By Joe Sheller / Guest Editorial
I had planned to write this month about echoes of the protests at the University of Missouri, and how interesting it was to see local actions, such as groups of students at the University of Iowa and Mount Mercy University wearing black on Nov. 12 to “support Missouri protests.”
My theme was going to be how social media – Twitter hashtags, Facebook, Yik Yak, etc. – are now mainstream ways that movements can form and touch us here in the Corridor, even when the events are a bit remote.
And then Paris happened. And it put in my mind different echoes of the 1960s. Mizzou reminds us of campus protests – Paris more of actual war.
Last week was the culmination of a three-month series examining the legacy of the Vietnam War at Mount Mercy University, called “Stories We Tell: Legacies of the Vietnam War.”
I was the coordinator of the series, but I’m not the only one with Vietnam on my mind. This year marked the 40th anniversary of the war’s end in 1975, and the 50th anniversary of the first large U.S. troop surge as Americans took on a major combat role. As a result, the local media has produced several Vietnam-themed stories.
Our instinct is to make up for the shameful homecoming returning Americans faced in a divided America by saying “thank you” to veterans and listening to their stories. That’s a good instinct, but not enough.
As the tragedy in Paris shows, we also need to understand how hatred grows and forms into violence.
In her Nov. 14 column in The Gazette, “Let’s Remember, Mourn All Changed by Vietnam,” Lynda Waddington wrote movingly of the ambiguity of that war. “No matter how personal or distant the connection, it’s difficult to reconcile emotions surrounding the Vietnam War,” she began.
Waddington has a personal connection to Vietnam. As she described in columns published Sept. 14 (“National Vietnam Memorial Offered Mirror to Past”) and Sept. 19 (“Catching Up on Odds and Ends”), she lost a brother in the war, although she was too young to recall him or the Vietnam era all that well.
One aspect of running the MMU Vietnam events was observing the coverage in the local media. My expectation was that the Moving Wall, an emotional and visual highlight of the series, would draw the greatest media scrutiny. The wall did draw a Gazette photographer and some TV attention – but far less media focus than I expected.
On the other hand, an art gallery exhibit of Vietnam-era artifacts drew extensive coverage from two local TV stations. That was more media focus than I expected.
However, as far as I know, there was no local news coverage of a Nov. 11 speech by a nationally prominent author, LeAnn Thieman. That mildly surprised me.
I also would have guessed, in advance, that media might cover the moving Oct. 13 presentation by writer Dale Kueter. He covered war news for The Gazette and described the impact of the death of a Cedar Rapids native in his speech, which drew from “Vietnam Sons,” the book he wrote about Vietnam.
The Gazette did a decent job overall covering the Mount Mercy series – running an extensive feature on it, Waddington’s columns, printing photographs of the wall, etc. If the paper missed a couple of speakers I thought they would cover, well, that’s the usual roll of the dice. Other media, especially TV, could have done more.
Anyway, Vietnam was a time of inexplicable violence, both in a war and, to a far lesser degree, in protest of it. I think that is partly why Paris put me in a mood to write about it. Another tie is simply thinking about big stories – what we recall and don’t, and how little seems to change over time.
I remember an early September morning when I was at the the Moving Wall at Mount Mercy. A veteran was slowly walking along the wall as I was photographing it. As he reached me, he paused.
“Will we ever learn?” he asked.
Sadly, in 2015, innocents are slaughtered in Paris. Terror is still a twisted way some try to communicate. Let’s hope that particular way of sending a message has less of a future.
Joe Sheller is associate professor of communication and journalism with Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids. He can be reached at jsheller@mtmercy.edu.
