Talking About the Weather(men)

The voice on the other end of the line dripped with conspiracy, and dragged me back in time.

He was unhappy over a piece I’d written about a former 60s radical-left activist who was to come speak at a local university.

Long before the students he was to address were born, William Ayers, now 64, was a founder of the radical Weather Underground, a group whose name was inspired by a line from a Bob Dylan song, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Weathermen were responsible for riots and the bombing of several public buildings in the late 1960s and 1970s. Most of the Weather Underground’s activities were in protest of the Vietnam War, which the group believed to be illegal. Ayers’ appearance on the state university campus was funded by private money, and his presence had nothing at all to do with his colorful and violent past. His lecture was about finding better ways to provide education in urban areas where there is little money or parental involvement.

My caller was eager to uncover a liberal conspiracy because I hadn’t written the story the way he thought I should. Oh. Well.

He did open a door for me though, back to the 60s, the decade when I grew from a boy to a man, the decade during which the whole country went absolutely crazy.

From his voice, I am sure my caller was not old enough to remember anything from 40 years ago.

I was there. I wasn’t in the middle of much violence, but that doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t living under a flat rock.

Try to imagine this: I grew up in the 1950s, in a safe world of gray flannel, of Eisenhower’s America, of booming factories and a stable world. Everything, at least to a kid in the ‘burbs, was pretty safe and reasonable. I mean there were personal drama, schoolyard bullies and the myriad insults of growing up, period. But there was structure to everything. It made sense, even if it wasn’t all friendly.

And then along came the 60s.

Here are some snapshots, things that were everywhere, in the newpapers and TVs, and laced themselves into our days and nights:

Click:   In the summer of ‘63, four little girls were killed by a KKK bomb blast in Birmingham.

Click:    Two months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and two days after that, the whole country watched on national TV as his accused assassin was shot to death by a man with the dime-store-gangster name of Jack Ruby.

Click:    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved by the Senate 73-27. Two days later, three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia Miss. (their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.).

Click:    President Johnson signed a sweeping civil rights bill into law, and two days later, Lt.Col. Lemuel Penn, a black U.S. Army Reserve officer was gunned down by the KKK near my home.

Click:    The next summer, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the voters’ rights law. A few days later, rioting that claimed 34 lives broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles.

Click:    The following summer, July of 1966, eight student nurses died in Chicago at the hands of Richard Speck, and only a few weeks later Charles Joseph Whitman set himself up in a tower at the University of Texas and killed 15 people.

Click:    The next summer, a month after I and most of my close friends graduated from high school, race rioting broke out in Newark, NJ. 27 people died, and 10 days later, rioting claimed more than 40 lives in Detroit.

Click:    That October, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters marched in Washington D.C. The Census Clock at the Commerce Department ticked past 200 million.

Click:    In the new year of 1968, three college students were killed in a confrontation with highway patrolmen in Orangeburg SC during a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley.

Click:    Though we didn’t find out about it until about a year later, that March, the My Lai Massacre occured in Vietnam, with the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed men, women and children.

Click:    Three weeks later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and three months after that, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was murdered after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary.

Click:    Of symbolic significance, 12 days after My Lai, Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the very symbol of the America we all felt we were losing, died.

Click:    In August, a riot broke out between Chicago police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention.

Click:    Four months later, Ted Kennedy’s car plunged off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne, and a few weeks later Charles Manson’s bizarre cult murdered actress Sharon Tate and eight other people in her L.A. home.

Click: Five days later my friend Herman T. Fields, a couple of days into his second tour in Vietnam, stepped on a landmine and pinwheeled into eternity.

Click:    That November, 250,000 protested against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. and, in the final month of the decade, four people died at a Rolling Stones concert in California, including one who was stabbed by a member of the Hell’s Angels.

Click:    On May 4, 1970, four students were killed and nine wounded at Kent State University in Ohio by members of the Ohio National Guard. Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, but other students who were shot had merely been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance. Reaction in the nation was immediate, and was, along with the reaction to My Lai, directly responsible for the end of popular support for the war, and the country became even more divided.

Today, William Ayers the “domestic terrorist” is a professor, an urban education specialist with 15 books on the subject to his credit. He was somebody entirely different 40 years ago. I wonder how many people are very much like they were 40 years ago.

My caller wanted to know why on Earth somebody whose ideas were so dangerous THEN would be allowed to speak to students NOW.

