It is rare for me after 74 years of struggling for human and nature rights, often against the institutions of power and impunity, to eulogize a person whom I have opposed on perhaps 88 percent of every policy position we have ever mutually addressed.
I was subjected to a form of torture for some weeks in Alabama in 1965 for the crime of refusing to kill people whom I had never met and knew nothing about. I was ripped out of the Civil Rights Movement in Selma. Commander John McCain was shot down after bombing the people of Vietnam, and was tortured in prison for his military actions.
While McCain became a United States senator, I worked on the docks in Chicago for 20 years. I worked with several organizations that placed their presumed political values far above the lessons of history, or of the democratic process. When their contradictions overwhelmed me, I ran barefoot over the mountains for thousands of miles to deal with the traumas of my life. I became Forrest Gump.
Sen. McCain fought for conservative governmental and economic policies, as he was taught to do all his life, policies that I consider to have severely crippled working class rights, environmental rights, voting rights, women’s rights. Yet, from his education and personal history, he may well have honestly done so. While working in the Senate with colleagues of different persuasions he listened, often with humor, and crafted several significant mutual proposals, especially with Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, to try to remove corrupt money from dominating the American political processes.
He broadened his perspective and his humanity.
While his operational principles have likely been always close to the opposite of mine, his values and specific policies became more and more independent of his political bosses. He became a maverick, a man willing to do his own thinking. I have been surprised, even stunned, at times, by this evolution. When the racist, nativist base of his own party grew more obviously, dangerously, intolerant, McCain refused to swim in the swamp. He stood up for the basis of truth, justice and decency, as opposed to the thuggery which has captured his party ever since. Having endured torture himself, John McCain always opposed the policies of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to torture those whom we dislike. And, unlike those chicken hawks, who never served, he did not slander those of us who opposed the war in Vietnam for moral reasons.
The iconic moment of the current regime came when McCain, in 2017, returned from conference at 2 a.m. and turned thumbs down on the theft of health care from the American people.
Since that moment the senator has stood, often as the only remaining voice for decency in the party of the person who consistently praises foreign dictators above any regard for the historical values of American democracy, or of the institutions which attempt to sustain this democracy.
I am no fan of the kleptocracy, the oligarchy, the theocracy, the mobocracy, the timocracy, the corporatocracy, which juggle the institutions of power for their particular domination over American society. At times McCain would cater to or vote with one or another of these tendencies; yet he never totally capitulated his character, nor his words and votes for their private interests.
He was no William Fulbright, nor Bob La Follette, or Bobby Kennedy, but I know of no other legislator of the past century whose stature might surpass or match that of John McCain. While we all tend to adopt the values and modes of our circumstance, our class and environment, our parents and mentors, in times of crisis history may call upon us to rise above our circumstance. A Gandhi, a King, a Lincoln, a Jesus, a Douglass, a Roosevelt, a Mandela: some do break through our own walls to teach mankind. The rest of us can always try to do so. John tried. Thank You.
Strider Arkansas Benston lives in Longmont.