Birthdays are funny milestones. The fact is that I feel no different. Well, I have to admit that each year I am a little less sure I'll see the next birthday, but that seems natural. Looking back, I would have never predicted I'd be writing this diary. Here I am Professor Emeritus and a Senior Fellow. No one in my family even went to college. My mom's parents were peasant immigrants from Lithuania. Grandma could read Lithuanian, but grandpa was illiterate. They had to teach him to sign his name before he could become a foreman in the Chicago Stockyards. My dad's father was born in Chicago and I really don't know when that family immigrated from Bohemia. My dad's mother died when I was very young and I did not know her. We were working class and that was not strange in a city like Chicago. If I seem to be rambling, bear with me. I am going to talk about political activism and my experiences with it over these years. Read on below if you are interested.
There was no real politics in Chicago as I grew up. We had the Daley machine and it worked like a well oiled machine. FDR was a sort of god and that was all there was. WE had WWII and Hitler and the Japs and that stuff. I remember Pearl harbor, the news reels, the blackouts, rationing, and that stuff. I will never, never forget the news reels of the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe and the walking skeletons and the sense that the world was not as nice a place as I had thought.Then came the bomb and the world was different. Oh and then Truman and MacArthur. Things got different when this McCarthy guy came on the scene. The guys lecturing in military uniforms at our school warning us about Commies. They never really scared me. Being a Slav I had a problem hating Russians for no good reason. And weren't they on our side at the end of WWII? Chicago politics. If you wanted to be radical there you had to be republican. Fight the Daley machine's corruption, etc. I tended to lean that way. I went to college on an NROTC Scholarship. They paid for the education and I served three years as a USMC officer. Then graduate school at the University of Chicago for a PhD in physiology. That was paid for by the people as well through NSF and USPHS Fellowships.
I have to explain that I pretty much raised myself as a Roman Catholic. Parents nominal but I really got into it. It was fitting for Chicago as well. When I reached 21 I was converted by meeting my first wife, a Baptist. Born again! That's another long story. I mention it because I voted for the first time in 1960. What a time to be broken in! Nixon vs Kennedy. New ranting fundamentalist and a Catholic candidate. Well it wasn't that simple if you remember the stuff about being a republican in Chicago above. Suffice it to say that the Nixon sticker in our apartment window in married student housing at the University of Chicago stuck out like a sore thumb.
I did a post doc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and was by this time becoming very radical. The labor party was in power in Israel and Socialism looked awfully reasonable in action. Then came Vietnam. Suddenly the flood gates broke and the myths about the USA came tumbling down around me. I came home early, got a faculty position at SUNY at Buffalo and in a rather short time was leader of the anti-war/civil rights coalition in Buffalo. We ran a Peace candidate for City Council. They were going to run me for Mayor.
I was a delegate to the New Politics convention and we from Buffalo were the first white group to vote in favor of the Black Power movement. I was in RESIST and we collected draft cards, helped with demonstrations against the draft, and actually was arrested on trumped up charges at a demonstration because I was keeping order and the cops wanted to break a few heads. I went to every demonstration in DC and watched the radicalization of MLK develop. I got more and more radical. When we had the Pentagon demonstration in 1968, the day before RESIST turned in thousands of draft cards at the Justice Department. I was on National TV as I turned in mine. The Black Panthers made me an honorary member.
I fully expected to go to jail for ten years and had made preparations for my wife and two kids. The sleaze bags prosecuted Dr Spock and the others under a 1918 conspiracy law rather than face a challenge to the draft laws.
We saw the Buffalo nine beat with chains while taking sanctuary in a Church. We had our phones tapped and FBI goons all over us. I would fill pages with things like this I have witnessed.
OK what's the point? There is a point. The movement of the sixties was hard work, dangerous and very very beautiful. We had teach ins where students felt that they were being educated for the first time. We had think tanks about alternate institutions and parallel governments. We had the underground newspapers with real news. We learned and practiced non-violent resistance in some depth. There was more.
Then all of a sudden it began to crumble. What happened? The NY Times had a front page editorial condemning the war for the first time. One paragraph condemning the war and six condemning us. We were demonized and the great electoral system rose to save the country and its children from us. Our meetings and organizations were filled with naive NY Times readers who wanted us out. All energy was directed towards elections. I may exaggerate for effect, but you get the picture.
Fast forward to today and you see the result. They still have you doing elections as if that will do something. The outrage against war and killing is almost nothing. The Bush crimes went as if they were nothing. Once again we play charades like "gridlock" etc while Rome burns. I'd laugh if it weren't so very sad! Well I got here and I'll keep trying. No one ever really listens to anyone else any more anyway.