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1963. 2011.

Forty-eight years ago today, John Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas.  1963.  He had been urged not to go there.  The country was too divided.  People were saying crazy and dangerous things.

Thirty-eight years ago, I had already decided that I was going to leave the parish I had in California, and go to graduate school in Chicago, to think through what was going on in my head, my life, and our country.  I never went back.

This week, when the campus police at the University of California at Davis sprayed pepper spray into the faces of students quietly protesting about what is happening in their heads, their lives, and their country, I remember.

My life changed forever at the University of Chicago.  I entered as a 32-year-old father of four, wondering what all the things I had been trained to say meant, and I left there, five years later, profoundly altered.  I learned that our own government had been lying to us, that Americans not only were willing to assassinate their own President, but were complicit in anti-democratic wars in Latin America, and that war and guns and clubs were what we thought about.

I was puzzled, at first, when students broke into University offices and poured blood into the file cabinets.  I learned how complicit the universities had been with our military, helping them to control developing nations, and letting them know how to draft their students.

When I left Chicago, in 1969, there was smoke in the air from the fires of protest against what we were doing as a nation.  I smell that smoke, still.  In Davis, the campus police peppered-sprayed students who sat quietly, protesting what we are doing as a nation.  This time, it is not racism, or even so much war, although it is that, too.  It is Wall Street.  It is the awful inequity our own government has crafted, and defended.  It is the innocence of being stupid about what we are doing, and the clarity of our young people.

We have crafted and continue to defend the awful inequity of gross wealth, and of growing poverty.  Our own government has written the laws that have turned the banks and Wall Street brokers into pig sties of wealth.  Our politicians plead that we have to protect the stinking rich because if the rich do not stink, the rest of us will not have jobs.  What jobs?

The distrust of government may have become clear to us in the 1960s.  It has grown huge, since.  But it is not government as government that ought to be distrusted.  It is government that pepper-sprays us and that defends inequity we should scorn.

It is time to reclaim our right to shape our own nation; our own dreams.

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