There has been speculation recently whether Daily Kos represents the continuation of the counterculture, whether Yearly Kos will be our Woodstock. I'd like to weigh in, and it will take a couple of diaries to lay out my thoughts.
As a person of a certain age, I remember John F. Kennedy's assassination as a formative personal and political experience. Mr. McNally broke the news to our math class, and delegated me to listen to his car radio for the latest bulletins, and return to share news with the class. Mr. McNally was from Boston, and was clearly shaken. These were the duck and cover years.
Kennedy was the first candidate I campaigned for, at all of nine years old, by wearing a red, white, and blue button to school up until election day. When he won, that made him my President. I could never have personally accepted Nixon, the loser in 1960. Even though he was a Californian, like me, he would never have been my President. Without having the language for it, I knew he was "the other."
Fast forward, through puberty, Watts, Selma and Vietnam on the nightly news, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, My Lai and the `68 Democratic convention, discovering rock and roll, pot, girls and hot rods, and the 60's were one crazy decade. Personal and political were incredibly jumbled. I was leading a double life, straight "A"s in school, getting ripped at night. My high school civics teacher was a National Guard Colonel who threatened with expulsion any of us who might travel the 50 miles to Berkeley to see what was going on at People's Park, where he was on duty. I listened to the Beatles, Credence, Santana, Airplane, Chicago, and Cream. I wanted to be James Bond, a secret agent.
Spring 1970 was a watershed. First Earth Day and then the Kent State shootings brought home the idea that the planet and students just like me were dying. The first Whole Earth Catalog appeared as a revelation, a multi-media vision of "access to tools" 20 years before the web. We took over campus on Earth Day, with teach-ins and the centerpiece burial of a car. We shut it down again for several days after the Kent State shootings. We occupied the new Union building, where art students silk-screened "power to the people" t-shirts with a fist superimposed over a peace sign, and a group called the Gay Liberation Front held meetings. There were police, clubs, and gas.
George McGovern went down in 1972, as I listened from a dorm room in Boulder. The oil Arabs flexed their muscles in 1973, and a couple of years later I had a little Mexico travel under my belt and returned "back to the land," built a tiny cabin, helped start a food coop, planted fruit trees, learned about comfrey, companion plants, feeding greens to chickens, granny gears, and splitting shingles and rails from old downed redwoods. I worked in erosion control, organic food, water wells, and community development. Worked hard, slept well, quit smoking pot.
We finally won one in 1976. Though Jimmy Carter (southern peanut farmer nuclear engineer Navy officer Governor) was a puzzle to us California hippies, we were glad to have him and not Dorf/Dole, "the others." Finally out from under the Nixon curse. Good times locally as we turned away a proposed chemical plant with the brilliant true slogan "Formaldehyde Stinks".
As handy, practical, competent workers we were stunned when America's military, when called on to rescue the hostages in Iran, failed to anticipate sand in the desert. As politically concerned citizens, we saw this setting the stage for Ronald Reagan's ascendancy. Carter had one good shot to redeem his reputation, and tossed an air ball. We prepared for the worst. We knew Reagan. He had shut down California's excellent residential state mental hospitals, quashed student protest, shilled for General Electric, posed his way to the top. The eighties looked bleak. We wore black armbands on his inauguration, even though the hostages were being released.
My part of the state discovered wine in a big way, and I worked in the cellars, learning about pH, and must pumps, fruit flies, and fancy people with hobby wineries. I used a computer for the first time, merging addresses onto form letters. We were building houses, starting businesses, starting families. Still I was profoundly unsettled, with Ronald Reagan, king of "the others" in Washington. I retreated to Mexico, not recognizing my own country. From that distance I began to develop an idea for a small business, something to earn a bit more freedom. In preparation, I needed to go to the Capital to see people in some government offices. September 19, 1985 found me in Mexico City, just in time to meet a massive earthquake.
I'd never seen real destruction before. I'd seen pictures of war, pictures of natural disasters, but nothing like blocks of buildings fallen into the street. One eight story furniture store around the corner from my friend's house slumped like a lopsided stack of pancakes into the avenue. I'd seen pictures of Hiroshima, pictures of Dresden, and this wasn't like that. The damage was relatively randomly distributed. Some here, some there. A hospital was badly damaged, an office building untouched. A line of apartment buildings fell over on their sides, like huge stiff animals pushed over in a field. I worked with hundreds of people over the course of several days with bare hands and buckets moving debris brick by brick. I didn't see a single body come out of the rubble. Eventually, in another part of town, I did see one body; for the first time I encountered death outside a funeral home.
My dream of a small international business was crushed along with the Mexican ministries. No one would have time for my questions of impuestos and licenses when entire sections of the city were buried. I didn't know quite what to do next until an American friend mentioned something that precipitated a great knowingness, and provided a way to return to the US without really being in the US. He told me about the Great Peace March, being organized as a mass demonstration against the madness of nuclear weapons. The March would gather 5,000 people and travel from LA to Washington over the course of nearly a year, a moving road show of education, advocacy, persuasion.
Next: A community finds itself in the desert, Part II.