Aug. 29, 1996
Dear Ken,
I was a fresh high school graduate when the Democratic National Convention was last held in Chicago. 1968 was the year that was. First, Martin Luther King Jr., then Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Then the Chicago police and the anti-Vietnam War protesters at the Democratic convention declared war on each other.
To a 17-year-old, the world as we knew it seemed to be coming apart.
From this perspective of a few dozen years later, the world wasn't completely coming unhinged. It was changing. That's how things change, generally, through crisis.
It could occur more easily, inch by inch, mile by mile, but resistance to changes is so strong and change so immutable that usually fits and explosions are required.
So there in Chicago in 1968 was the truth. The whole world watched America beating its rebellious children into submission. Its children throwing a world-class tantrum because they weren't being paid attention to.
We didn't like those pictures of ourselves, wanted to stuff them in a bottom drawer labeled "They deserved it." But those were pictures of America all the same.
DC and I took our friend Carlos to see Crosby, Stills & Nash at the Show Me Center. Carlos is 20 and from Panama and knows of America's Vietnam experience mainly from books. He liked the music but didn't know what "Four dead in Ohio" referred to.
I remember when "Ohio" leapt out of radios across the U.S.A. only 10 days after the National Guardsmen killed the four students at Kent State. The rage and grief at the realization that America not only was prepared to beat its children, it was willing to kill them.
That was a turning point for me, the event that made "Question Authority" more words to live by than taunt.
Authority is status quo, resistance to change.
A lot of children lost their innocence that day in Kent. That day in Memphis. That day in Los Angeles.
Some say nothing has really changed since the '60s. But there's a guy in the White House who protested against the Vietnam War and did everything he could not to help fight it.
Drugs aren't hip anymore, especially for people who are done with them.
The son of the despised mayor embraces members of the Chicago Seven.
Tom Hayden is a California state senator.
Crosby, Stills & Nash aren't angry any more.
And the people who now most fear the U.S. government's power, Freemen and Waco disciples, are the same people who believed "America: Right or wrong" 30 years ago.
America has changed plenty, mostly through firestorms and fusillades, brickbats and landslides though. Does it have to continue happening that way?
My own resistances to change are like shadows that block the sun from time to time. Most occur as infinitesimally small acts. Reacting to a co-worker or to DC in a certain way that, if I'm honest, can be traced to some old hurt that never was tended to or to a fear never confronted.
Behaving compulsively. Hiding out. Withholding your true self. These are all ways to avoid becoming who you are meant to become.
So much scarier, it seems, to look beyond the shadows at the truth of the situation.
Carlos says many Panamanians are still mad at the United States for invading their country and imposing our will on them -- no matter how nefarious Noreiga was.
People and countries don't readily look at the world from others' point of view, don't easily see their own reflection until someone has to build a long black wall.
~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.
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