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Reclaiming America

"What are they talking about?"


I remember having had that thought often, 
in the 1960s, already in my mid-thirties, 
already with a large family.


There were war protests:  everyone could understand that, 
even if one disagreed with them.  Young people seldom choose war, 
especially if they do not understand why only they must die.


The young are seldom as racist as their parents.
They are less insulated from the neighborhood,
and from what is new.  We understood racial integration,
even when our logic and feelings did not coincide.


But the sixties was more than that.  It was generational.
One of the reasons the students of the sixties were non-violent
is because it was their parents they were resisting.  
They were resisting the unthinking assumption of their parents:
that war was necessary and good; that America was good;
that whatever government did was good, and necessary.


It wasn't.  


We undermined democratic ambitions in Latin America
to serve our economic interests, and our military posture.
Our universities provided the brain power to manipulate
incipient democracies if they endangered our investments.
The universities conspired to lubricate the military draft.


If our parents were not lying,  
they were unthinkingly conspiring 
against their own children.  


Their children sat in, sat down, and said no.
They stood on the campus of Kent State and were shot.
They stuck flowers down the muzzles of the militia.


Today they are saying no to Wall Street,
to the awful inequities their parents 
have been stupidly complicit in creating,
in defending, even when it crippled them.


"We can all be rich," their parents said, "just like the rich,
if we make sure the rich can stay rich."  At church,
their pastors said Jesus wanted all of them to be rich.
All they had to do was to protect the rich, and believe.


Today, the protests of those who occupy Wall Street,
wherever they find Wall Street, is as murky to their 
parents as the protesters of the 1960s were to their parents.
"What are they talking about?", we say.  "What do they want?"


They want fairness.  They want something for their parents
that their own parents do not seem to be able to demand.
Less war.  Cleaner water.  Fewer lies.  An equitable sharing
of the resources of the nation; not a concentration of it.


And in Davis, California, Bull Conner, now a university 
security guard, sprayed pepper spray into the faces 
of our children, and the Chancellor said she was terribly sorry.


We have seen this before. 

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