This was me in the Summer of Love, 1968, on the beach at Mustang Island in Texas. I look like I was already starting to lose my hair.
I turned 8 that summer, and practically the only consistent time I spent with my father was watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, which was a nightly ritual, so I was also reasonably well-informed about current events.
I know we, particularly those more or less near me politically, look back on these times with quiet, content, nostalgia. Yes, there was some civil unrest back then, but we were on our way to a more perfect union. Lots of change back then, bad things were happening, the war on, people were being drafted and not coming back, those who did come back were shouldered with our collective guilt for the war, but we had good music, and practically no females under thirty wore a bra, and we were on our way to the moon!
That’s not how people felt at the time.
That cute boy in the picture was already fully indoctrinated into white supremacist notions of why the world was the way it was. You can read about that in an essay of mine on Medium, “By the time I was seven years old.” Political leaders committed to racial integration were being assassinated. There were still signs over water fountains that said “colored people only” in public parks.
Nixon took a page from Roy Cohn’s playbook and stoked the notion of a “Silent Majority.” That is, most people (only whites are people, of course) are not out in the streets protesting and causing all this trouble, we just need to show them who’s boss and make those filthy hippies cut their hair so real Americans can get back to living their lives and pursuing the American Dream! This protest is just un-American!
Meanwhile, we were sacrificing the generation just before mine in a colonialist act of raw aggression against a non-white people who posed no threat to us. What Walter Cronkite and White House Press people whitewashed this brutal, awful, wasteful, expensive, imbalanced, immoral, and inhumane violent war of raw stupid violent human aggression with the gentle moniker: “the conflict overseas….”
Things were bad. People weren’t talking to each other. Families split apart, people fled the country, many went underground and off the grid. I was there. I saw that with the same eyes that now peer through thick glasses to commit these words to this email.
It was also FIVE YEARS AFTER Martin Luther King Jr had committed these words below to paper in a letter from a Birmingham jail, were he had been incarcerated for leading peaceful, lawful protests fully protected by the Constitution. The problem was, as Malcolm X observed, his effective lack of US citizenship
After he was arrested, a group of eight prominent white clergy leaders criticized him then for his “unwise and untimely” protests against institutionalized racial hatred.
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice [...]”
Even Dr. King had his moments of hopelessness before he was shot in the head outside his motel room in Memphis about three months before that picture of me was taken.
Things got better. Some problems were solved, others were kicked down the road and we’re picking them up now. New ones were created that we are also faced with now, others went away on their own.
I know we have a huge amount of work to do, and it is not at all certain the right people will prevail. I just find that I benefit from keeping in mind that it is also not certain that this all won’t turn out as badly as it looks like it could right now.
Things could also get better.