With commentary. See the bolded notes.
This
weekend is the fiftieth anniversary of death of a president. If you
were in grade school or older on November 22 you’ll know who I’m
talking about. If you weren’t you’re probably wondering what all
the hub bub is about. I’ve never really thought of myself as part
of a declining generation before, but that death in Dallas marked the
beginning of a series of events that almost defined a generation. (fifty five years now, but who's counting)
Montgomery,
Dallas, Birmingham, Selma, Memphis, Kent State, Watts, Los Angeles,
Vietnam. History landed in our living rooms every time we turned on
the evening news. The Summer of Love turned into decades of
destruction that haunt us like hungry ghosts. Good laws had
unintended consequences. The voting rights act allows minorities to
vote. Gerrymandering state houses work to make sure they get to vote
for as few candidates as possible. (of course now the voting rights act has been gutted and gerrymandering and out right fraud is still rampant)
Integrating
the suburbs meant that those with money and mobility could leave the
cities with their crowded streets and poverty behind. The city became
the place where you worked, played, bought drugs and headed home to
the house, minivan and 2.5 kids. Safe in gated communities we could
ignore the blasted neighborhoods with too few jobs, crumbling schools
and damn few local role models. Public spaces are turned into “free
speech” zones or strip malls where there’s no “public” space
at all. (and the free speech zones are usually blocks from the action)
Vietnam
taught the military and the elected hired help two important lessons.
Pay somebody else to do the dirty work and keep the media as far away
from the action as possible. The mid seventies to the early nineties
were years of death, torture and displacement for hundreds of
thousands of people living in Central and South America as the US
channeled aid, equipment and millions of tax dollars into the pockets
of brutal dictators who claimed they were fighting “subversives”
and our war on drugs. Turns out the war on drugs was a great way to
channel off the books military aid into those countries. (and now drugs come in via container ships)
The
Great Communicator challenged Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”
in Berlin while our proxies were blowing up fields, shanties,
tenements and refugees in El Salvador and Guatamala; it almost never
made the evening news. It sure as hell didn’t make it into the
local papers. (And now the refugees from those failed countries are fleeing gangs and drug lords trying for asylum in the country that blasted them. There's a lesson in there somewhere. If they were blond, white Protestants there probably would not be a problem.)
When
we finally chose to do our own dirty work in the Middle East the
military made damn sure that the correspondents weren’t allowed to
go nosing around on their own. And some of the ones who did try ended
up being murdered by the extremists on the other side. Now technology
makes it possible for a technician in a control room in the
continental US to push a button and kill without ever seeing the ones
who die. No more Ed Murrows hitching rides on British bombers and
filing reports on the missions.
Voters
put a Black man in the White House in 2008 and we pretended that this
proved we were living in a post racial society while every new day
proves that the divides are deeper and deadlier than ever.
Who
knows. Maybe this generation has to pass before we can finally heal
the divisions and finally make at least part of the dream Jack
Kennedy described for us when he took office half a century ago.
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