From blue jersey mom in Brothers and Sisters tonight:
And a short prayer for an end of the diaries that pit one "generation" against another. We are going to need everyone's help to turn this country around.
I am so amazingly sick and tired of the generational warfare diaries here on Daily Kos. Not only do I see no purpose to them, but I also feel that they feed into the Karl Rove-driven divide-everyone-into-categories and market to those categories meme that has reduced our country into Volvo-driving, latte-drinking, cat-owing Liberals vs. oh, whatever -- and encouraged us to fight amongst ourselves because of them. I am not a category. And neither are you. And I refuse to fight other progressives on the basis of the year of their birth. How incredibly unproductive this sort of fight is.
None of us had any control over when we were born. None of us had any control over the events that informed our young years -- whether those events were the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the march on Washington or the assassination of President Kennedy or the Vietnam War or the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy or the Moratorium or the destruction of the Twin Towers or the invasion of Iraq. But, and this is an important but, whatever the events were that marked our young years -- the transformative events that each of us will never forget -- none of them "belong" to any of us. They are all part of our shared national landscape, in which all of us now live.
For me, the transformative events began with the assassination of President Kennedy. I was almost seven -- just nine months older than Caroline Kennedy. The year before, my Dad had been called up and deployed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I didn’t understand at all. What I did understand was that I was not living in my townhouse in New York with both my parents, but, rather, at my grandparents’ farm in Vermont with one of them, and that my Dad was not there. He was, for quite some time, flying surveillance planes over the North Atlantic, searching for Russian submarines. He wasn’t home; but he eventually would be. Caroline’s father never would be.
When I was 11, the eldest brother of a family of brothers (six in all), the youngest two of whom I knew because of the small size of the village in which I grew up, was killed in Vietnam. His name was Robert C. Ransom, Jr. He was 26 years old. He had grown up in a privileged family in a privileged village, and before he went to Vietnam, he had attended Bowdoin College. This is a photograph of him that appeared in a Bowdoin College alumni magazine article about its graduates who had been killed in Vietnam:
The experience of 2nd Lt. Robert C. Ransom, Jr. during the Vietnam War was not the experience of others. Many kossacks who write here served in that war; others protested it and refused to serve. Meteor Blades went to prison as a result of his objections to it. None of them fits into a "category." They are all progressives whose views were shaped by the times in which they lived ~ but they are all progressives.
The draft ended when I was a senior in high school ~ my number would have been 273 (it was then by birthdays) -- it’s a number that sticks with you. But, of course, I never would have been drafted, because I was a girl.
When I was in junior high school, several girls in the high school (this was a small town) contracted horrible infections as a result of illegal abortions. Heaven knows how many other girls in my village had abortions (I grew up in a wealthy town ~ girls in the "family way" then could go abroad for abortions, could have phony medical records from high society doctors produced) . Girls -- and, more often, women -- who lived in less fancy circumstances often died. New York, where I grew up, legalized abortions in 1970. But the Roe v. Wade decision on January 22, 1973 was a watershed moment for me, too, because it meant that all women in the United States (finally) had the right to make private medical decisions with their doctors and families -- and would not die because abortion care was illegal. If you were not alive then, you would not know that city hospitals regularly kept whole wards open every single night to care for the women and girls who came into the emergency room with horrific infections, hemorrhages and other complications of botched illegal abortions. Kings County Hospital (Brooklyn) regularly reserved 18 beds a night for these women and girls. Heaven help us if the fundamentalist loonies strip any more rights away from women and girls needing abortion care. We need to stick together on this issue, too, and not fight on generational lines.
At 5:50 am or thereabouts on September 11, 2001, the phone rang at my house in California. It was my brother; he told me to turn the television on. This was during my year-off after the death of my adored father and my divorce from my thankfully now ex-husband. My Dad had worked on Wall Street for 30 years; my sister-in-law had worked in the South Tower. My brother, sister-in-law, Mom and I all had friends of long-standing whose offices were in those buildings. One burned to death. A second got out in her stocking-feet only because her ex-husband had called her and begged her to leave. Two other friends escaped only because they were late to work that horrible morning. That day, unfortunately, belongs to all of us.
As do the events of December 7, 1941 that my Mom heard on the radio in her parents' kitchen in Vermont, while she and her best friend were baking their first-ever cake.
We all share the landscape of this country; we all want to make it a better place. This, I think, is why we are progressives. And arguing about our progressive bona fides based on when we were born does nothing to help our cause.