James Rubio, or Ruby as he was called, back in the days during the war in
Vietnam had come to hate all that war meant in his life so one day he decided to speak out against the war at a rally in Cincinnati. The rally Ruby attended was his first and would not be his last as he became an outspoken critic of all things that had to do with building powers to kill any living being. I decided to write an essay on this subject in a questioning format. I will go deeply into the psyche of Ruby to get the true feeling of his intent and how it made him feel. “A social movement is an informal collective movement of people, loosely coordinated in their actions and using flexible tactics, with some sort of leadership group to give its actions coherence” (Shively). James Rubio was all about the social movement and wanted to become part of one, Ruby sought out a movement so he could voice his displeasure with the war in Vietnam. Ruby hated the war. Ruby loved to speak out against it. “I had to become involved somewhere so I did it in Cinci where I was visiting a buddy. He did not like the power of the government to just bomb at will and I didn’t
Koop 2 either”. Ruby says “they didn’t even ask the people if it was ok, they just did it”. James
Rubio carried signs and sang songs while on the campus of the U of Cincinnati. He was a foot soldier for peace. Over time his involvement became less as the years went by, but, back then during the war in Nam, as he called it, he was into it for the love of country and for the power the people could use to move the government. Ruby remarked more than once, that “it worked when the people stayed strongly united”. “It pissed the cops off and it pissed the fuckin president off and I loved it”. “They all could kiss my ass”! The war in
Nam pushed the country far to the right of the political spectrum. War is peace, and bombing them into sanity was the thought of the war pigs on the far right. Nixon wanted nothing more than to conquer communism and be the hero but it was not to be and Ruby points it out to me with this statement” They lied from the start, they bombed Cambodia, they killed innocent civilians, Nixon and Johnson didn’t care”. “Power is all they wanted”, says Ruby, and for that he did not care for the US Government. My impression of Ruby, this man I met one day a meeting for people bettering their lives off of drugs, was that he was sincere in his thoughts, and he was, or could have been, a fireball of trouble back then for anyone who had to listen to him speak. I liked this man because he spoke for me as well. He sacrificed being with his family back home in Minneapolis, and he also blew off job opportunities as well.
Schooling was in his future but he did not know when until late in the 70’s. He attended brick layer school and received a certificate for completing the program of 8 weeks. “All I gave up to protest was ok to me cuz they needed to hear it and because of our bitching
Koop 3 the government changed their tune and pulled out of Nam”. Ruby was proud of that fact as he was very emotional while telling me about it. Six foot two and looking like he could rip the head off of a pit-bull made it surprising to me when tears came to his eyes. The movement, or protesting the war in Vietnam was a big success in my view because it got the government to move as stated in this article by Mark Barringer, “The
American Movement Against the Vietnam War”. It was the most successful antiwar movement in U.S. history. During the Johnson administration, it played a significant role in constraining the war and was a major factor in the administration's policy reversal in
1968. During the Nixon years, it hastened U.S. troop withdrawals,
