this movement and join with the occupiers who are putting
themselves on the line to transform our nation and achieve a secure
and sustainable future. … The time has come to put people before
profits.”
There was a time — not really so long ago — when a
ringing endorsement from CPUSA would have been the kiss of death
for any political movement in America. Twenty years after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the anti-communist
sentiments of the Cold War seem as obsolete as the F-105
fighter-bomber (finally mothballed by the Air Force in 1984), while
a vaguely Marxist mentality inspires headline-making protests from
coast to coast. I say “vaguely Marxist” because most of the
demonstrators seem incapable of articulating any coherent ideology
or agenda beyond a hatred of the rich, hatred of corporations and
banks, and hatred of whomever or whatever else they associate with
the “1%” against whom they rant and chant: “We are the 99
percent!”
Since these protests began Sept. 17 in New York as Occupy
Wall Street, their demonization of the “1%” has been echoed by
major national news organizations that strive to ignore the
numerous incidents of
criminality amid the mob. Even the documented presence of
heroin dealers, arsonists,
rapists and
murderers among the Occupiers is not enough to discredit the
movement in the eyes of liberals like Rep.
Maxine Waters. “That’s life and it happens, whether it’s with
protesters or other efforts that go on in this country,” the
California Democrat
told CNSNews last week. “So I’m not deterred in my support for
them because of these negative kinds of things.” Nor did the Occupy
movement lose its liberal friends due to the raving anti-Semitism
of protesters who
spew hatred toward “Jewish billionaires.” No matter how many
criminals and psychotics cluster in the camps of the Occupiers,
liberals refuse to repudiate these protests, evidently taking their
cue from
President Obama’s assertion last month that the movement
“expresses the frustrations that the American people
feel.”
Expressions of frustrations didn’t get a sympathetic
hearing at the White House when the American people feeling
frustrated were Tea Partiers rallying across the country in
opposition to the administration’s left-wing agenda. Not even the
“shellacking” of last
year’s mid-term elections could convince Democrats to abandon
their class-warfare ideology. Capitol Hill is still
deadlocked because Democrats insist that deficit reduction must
mean more taxes for the rich and less money for defense, rather
than removing a single cent from the out-of-control entitlement
programs that threaten to bankrupt the nation. The liberal media,
of course, would have us blame the budget stalemate on Republican
intransigence, but distorted perceptions have become the media’s
stock in trade.
The same news organizations that scapegoat conservatives
for the failures of the not-so-super “supercommittee” are also busy
trying to convince Americans that the Occupiers are a non-violent
mainstream movement, no matter how extreme their rhetoric or
violent their actions. Sunday’s Washington Post
prominently
featured an op-ed manifesto by the ideologues who claim credit
for inspiring the Occupy movement, and the paper also offered
Barbara Ehrenreich’s
suggested reading list for the soi-disant “99
percent.” First on that list was A People’s History of the
United States by former
Communist Party comrade Howard Zinn. When the works of known
Marxists are so highly recommended in the prestige press, as their
way of showing solidarity with anti-capitalist street mobs, we
might suspect many in the media have adopted the radical motto of
French revolutionaries: Pas d’ennemis à gauche! “No
enemies to the left” also evidently describes the posture of
today’s Democratic Party, which has drifted so far leftward that
the heirs of Marx and Engels might plausibly sue for copyright
infringement.
Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver
once warned, and one consequence of the Democrats’ embrace of
left-wing ideas is that opposition to socialism has become
“controversial,” as if economic freedom were an extremist concept
or merely the narrow partisan agenda of Republicans. Simply telling
the obvious truth about the Marxist orientation of the Occupy
movement — a fact evident enough to the CPUSA — is sufficient to
cause liberals to sound alarms about the danger of a return to
“McCarthyism.” Liberal outrage, however, seems to depend entirely
on who is witch-hunting whom. Advocates of free enterprise are now
routinely besieged by the same Occupier mobs whose efforts are
enthusiastically admired by the editors of the Washington
Post. Two weeks ago, I found myself briefly surrounded by
Occupy DC protesters attempting to storm the doors of an event
sponsored by Americans for Prosperity. More recently, hundreds of
Occupy Denver demonstrators descended on a
hotel that was hosting a conference sponsored by
FreedomWorks.
The encounter Nov. 11 at Denver’s Crowne Plaza Hotel
proved an embarrassment for the Occupiers. The FreedomWorks event
was a nationwide gathering of conservative bloggers and evidently
the protesters weren’t prepared to confront scores of New Media
activists armed with digital video cameras. One of the bloggers,
Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit, interviewed a teacher who
apparently brought her students to participate in the Occupy Denver
march on the Crowne Plaza. Celia Bard said the students from St.
Mary’s Academy were merely there on a field trip to “observe” the
protest: “We want them to see the democratic process in action.”
But another blogger, Jeff Goldstein of Protein
Wisdom, interviewed one of Bard’s students who seemed to
contradict her teacher’s explanation. “You’re f—ing up
our future,” the 17-year-old told Goldstein. “What do you think we
learn at school? This is what we learned about.…We’re the 99
percent.”
That expression of Occupier sentiment, from a blonde
teenager who attends an all-girls Catholic school where tuition is
$14,000 a year, was as shocking to me as any report of criminal
violence in the protest encampments. It prompted me to write a
long contemplation about how so many American young people have
been indoctrinated to regard the “New Left” radicals of the 1960s
as heroes. What have these kids been taught about the history of
that era? And perhaps more importantly, what have they not
been taught?
While liberals were wringing their hands about the
Occupier encampments being removed from parks in New York and other
cities, memory called to my mind a monument in a park down home.
That monument bears the name of a handsome Georgia boy voted “Most
Talented” in his high school, a brave pilot who died fighting for
freedom at age 25. Today children play in the park dedicated to his
memory, and no one can doubt Douglas County gave her best in what
John F. Kennedy called “a long twilight struggle” against the
totalitarian menace of communism. Can such a sacrifice ever be
forgotten, while our nation’s children are taught to admire
draft-dodgers and Marxist agitators? If schools want to teach kids
about heroes from the Sixties, they should take a field trip to
Washington, D.C., where Robert G. Hunter is one of more than 58,000
names on a black
granite wall.
