RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE!
On a chilly afternoon in the spring of 1967, David Harris stood before an audience of nearly 60,000 in San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium. Clad in a denim jacket against the cold, the 21-year-old sported muttonchops and a prodigious mustache, and his six-foot-three frame seemed too large for the simple lectern. Speaking with an inexplicable New England accent, he preached that “the brutality in Vietnam is simply a reflection of the brutality of American life” and warned that “you will do her murdering [until America is] confronted by young men who will not murder!” The crowd roared in approval, and he urged the men in the audience to return their draft cards and to refuse military conscription.
But on this afternoon in the spring of 2019, Harris, 73 and recently diagnosed with incurable metastatic prostate cancer, talks to more than a dozen juniors and seniors at the Athenian School in Danville, California. They’re studying the Vietnam War and are seated in a classroom whose bright green walls are covered with posters bearing slogans like “Make Art Not War” and “Dissent Is Not Disloyalty.” Harris explains that instead of defecting to Canada to avoid the war, he felt a patriotic obligation to go to jail. He was not dodging the draft; he was resisting it and taking his punishment. Much as he did more than 50 years ago, he holds his audience’s rapt attention.
His voice becomes animated and his blue-gray eyes light up as he talks with the students about their worries: gun violence, climate change, Trump administration policies. Harris’s advice is simple: actions, not words, are needed. “You get what you do,” he urges them. His mantra: Resist.
During the turbulent Vietnam era, hundreds of thousands of people heard Harris speak, saw him on the evening news, or read one of the many magazines
