Ok, Boomer, what about protests this time around?
Current turmoil, especially campus turmoil of late, has taken me back to turmoil of my long-ago campus days and, more broadly, of my adolescence and young adulthood. Turmoil I hoped never to experience again, even as a distant echo. The times have prompted this journey back as have fellow Boomers and even those far younger (even somewhat from our children… kind of!)—'how do now and then compare?’
The differences, albeit as viewed through the oft filmy glass of memory and the peculiar limitations of gazing through but one person’s lens, do seem numerous— the broad themes so recognizable, so similar...and yet… Many of us ‘then’ also protested in the midst of the hurley burley of youth. We know who generated the anthem ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’, and, later, the hollowed out, hedonistic and narcissistic guidance of ‘if it feels good do it’. Hey, we told ourselves ‘don’t trust anyone over 30.’ Were we the youngest young people ever? Well, we tried—as best we could given the times and given the time we had…as have so many of those before and after us. We all share that.
We lived the turmoil of being and acting, maybe desperately, young, counter revolutionarily young amidst a world teetering on the edge of a deeply felt and hauntingly penetrating if ill-defined precipice. We protested accordingly… many of us in many places and for many years. In no particular order, speaking for myself (and perhaps in resonance with a few others, perhaps even you),
-Human rights, at home and abroad, from Selma to Cape Town, from MLK, Malcolm X and Mandela and from Bela Abzug and Gloria Steineim to Wounded Knee and amidst nascent twitching about shameful acts such as the WWII Japanese Americans internment. The beginnings of a broader, more inclusive history (e.g., John Hope Franklin and Dee Brown). ‘Then’ less gay and far less discerningly so (e.g., LGBQT+) than ‘now’. Yet not absent, e.g., an anti-war, counter-cultural standard ‘For What It’s Worth’ (Buffalo Springfield) arose from Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip’s ‘alternative clubs’, ‘gay’ bars (e.g., Black Cat Tavern), and the LAPD. Pursuit of human rights then and now. Perhaps ‘then’ was more ‘for’ rights and less ‘against’ their violation. A different kind of aspiration. A different tone, but similar fervor? Perhaps.
-Environment. I was one of the organizers (local) of the first Earth Day (1970). ‘Then’ came less from a sense of fighting for our survival as a species (the book Silent Spring notwithstanding) and more from a call to respect our planetary home. Generally stated, we likely acted more out of a desired (probably romantic) sense of relationship with the earth and less from forestalling disaster. We were only recently emerged from Lady Bird Johnson’s initiative which successfully led the way to stop treating roadsides as junkyards. We of ‘then’ and those of ‘now’ probably share a general concern and even outrage but less sense of impending disaster…We had more time.
-War. Lies. Carnage. Endlessness. National Guard shootings on a campus. We couldn’t vote, but we could and were sent by the hundreds of thousands to kill for our country—about 1.9 million Americans drafted 1964-1973. (I headed a Congressional district campaign to lower the voting age to 18. Failed.) The more one knew, the worse it got. Venerable news anchor Walter Cronkite told the nation that the government had long lied to him. My choices altered my life. Generally, we failed to separate disgust for the misuse of American power and regard for the warriors we sent to do so… people we sent in wave upon wave. We dined on our own—and not just the protesters. Today the focus, for the moment, is on proxy wars. That seems of consequential difference, at least experientially—the experience of immediacy, of proximity, and of pervasiveness. Intolerance unfortunately again stalks the ranks of the righteous.
-Fractured politics. The country broke into smaller and smaller bits-- along generational, race, gender, class, and... A progression of political violence, including assassination. Riots. Burning streets. Dead leaders—JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK (along with a bullet to paralyze George Wallace). ‘Student’ radicals robbing banks to ‘fund the revolution’. Police assaulting protesters and under assault themselves. National disintegration into a monumental landslide ‘victory’ for a ‘law and order’ war president--soon to be first US President to resign under the threat of impeachment for crimes related to election tampering (and coverup) and a Nobel Laureate Secretary of State also accused of war crimes. ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ (Billy Joel), but neither did we put it out. Maybe we helped to cram a lid on it. Maybe.
-Nukes. As children, we practiced hiding under our school desks upon spotting a mushroom cloud and received encouragement to build a bomb shelter (or at least to know the location of the nearest one)… Protests about the very existence of nuclear weapons seem now to have faded from prominence, following the Berrigans to the margins and then into the twilight. The topic (other than in organizations such as Global Zero) seems today largely resident in post-apocalyptic sci-fi such as the well-crafted series Fallout—as if any of us or even the atmosphere of the planet would survive a full-scale nuclear war and, with it, our transformation of this exquisite blue white swirled marble turning in the darkness of space into a black, lifeless clump of irradiated rock. Likely more danger than ever ‘now’, given nuclear weapon proliferation, but eerily nukes make for less front-page (or front section) protest… Desensitization? Resignation?
Many of us headed North. Perhaps 60,000 fled to Canada. Immigrants leaving a nation of immigrants. That seems quite different…at this point.
Given the above, how could we as a generation not carry as an anthem Barry McGuire’s rendition of Philip Gary Sloan’s ‘The Eve of Destruction’?
And yet… there were other anthems too. Much different on so many dimensions. One such anthem, complementary to McGuire’s, being by Joni Mitchell—
Woodstock
by Joni Mitchell
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm *
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning
We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden
© October 22, 1969; Siquomb Publishing Corp
(for a contemporary appreciation)
As for “life is for learning”,
here’s the ending of T.S. Eliot’s last of the Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick, now, here, now, always
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
(for TS Eliot reading his poem …..)
Keep Paddling.