Shattering plate glass sounds like church bells being thrown down a flight of steps. I know this because I heard it myself, from two feet away--the sound of the glass, I mean. The two young guys who had tossed the cinder block through the glass looked pleased, and at that moment, I admired them.
It was January of 1970, and Revolution was all the rage. We were marching. Nixon was president, the war in Vietnam was escalating, Hippie was long ago dead and the sign of the closed fist was everywhere. We even had a brand new anthem by the group Chicago, called It Better End Soon:
They're killing everybody
They're killing me and you
They're fighting and
killing everybody
I wish it weren't true
They say we got to make war
Or the economy will fall
But if we don't stop
We won't be around no more
They're ruining this world...
Chicago was a very popular group, and this was its second album, and what the hell was a plate glass window to the indisputable fact that thousands were dying in a war nobody wanted, fought on a Domino Theory that nobody believed, by draftees forced into battle by a law everyone hated?
So I was happy at the terrible church-bell sound of the shattering plate glass. That the glass belonged to some hapless innocent merchant, whose store happened to coincide with the route of our particular march that day, did not occur to me once.
*
For years afterward I admired the two young men who tossed the cinder block. I considered them exemplary--willing to act, where I (poor weak soul) was not.
Break anybody's window? Are you kidding with that? I could get glass in my eye!
Besides, as I had been taught from the cradle--breaking windows is wrong.
*
I don't know if many Americans admire whoever it was who shot Dr. George Tiller, or if any of you secretly admire the punk who just murdered that poor pro-life guy, James Poullion. I would suspect it is more than a few. Probably the ones who admire the shooters feel as I did back then: It better end soon. Probably they also feel about murder as I did about vandalism: By God, what balls! And in the cause of right and justice! Whoo-hoo!
In 1970, though, admiring vandalism was as far as I got. When the Weather Underground accidentally blew up its own staff in Greenwich Village about a month later, with a nail bomb intended for an NCO dance in Fort Dix, I demurred. I stopped thinking of the New Left as "we." There were too many weirdos and crazies. You don't kill people.
And as it turned out, the violence of the Weather Underground was political poison for the left. The Republican party was still getting mileage out of it forty years later.
*
I still wonder about what happened to the two guys who heaved the cinder block. If I saw such a sight now, I would consider it thuggish. That is because I have become the solid citizen that I swore back then I would never become. One grows up, marries, has children, settles down, and now it is somehow almost forty years later.
The violence seems to spread across the bloody fringes once again. I condemn it. Don't these vile punks have a clue?
But at the same time, I still recall the thrill of being touched myself by the devil's hand, as the plate glass fell in ringing shards to the street.
Shattering plate glass sounds like church bells being thrown down a flight of steps. I know this because I heard it myself, from two feet away--the sound of the glass, I mean. The two young guys who had tossed the cinder block through the glass looked pleased, and at that moment I admired them--bold young men of action, I thought, like George Washington.
It was January of 1970, and Revolution was all the rage. We were marching. Nixon was president, the war in Vietnam was escalating, Hippie was long ago dead and the sign of the closed fist was everywhere. We even had a brand new anthem by the group Chicago, called It Better End Soon:
They're killing everybody
They're killing me and you
They're fighting and
killing everybody
I wish it weren't true
They say we got to make war
Or the economy will fall
But if we don't stop
We won't be around no more
They're ruining this world...