VH1 is showing rebroadcast of The Sixties, a splashy mini-series NBC did a while back. It’s got hippies, Black Panthers, draft card burning and pot. Lots of pot. No cliche’ is left unattended to. I counted. The soundtrack is an incessant as a tickertape and the half-decent crop of actors they’ve assembled practically collapses under the wait of all the stereotyping. It plays like highlight reel of one of the most choatic decades in American history.
I lasted five minutes before I started to cry.
I was born in 1973, right as Richard Nixon showed the extent of his thievery, after the last men had come home from Vietnam, when New York City went bankrupt. My mother worked on Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and was teargassed that summer from a Chicago hotel during the Democratic National Convention. My parents and their friends marched in Batlimore, Los Angeles and Washington. When I was in elementary school and we talked about that time, the live would drain out of their eyes. Sometimes they’d weep.
Saying I learned about the 60’s at my mother’s knee sounds like drivel but I still believe that decade is part of my heritage. I side with the little guy, well up with pride around civil defiance. A heathy spirit of contrarianism blows through me like wind.
So why does it all seem so foolish now? Did those kids my mom’s age then, close to my age now imagine that a war across the ocean seems almost quiant compared to a stealth war at home? What would Abbie Hoffman say about September 11th?
My values are strained. My belief in love, justice and sisterhood may not go far enough when 4,000 can die just because they showed up at work in the morning. Here. In America. This place that holds my heart.
I once asked my mom if she loved America, if she ever got called a traitor. She said when you love something enough, you want to see it be the best it can be. You weep for it when you feel it’s lost its way.
I don’t know if how my country has reacted to September 11th is right. I haven’t made up my mind on what "right" is. Those kids who occupied the administration building Berkeley seemed so sure of what "right" was. I’ve been questioning my idea of it for almost 2 months now. It makes me look at myself and weep.
