Recently
I watched a program on the local PBS station. The program, “John
Sebastian Presents: Folk Rewind” was the backdrop for the PBS fund drive.
As I watched, it became evident to me that the program meant more to me than
the PBS telethon and brought back memories and stirred deep emotions, some
caused me to face very disturbing questions.
So
that you understand my need to look in the mirror and ask questions that may
not have an answer, I was born in 1944. I grew up during the most
volatile and rapid change in the psyche of the nation and, in my opinion, the
world. I refer to myself as a child of the sixties because, even though
I, and most people of my age, had thought about and discussed the future, who
we were going to be in that future and how we would fit into that future,
before the sixties arrived, it was during the 1960s that we put into practice
those things we said we believed, those things we said were important to us and
to the world, those things we wanted to pass on to our children, if and when
they came along.
We marched, we sang, we protested, we testified, we loved, and we changed the
world. We helped, along with those brave men and women who had battled for so
many years, to bring about equality for all. We helped, along with those who
went to fight on the battlefield and those who fought in the courts and by
leaving their country, homes, and families behind, to stop a war. We helped,
along with millions of Americans, to force a corrupt president from
office. For
the record, I served our country during the turmoil in Southeast Asia and
earned the right to protest, but everyone in this country, regardless of their
service had and still do have, the right to protest.
Those
of us that grew up in that period had high ideals, many will not see it that
way, but we were out to build a better world. Each of us, no matter our
political ideology, social class, or race felt that we were contributing to the
future as we envisioned it. For some reason, I was part of what you may
consider to be the more radical segment of the Post World War II Generation.
I
grew up in North Eastern Ohio. The Civil Rights Movement was just gathering
steam and we did not understand what it was all about. Where we lived,
there was no race problem, at least to our young eyes. Black and white
lived near each other, we went to school together, played sports together, hung
out together after school, some of us Do-Wopping, hoping that we were going to
be the next Dion and the Belmonts or The Drifters. As I got older, and
after my excursion into the heart of the activity, I noticed that blacks lived
near whites, but not like next door. I realized that, even in Ohio, there
were places where black people did not go and I realized the degrading nature
of some of the names that were used in reference to black people. By the
time I left home, I heard young people, my age, using the very words we hated
so much when we heard them form our parents generation. Either those who chose
that road were too ignorant of what they were doing or hate is passed from
generation to generation. Looking around America today, we see the voting
rights that so many had fought for so long to see enacted, trampled under the
feet by those who do not want everyone to participate in the democratic
government that our founding fathers gave to us. In the last year alone, years
of work has been tossed under the bus by people who want power at any cost. Why
have we allowed that to happen?
We
had such high ideals and such high hopes of changing the world, and then we
were gone. We were still here physically but most of us had to change our
focus from changing the world to putting food on the tables of our young
families. Advancing in our jobs so that we could make more money and have
more things became more important to us than the billions of our tax dollars
that were being spent around the world influencing governments so as to shape
them into our vision of what they should be.
Suddenly
one day, we looked around and discovered that we had become the very thing that
we had fought so hard to destroy. We had become them. We were part
of the establishment, living our lives of affluence, always wanting more and
not caring about the suffering that many may have endured to bring it all to
us.
We
want cheap clothing, people in Bangladesh will make it for us two cents an
hour. We want a cheap TV or computer, people in China will make it for us for a
few cents an hour, a dorm to live in and the right not to be shot. We don't
care, we just want. We want what we want, when we want, and at the price we
want and we don't care about the cost to people who make it for us. We don't
care about the cost to the environment. We don't care about the cost to our
grandchildren who will be living in third world conditions so we can have what
we want, when we want it, and at the cost we want to pay.
In
America, the greatest threat to the health of Americans is the epidemic
of obesity. In the meantime one third of the world is starving to death.
We
dreamed, and fought for real education, education that would prepare students
for the world they would someday enter. The two sizes fits all
educational system of the 1950s needed to be updated with more individual
attention for those with learning difficulties and curricula designed with the
person in mind rather than the cookie cutter systems we had all grown
accustomed to.
We
dreamed of, and fought for equality. Not just for the word but for the
meaning. We wanted every person in America to be afforded the same right
to a good education as his or her neighbor. We wanted every person of
legal age to participate in the election of government officials and to vote on
issues and to run for and be elected to government offices. We wanted any
person with the means to pay for a home to be able to buy a home in any
neighborhood and to live in harmony with their neighbors as part of the
community.
We
dreamed of, and fought for peace. Peace, in our community, in our
country, and in our world.
What
happened? Where and when did our dreams get derailed? To where did
we, and our big dreams of a better world disappear?
Today,
the poverty we dreamed of eliminating encompasses more of our countries
citizens and is deeper than any time since the Great Depression of the
1930s. To add to the despair of those in the most need, members of our
congress are fighting to eliminate the very programs put into place, during and
after that Great Depression, to ensure that the basic needs of all American
Citizens would be met.
Shady
real estate brokers and their equally shady Wall Street cohorts cheated the
process of home sales and the handling of the subsequent mortgages so severely
that they have sent this country’s and the world’s economies to near total
collapse, and profited from the whole mess. As their empires began to
disintegrate, we, the taxpayers, were forced to bail them out of their troubles
and save their companies. They used our tax dollars to pay themselves,
the very people who destroyed our economy, put millions on the unemployment
line, caused thousands of businesses to close, pension funds to shrink to such
a level that made retirement for most a forgotten dream and destroyed the lives
of many already counting on their pensions to live, multi-million dollar
bonuses.
We
have engaged in two wars lasting a decade and financed by raiding the Social
Security Trust Fund and borrowing money from China.
As
these events unfolded and continue to unfold, our national balance sheet
presents us with a deficit so large it is hard to comprehend. The answer
for many of our members of congress is to eliminate the programs that assist
the poor and elderly while refusing to allow a slightly higher tax rate to be
levied on the richest, very small, segment of our population. Our country
has become populated with people whose motto seems to be, “I got mine, screw
you.”
Somehow
and by someone, a determination has been made that our public school systems
are failing students. There seems to be two main reasons cited for this
situation; the failure of some students to pass a standardized test and the
fact that teachers belong to a union and therefore get paid too much. The
resolution; get rid of the public schools, except to serve the poor and
basically disenfranchised students, and use our tax money to fund private
schools, catering only to those students the private, for profit, school
operators deem worthy of their particular school and whose parents can pay the
additional tuition. This plan will, as it is intended to do, leave the
children with the most need stuck in the remaining public schools with very
limited resources, like books, teachers, chalk, you get the picture!
I
do not have enough years left to list all the wrongs I see in this once great
country. What disappoints me most is my generation, including me, that
gave up the fight far too soon and then failed to pass the torch. The
Occupy Movement is far to disorganized and lacks the commitment, and intestinal
fortitude, to bring this country back to its senses. What we need is
another round of “children of the sixties” to wake us all back up before it is
too late. It may be too late now! Think about it!
The
following was written by a nineteen year old young man in 1965. This
video is one of many. Some show scenes from the 1960s, some, like this
one are updated.
Same
old world, only worse
Peace
