DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet
By:
Gene Glazer was a man of action.
The longtime Kendall Park resident was not only a critic of the nation’s lurch to the right over the last three-plus decades, but he devoted his life to challenging the policies of the conservative movement.
Mr. Glazer, who died last week at the age of 82, was a World War II veteran who spent a lot of time marching against the various foreign misadventures the United States has engaged in since his return from duty. He was an active member of Veterans for Peace he served on the national board and lived long enough to see the New Jersey chapter of the organization renamed in his honor earlier this year.
The last time I saw Mr. Glazer was last summer at the memorial service for his longtime neighbor Grace Plater. He was wearing a suit and several buttons that summed up his political views, buttons calling for an end to the Iraq war and the impeachment of President George W. Bush.
After a few pleasantries, we started talking about the state of American politics. I’d known Mr. Glazer for about 16 years by then he was an occasional columnist for the South Brunswick Post when I was a reporter in the early 1990s and would call me frequently to chat about the world.
Politically, we were on the same page. He was an unapologetic leftist who, as confirmed by the political buttons on his lapels that summer day in 2006, maintained his fire and purpose even as he entered his 80s.
I was a bit down on things when I saw him that day, fed up with the war, the president and the Republican-controlled Congress. I was feeling disillusioned and questioned whether change was possible at that moment in time.
He stopped me, pointed to the "Impeach" button and smiled.
"I’ve been wearing this since the war began," he told me.
The working-class guys behind the counter at the post office in Bloomfield, where he had moved after leaving Kendall Park, used to be dismissive.
"Very patriotic, pro-military," he told me, "but now when I go in there, they tell me ‘you know, you were right.’ Now they want the troops to come home."
I thought of this late last week, after getting a phone call from Mr. Glazer’s son, Barry, a friend from college, telling me his father had died in Colorado, where he had moved to about a year ago. Watching the news this week, watching the way the Democrats ceded their responsibility as the majority party in Congress to act as a counterweight to an out-of-control executive, I could hear Mr. Glazer’s voice in my head calling out the Democrats for their cowardice.
Barry told me in an e-mail that his dad continued to battle, "continued to write to local media expressing his concerns about the war in Iraq and a myriad of other social issues" until the end.
On July 4, for instance, according to the Boulder (Colo.) Daily Camera, Mr. Glazer joined a couple of hundred people at a rally calling on Americans to do what the president and Congress have so far been unwilling to do: End the war in Iraq.
"Who then do we turn to? You and I," he asked the crowd, according to the paper. "We have to stop the war and bring the troops home."
Two weeks later and just four weeks before he died he reiterated his criticism of the Democratic Congress and again called for an end to the war. The Democrats, "at the moment of truth," he wrote, "caved in to George Bush and the Republicans by voting to continue funding the obscene and immoral war in Iraq." The Democrats, he said, "ignored the voice of the American people" and "their hands are forever stained with the blood of American dead and wounded."
As bold a critic as he was, Mr. Glazer also was an optimist. He believed in his heart that he was right about the war and he knew, provided we keep working for peace, that the American people would come to see the war for the disaster it has been.
"He was certainly a man of conscience, of conviction, and most importantly of action," Barry wrote. "He passed peacefully in the company of family with an ‘Impeach Bush/Cheney’ button on his hospital gown."
Now that was the Gene Glazer I knew.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected] and his blog, Channel Surfing, can be found at www.kaletblog.com.

