Disappeared Dreams
I once cared about who the Democrats nominated for president and what that nominee did or did not accomplish if elected. Now I don’t give a fly**g f**k! I’ve quoted the anarchist Emma Goldman about elections meaning nothing many times, so I won’t torment anyone, including myself, about her admonition that elections would be illegal if they amounted to that obscenity hidden above.
This is why I once cared. I come from a time when elections meant at least something in the US: The 1950s and 1960s. I know that Goldman’s observation could be applied to those years, but there were small victories for movements such as the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and the women’s movement as a result of the agitation that came out of that epoch. Read David Halberstam’s The Fifties (2012) if a more eloquent and detailed account of how the 1950s morphed into the changes that followed. Time magazine accurately called that book’s presentation of the 1950’s as a “pivotal decade.” I carried a sack full of newspapers on my paper route then, in a decade that began with McCarthyism and the Korean War.
But there was more at a personal level to the changes that improved this society. That the right-wing backlash has been so thorough amazes and saddens me. The Supreme Court is a bought entity and their decisions move us all on the conveyor belt toward doom, as just one instance of the backlash personified. Choose another example: The repression of protest against the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, and its lack of coverage by the bought and sold mass media. The elite won’t even allow the bloodletting from Adam’s marauders shown in the Newspaper of Record. The horrors go on and on and on with income inequality and endless wars, both overt and covert. The environment cooks!
The personal level was personified by my mother, Sylvia, who was undaunted in her work for Democrats in Rhode Island as the 1960s culminated in the few victories of so-called liberal democracy that continued for a few scant years. Sylvia had always been involved in local politics in the mill town where we lived in Rhode Island. But it was presidential politics that energized her and captured her imagination. She knew the limits of the local, though important, and immersed herself in the presidential campaigns in both 1968 and 1972.
In ’68, Syl opened a local campaign office in our hometown, which also became a mecca for teenagers. I know most of those kids were not enamored, or even cared about, Eugene McCarthy’s unsuccessful run for president, but the campaign office on the main drag of town was always filled with their activity and presence. Syl kept the spirit alive in that campaign through the awful time of Robert Kennedy’s assassination and the debacle of McCarthy’s campaign with the nomination of Lyndon Johnson’s sycophant Hubert Humphrey. Nixon would win and his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War would end in 1975 with the deaths of tens of thousands of US soldiers and millions of people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Three to five million dead is as close as the estimates of dead can come from the entire US involvement in Southeast Asia. Millions would resist in the streets.
Not chastened by defeat, she went on to co-chair George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign in Rhode Island. Nixon’s landslide victory that year told of where the political, social, and economic systems in the US were headed. Perhaps the endless wars the US is involved in today is a reflection of that trajectory?
My mother turned our house into a McGovern campaign headquarters that year and the house was filled with campaign paraphernalia and political activities of all kinds including parties when the house was filled with people. I think the partying was an expression of Syl’s outward facing social stance rather than inward family expressions of that bent, though I loved her politicking and ceaseless work toward some kind of better world which has vanished.
Syl was asked to go to the Democratic national conventions in both ’68 and ’72, but that wasn’t her cup of tea. She liked the local end of that commitment.
I look back at those years and think about the politics of that time. I recently stood with a grandchild in the rose garden at the Roosevelt library and homestead in Hyde Park, New York. Looking at the graves of Franklin and Eleanor is a bittersweet experience, as all of those liberal initiatives are gone. The heatwave that enveloped that historic site put an exclamation point on how far from the values of change we have come.
Disappeared Dreams