I probably don’t even have to mention the whole First Amendment thing. And I have to guess that my caller’s idea of education is NOT to expose students to all sorts of ideas and viewpoints. But part of functioning in the real world is to be able to tell the difference between butter and bullshit, you should excuse my French. If you believe anybody’s party line without question, your toast is going to taste funny.

By the way, the group Ayers was associated with never killed anybody. A nail bomb they were building blew up in a Greenwich Village building, killing three Weathermen, including Ayers’ girlfriend.

That bomb was, in fact, being built with the intention of killing some military personnel, but the truth is that it never happened, though my caller seemed to believe that thinking about killing somebody is the same as actually killing them.

If that’s true, I think most of us would be locked up by now. I know I would.

That said I’m not sure how much credence I can give to somebody who speaks with so much passion about an era he did not live through. I can remember feeling throughout the 60s and 70s and beyond that the entire world I had known had flashed like tissue in fire and become something else, someplace else. Nothing, nobody, no sensibility, came out of it unscathed. We burned, smashed, and tore at our social fabric. Even now, four decades hence, it is not entirely mended.

Was Bill Ayers a terrorist back then? Maybe. More to the point, I think he was simply part of a larger terror. As were we all.

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© 2009 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

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Hope, Not Kool-Aid

The email came a week or so after Barack Obama’s win in the presidential race.

“I became more worried,” it read, “upon watching the look on the faces of the O supporters after the victory – dancing in the streets.  It was a look, almost universally, of religious fanatics, who have just seen the Messiah.  They have just swallowed the Kool Aid.”

“…Swallowed the Kool Aid.” An interesting choice of phrase. A reference to the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which 918 followers of the charismatic loon, The Rev. Jim Jones, drank Kool Aid spiked with cyanide at the good reverend’s direction, and died.

I think drinking the Kool Aid is what brought us the past eight years, by enough of the electorate buying into the idea that a “regular guy” you’d feel comfortable having a beer with is a good pick for the most miserable and powerful job on the face of the planet.

I saw the same news clips of the elation at Grant Park, but my take was a bit different.

I suppose it depends on what your preconceptions were, your own personal point of view, and fears, whatever.

Here is one of mine:

One of the most heinous Klan murders happened just 15 minutes from the house where I grew up in Athens, Ga.

It was in the summer of 1964, just nine days after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The victim was Lemuel Penn, a Lt. Col. in the army reserve and a D.C.-area educator, husband and father.

He and two colleagues were on their way back from some Reserve event at Ft. Benning, Ga., when three KKK members pulled up next to the out-of-state car and gave Penn blasts from a pair of 12 gauge shotguns, blowing off the back of his head.

That happened at home, MY home.

This wasn’t the grim photos of lynchings in the rural South, grainy black & white images of some black man back in the distant past, sagging from a rope thrown over a tree branch, neck unnaturally long, while a crowd of self-righteous goons point at the corpse and sneer.

This was now.

This was today.

People I didn’t know, but knew by sight, had done this.

The world looked just like it always had. People went about their business, shopped for groceries, and did laundry. Adults talked about it in hushed tones, some fearful, some gleeful. Some of the kids at school joked about it. A good start, some said.

Years later, one of the Klansman involved in that murder, though not one of those in the car, owned a greasy spoon called The Open House Café across from where I worked the night shift at a print shop. I used to go there for coffee and watch him. If it was me the way I am now, after 20+ years as a reporter, I’d have asked him what he was thinking that night, what they thought they’d accomplish. But I was 19 or 20, and afraid.

It was a different time. Almost a different country. I mean in the sense of “Whites Only” signs over water fountains, and public restrooms labeled “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored.”

Fast forward 44 years. Things are different. Not perfect but different. Change, as Obama said in his speech, has come to America, if at a glacial pace.

It wasn’t fanaticism we saw on those faces in Grant Park that night. To be sure, there were and are fanatics on all sides, some of whom would deify Obama, and some of whom would gladly put him in his grave rather than see him serve.

The light in those faces late on Election Eve was not the deification of Obama, but that of people who have for centuries stood out in the cold of our nation’s further reaches, allowed only to look in the windows and dream. On Nov. 4, they suddenly saw the door to that house open, and a hand beckon them to come in.

Coda: I believe all four of the Klansmen are now dead. One of the triggermen was shot in the chest by a shotgun some years ago, by a friend with whom he had been arguing.

The last time I drove by The Open House Café, which had been closed for some years, it had become a church.
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© 2008 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/