It’s hard to be almost 70 when the protests of the 60’s come roaring back
I am an annoyingly stereotypical Baby Boomer (though I hate the phrase.)
I am white, well-educated and live in a blue state. Later this year I will enter my seventh decade. And I am having cultural whiplash to the late 60’s when my political sensibilities were formed. The vision of the frustrated and well-meaning young people in the streets, the police in riot shields, thumping their batons on their black-gloved palms. Helicopters overhead. Bullhorns and sirens. It is making me sick and sad. I think I will take to my grave the image of Trump with bible aloft looking stupid and wooden.
In 1968 when I entered college, I was already a veteran of protests. My mother organized a “Mothers” sit-in in the Massachusetts Governor’s office to protest against elevating Storrow Drive and obscuring access to the green and the playgrounds along the Charles River in Boston. After a few hours of mothers with crying toddlers crammed into his office, the Governor reportedly told an aide, “Give them whatever they want.” The road was dropped to surface level where it remains today. I was six months old.
In Junior High, I was arrested with my cousin Jill, a BU sophomore and her boyfriend Jeff inside of Boston’s Federal Building as part of a Civil Rights sit-in. We linked arms and sang We Shall Overcome, and Amazing Grace and I loved it. My parents were not so happy with Jill. We were supposed to be at the movies. But though I have warm memories of these formative civil assembly experiences, I do not make light of them. They were important lessons in all the ways we as free Americans communicate our concerns and our values.
I was a Wellesley College freshman the fall of 1968, that most political of years. I was Freshman Class President, and a very smart girl named Hillary Rodham was the Student Body President. College campuses were in total turmoil. I thought our campus should go on strike. Hillary did not. She prevailed.
The time was ugly. Anti-War. Anti-violence. Still simmering over the summer’s assassinations and civil rights injustices. Hating the President. And to top it off, most of the boys we knew were sweating their draft numbers. An unlucky birthday read like a potential death sentence. We marched. We made signs. We sang and locked arms. We had huge rallies and were joined by our professors and often our parents. Most people we knew joined various protest groups. Some joined radical groups like the Weathermen and trashed storefronts and vehicles. We were not proud of the damage they inflicted. It seemed as pointless to me then as it does now.
Today is something so different. The rage is so diffuse. Touched off by yet another video of a black man lynched by local police. A whole world watching this unarmed, handcuffed man die over eight minutes captured on a brave bystander’s righteous cellphone. The class and rage anger has been stewing, simmering since 1968 but this boiling point was preventable. Real progress that we have made doesn’t excuse the distance we still have to travel for America to be fair and free for all.
The blame rests on Trump and his dog whistles to the racists, the haters, the gun toting anarchists. They’ve always been there but when he calls out to them, his tweets function like a call to arms. He throws out “Second Amendment” as if it were a secret handshake inviting anyone with a gun to just come out and use it. He is the match thrown on a house doused with kerosene. Isn’t he the terrorist mastermind? And we see how he preens and poses and quashes all those who disagree like beetles.
More disturbing is how the militarization behaves and how it looks. Tanks and low-flying helicopters. Soldiers with Bayonets. Pepper spray and military police on horseback. Remembers the camels during the Arab Spring? Trump and Barr glorying in the show of force, bible in hand. The Secretary of Defense shrinking in embarrassment.
We watched Tiananmen. We watched Cairo. We see Venezuela. Each led to an authoritarian and lawless government. And we simply cannot believe this is America. Haven’t we learned anything in the decades since 1968? Did the Vietnam era protests teach us nothing? Or did we just learn all the wrong lessons.
Photo from the New York Times 06/03/2020