Fifty years down the road…
Summer of ‘67, right before becoming a high school senior, I met Alan of the soft brown eyes. We spent week-ends in his hot ’57 Chevy at the drive-in, a hinged silver speaker delivered scratchy sound to an interior hush. By the time I returned to school he’d been drafted and quickly dispatched to Viet Nam. What did I know? This far away place had been on the periphery of my news field for a couple years. But that pivotal year turned to 1968 and the war migrated front and center. Meanwhile I wrote on wispy airmail stationary and waited for letters from afar, absorbed Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Beatles and Stones, needle to vinyl on the cheap record player in my room, studied physiology and Shakespeare and refolded clothing in my $1.40 an hour job at May Company.
But something ignited in me when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April. A man of peace and deep integrity gunned down in my country. What? How? Why? And this tender spark rose to flame when Bobby Kennedy was murdered in June. The black and white war, beamed into the safety of my living room: body bags, flag-draped coffins, napalm explosions, Buddhists immolating, the My Lai massacre in gruesome detail. Alan of the soft brown eyes somewhere in the middle of all of that.
By the time August rolled around, the televised protests and outrageous response of law enforcement that characterized the Democratic National Convention pushed me over an edge I didn’t even realize I was teetering on. I left for freshman year at UCLA packing my best outfit: a yellow gabardine sweater with pleated pants to match. Within a month those clothes languished in my dorm closet. I was attired in Levis and a burgundy peasant blouse. The travesty of Nixon’s election in November erased any remaining shred of moderate neutrality. I was a full-fledged left wing radical.
When Alan of the soft brown eyes returned home, I could not even begin to connect to who we were, who he was, who I was. It was a horrible Dear John moment and I still wince in recognition of the hurt I caused. But there was no stopping this transformational tidal wave and I joined every campus protest. The recollection of the administration building sit-in and police snipers on Royce Hall’s roof and the Campell Hall shooting and the penetrating voice of Angela Davis still feels fresh in the strange way memory has of storing intensity at the forefront. In February 1969, I travelled to SF with the boy who eventually became sweet hubby. Together we marched our anger down Market Street. These burgeoning public actions of dissent, following on the heels of civil rights marches, are the seeds of what we see happening today. A demonstration of public opinion can definitely effect change in public policy. I have to believe that here we are 50 years down the road and these current actions will create change again.
But change can be frustratingly slow. It was another four years before the US dishonorably pulled out of this tragic war. I was so impressionably young; it was such a defining event in so many ways. But historical perspective makes itself known only when events have been touched by the tincture of time. So it was with utter absorption that sweet hubby and I immersed in Turning Point: Viet Nam War, a five part series that illuminated so much of what I never knew or fully understood. So very highly recommended. Not just for what it has to say about then, but for how much this particular past has fed what is happening right now. It was in the sixties that American people’s trust in their elected leaders began to leak. When outright lies became a solution for managing popular opinion. When objective reality was still the basis for truth in journalism. Before accuracy began it’s pathetic slide into it’s current sorry state. Not that I have an opinion on any of this.
But I do have hope. I just returned from No Kings Day, the alternative to the military parade in Washington DC. The way things are coming down is not OK. We the people are energized. And public actions of dissent are an historically proven way of creating change. Sweet hubby works for Indivisible Sacramento. This link will help you wonder how you might get into action. My own contribution (other than protest!) is to create spaces of support and clarity so that you might feel into your unique calling. Come to class, feel your ground, listen to your heart, find a clear focus. We have what it takes.
❤️Bella