While Berkeley is being occupied, visited by Daniel Ellsberg, tents on the Mario Savio Square, I feel so much more than nostalgia. I am rifling through my mind to figure how on earth I found out about the Free Speech Movement. It was not on the Nightly News with Huntley Brinkley, it was not in the local papers (Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel), it was not dinner conversation in my home or any home I visited. You can know it was not in my Catholic Church; they were not pro-Kennedy. It was not the lunch talk over tuna noodles or sloppy joes.
To say there was no internet, there were no PC’s but, moreover, there was no lateral communication that had a secret factor as there is today. Many adults have not kept up with electronic news possibilities; they merely read CNN on their ipad rather than fish for the Guardian or Al Jezeera. Though I carry my own biases, it appears to me that many people my age who are devotees of Amy Goodman and foreign press are child-free or involved in learning professions.
Somehow I knew, I knew about Birmingham, I knew about Martin Luther King, I knew about the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Somehow it found me. My compass was set on autopilot to point 180 degrees from anything my mother supported; Wisconsinite, Joseph McCarthy; the Committee on Un-American Activities; the John Birth Society; crazy messages about communism including people building air raid shelters in their basements.
Mind you this is all before Betty Friedan, before PC’s, before Stonewall, before HIV/AIDS, before home pregnancy tests, before thousands of things that are now simply, “in the water.” As best I can measure how it got to me at 15, it was books, music and a genuine taste for fundamental resistance to the same ole, same ole. Anything that had been tested, tried and true was toxic and antiquated. Change was being born, born in me; where else could it be? Yes, I was a genuine card-carrying anti-war hippie by the time I was 19. I wore overalls with an American Flag sewn upside down on the bib.
Today as I watch the news, comb through facebook, watch youtube videos and search on #OWS I see the outcome of a sliver of that investment. And there are Joan Baez and Crosby & Nash singing right on queue. I see 19 year olds and 25 year olds who are moving the world one change at a time. The human mic, refusing dogma, demanding equality, valuing books, standing in unison. It isn’t déjà vu all over again, it is burgeoning brilliance roaring across the earth on the finest brand of courageous NEW. From Marines to medics, from seniors to daycare, from a few to a thousand, change is being born in each and every one.
But here is what you may not know, what you may not have realized. Today there is a kid, 12 or 13, who is lost in a sea of toxic traditions of bigotry and fear, who is taking it all in. They are writing it all on the walls of their heart. They will continue on a lifetime trajectory, now plugged in, and, whoa, change is gonna come, born at the speed of light, fueled by today’s resistance, informed on a scale I can not even dream of. Oh, lucky kid. Oh, better world.
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