First, some history--ancient & more ancient. I came up through the sixties, achieving the age of majority in 1969. But the 18yo vote had not been implemented yet, though it was on its way. I couldn't vote until 1972, George McGovern against the incumbent, Richard Nixon.
Leading up to this decision was arguably the most turbulent time, resulting in the greatest number of death of kids in the history of the United States. The Civil War might have been worse on the fields, but kids my age were being killed for demonstrating on college campuses, peacefully, for screaming and yelling and marching for an end to the war, marching black & white for civil rights, with women for equal pay & abortion rights. Groups who were more proactive were occupying government buildings, planting pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails. Black Panthers were radicalizing a huge percentage of angry young men & women while Muhammad Ali refused induction & Malcolm X called for separatism from the white slavers.Our leaders were assassinated one after another. John Kennedy in 1963. Malcolm X in 1965. Martin Luther King Junior in 1968. Bobby Kennedy in 1968. These are the Big Four, but they are far from the only casualties. Individual community leaders for civil rights were murdered in the dark.
And in Vietnam, 18-year-old boys were being murdered by the tens of thousands, for no apparent reason. The obscenities of war led to fragged brains. After they came home, tens of thousands more of them committed suicide. Dow Chemical & the American tire companies profited from our interference. Agent Orange and Napalm were created especially for Vietnam, tested out on civilians. The obscenities of Vietnam cannot be understated. I lost so many friends, beginning when I was 17. It was one after another after another after that.
The numbers didn't match with the near-genocide of Jews in WWII. But Vietnam was the first war that was televised. Every night. At dinnertime. What the fuck did people expect us to do, after watching bodies in rigor mortis being tossed atop piles of other bodies, doused with gasoline & set ablaze?
Anyway, back in my little corner of the world, while still in high school, a very Trumplike division of sympathies came down the pecking order. Boys with slightly long hair were ganged up on by mobs of boys with scissors, shorn & beaten & sent home because anything longer than a butch cut threatened our society. Girls were sent home if their skirts were more than 1 inch above their kneecaps. A friend of mine sewed a pair of pants out of an old American flag. She was arrested & expelled from school. Her wealthy father was able to fight for her. It was a 48-star flag & therefore, not a symbol of our 50-star nation, so she won the case in court.
I lived in captivity, in a redneck town with an active branch of the John Birch Society. It wasn't in my power to change that. But in order to work, our boyfriends & husbands had to buy short wigs & wear them over their innocently long hair. In every shop a sign was on the wall over the cash register: "We don't do business with hippies" More pointedly, much like the Texas judge who told the newly minted citizens they should move to another country if they didn't like Trump, the phrase: "America: Love it or Leave It" was developed specifically for the hippies and must have been the hottest bumper sticker of its time. There were attacks, beatings, discriminatory acts & a strong stench of hatred in the world. We had to work in secret to get abortions, or phony up notes from mom to get birth control pills.
In 1970 I was arrested three times on drug-related charges, even though I had already realized drugs & I were a bad fit. My brain was way too fertile for hallucinogenics & pot bored me. It was too hard to get hash & opium, my favorite things, & every acid trip ended up being a bad trip. So I quit, on Valentine's Day 1970. But my friends didn't, so the police who hid in the bushes outside my house & used narcs to report on our travel plans were able to arrest us & put us in jail. Pigs were like Trump, the King of Pigs. I remember a pig telling me he was going to save me for last & strip search me himself. The law, of course, is that females are searched by females. I possessed no drugs, hadn't ingested any & there was no reason for anyone to search me. I was eventually searched by the matron, then put in a cell with a dirty white sheet that seemed to be covered in sand, a grey wool blanket tossed atop it. A friend who knew I was innocent bailed me out in the morning.
To make a long story longer, the late 1960s were filled with unrest, legal dissent, legal demonstrations & then in 1970, the pigs won once & for all: They killed four students on the Kent State Campus who were demonstrating peacefully, more so even than the Sioux at Standing Rock. The National Guard was called in, they leveled their rifles, took aim, & killed the children of four pairs of parents.
FOR NOTHING. FOR FUCKING NOTHING. FOR EXERCISING CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. THEY SHOT FOUR UNARMED TEENAGERS WITH THEIR LARGE-CALIBER WEAPONS.
The world was never the same after that. The government was a little nervous, since Nixon was secretly sending illegal forces into Cambodia at the time & his little gig at Watergate was being unraveled. Those who didn't leave government service realized they had to figure out ways to appease us. They made it appear as if we still had avenues for protest, but in fact, they just started lying to us bigger & on a regular basis. They shut down every option we had. Now we knew, if we demonstrated, we took a good chance of being beaten or killed.
Maybe we put an end to the Vietnam war, but I have a feeling it was more about the opportunity the Establishment saw coming down the pike: Creating a phony energy crisis & telling us we'd be out of oil by the turn of the century, maybe sooner. So Nixon was out in 1974 & people were in gas lines that stretched on for miles & quietly, the shattered soldiers came home--to nothing. No parades. No Thank Yous. Skimpy benefits. No treatment for Agent Orange. No treatment for PTSD.
How mad did YOU get about that? What did YOU do to help the vets?
They say when you're young & hungry, you're likely to embrace radical democracy or even socialism. But if you manage to get through school, become a doctor or lawyer, put some money aside, invest wisely, get comfortable, have kids, they say you begin to embrace more conservative values. This is, essentially, the evolutionary track of Democrats & Republicans. Of course they cross over. At a cocktail party Kurt Vonnegut said to a Republican friend, "There's nothing a Democrat likes more than a liberal Republican."
The Go-Go Eighties, the Me Generation, was all about mutual funds & making a lot of money really, I tell you this because I want you to know that the water hoses turned on the Sioux are the fire-hoses turned on blacks in the south. The rubber bullets are bigger now than the ones used in the UK for crowd control. The concussion grenade is an idea whose time had not come. Tear gas in the old days turned into pepper spray today. Much worse. The more you try to treat it, the hotter it gets.
And the dirty tricks used to get politicians like Nixon in office have turned into enormous gang-bangs of lies & rat-fucking, Swift-Boating, theft, bribery, pay-for-play.
As bad as the Sixties were, they cannot hold a candle to what has happened to our hopes & dreams, our hearts & minds, our bodies & souls since November 9, 2016.
So I want to talk about the Electoral College, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, your rights, what's real, what's fake, who stands to gain & what the BEST THING IS YOU CAN DO to save us, because we are perched on the brink of the worst moment the ENTIRE WORLD has ever seen. There is an effort by hostile foreign actors to take control of the entire world. What is more desirable than money? POWER.
I was there. I lived all of that too. To this day, I remember my first time in that voting booth. The intense responsibility as I pulled the lever and the curtain closed behind me was overwhelming.
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