When I was a Radical

I got to thinking that I never told my son about where my politics and life choices came from. I was born in 1950, in the time when the Great War was over, the men came back, evil was defeated, and everyone set about having conventional, safe lives. Lots of kids were born, and in Delaware where I was, parents wanted good schools, back yards with swing sets, and they worked for DuPont. We lived in a couple of small duplexes in different parts of downtown, and when I was six we moved to the suburbs, according to plan. Where I lived was almost the country, with a big backyard, and we wandered all over the place, always safe, free to explore the world. I was the second of four girls, and the tomboy, spending most of my time in a big willow tree with a book, or in the woods. I thought I had a happy childhood, did well in school, took piano lessons, cut the grass. We went sailing on the weekends. When I was twelve a brother was born, which gave me the chance to learn how to nurture a little, and anyway we all did a lot of the domestic work together, singing while we did the dishes. We had fruit trees and gardens, snow in the winter, all idyllic..

Except it wasn't, as my parents drank and my dad developed a depression problem. He was unpredictable and we were always afraid of him. I learned to dissociate when things got tense. I escaped in various ways, mostly reading, sailing by myself, taking my frustrations out on my younger siblings by teasing and other devious behaviors. But still, an obedient and good little girl; Brownies, Girl Scouts, folk dancing, all A's, a little chubby, plenty of friends. Singing, piano, art. I had a bad first grade art teacher who damaged me a lot but I still made a lot of things and loved it. We went to Catholic School a little, but that went bad. Dad was an athiest of sorts, and Mom raised us Catholic to please her mom, a Nebraska farmer. Catholics get a lot of damage, but all that is another post. My Dad was a chemical engineer, and did lots of things in his basement workshop, including making nylon, distilling brandy, and turning metal. I'm actually a lot like him, enjoying trying to make all kinds of things just to see how it is done, and seeing if I can do it.

When I was thirteen the President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated, followed by Martin Luther King Jr. and then in 1968, Bobby Kennedy. It's hard to describe how disillusioned and shocked we all were. I must have been politically aware because I knew about the Civil Rights movement, but I wouldn't say I cared much about any of it. My family dynamics were compelling and I was thinking about myself as most adolescents do. Kennedy was our president though, the first Catholic, young and handsome. They called it Camelot. It was mythical. The death was dramatic and the rituals powerful. There's no way to forget it.

In junior high and high school I was one of the smart kids, popular but awkward. I had buck teeth because my parents prioritized other things. I had a great English teacher who taught me I was a writer. I liked student government, and our high school was new so I got to help write constitutions for the student council and the cheerleaders.  My best friend was a cheerleader so I was too, but I quit over an argument about whether or not we should have both blue and white shirts under our letter sweaters. I honestly felt that I couldn't afford both shirts, which wasn't true, but I had learned to think of my family as poor in a rich community. That came from my Dad, who was the son of an alcoholic and had his own traumatic childhood. I guess we were all very status conscious, and there were a lot of wealthy people in my school. We read Time Magazine, and my parents had some wealthy friends who were role models, probably introducing us to the New Yorker. Delaware is a wealthy state, and the whole east coast is still about status and wealth, with the conformism that comes with that. I had a boyfriend a year older, and at some point I convinced him to have sex. It was something I wanted from the books I'd been reading. Sex was power and I used it that way. 

College was expected, but when it came time to apply the trauma was showing. Dad suggested I go to Purdue where he had gone, as I could get a scholarship. I got $100. It seemed very expensive, but my parents were able to pay for both me and my older sister, with our summer jobs and the babysitting and things we had always done for money. We got 35 cents an hour to babysit. I was used to doing a lot of work and expected to, and I worked hard at Purdue, but was in over my head. I was studying to be a medical technologist, maybe because I wanted to be a doctor but knew that was out of my reach. Girls really were programmed to get married as a primary goal, and have a job while you waited to meet Prince Charming. We all thought that was our path. We all dressed in sweater and skirt sets and little flats that had to be the right kind. My clothes were mostly homemade to stretch our budget, as I continued to feel poor. Indiana was a hick place with kids that I couldn't relate to, and I was extremely lonely and unhappy.

I thought transferring to a school closer to home would help, and landed at American U in Washington DC. It was kind of a party school but I was in with medical and dental students and lived in a house with a group of assorted people who shared a kitchen in the basement. I shared a room with a girl who was the daughter of lawyers, from Connecticut. One day at school I went to a film, The War Game. It was about nuclear war and how it developed, and I remember the repeated refrain that it was "perfectly safe." I was completely shocked to see how the public was deceived, and was immediately radicalized. We had grown up with drills where we huddled under our desks, as if that would have saved us. I felt that everything about my world had changed. I completely lost my faith in authority, my own safety, and my future.The innocence that was eroded by the Kennedy assassination was now gone completely. When that happens, you don't get it back. I'll never trust authority.

This was in 1969. I had loved the Beach Boys and the Beatles and knew a little about the social changes of the sixties but nothing about pot or hippies or the Dead or any of that. I stopped wearing a bra (women had burned their bras in front of the Miss America pageant on the boardwalk at Atlantic City) and started wearing the same jeans and wool sweater every day. No more fashion for me. My roommate must have introduced me to Democratic politics, and I was reading things. The anti-war movement was already happening at my school, and I got involved in it very quickly. I went to all the demonstrations. I knew now that nothing the government said was true, that Kennedy had been shot by conspiracy, and our country was morally bankrupt. They told us we would find out what happened to Kennedy in 50 years, but that has now come and gone and we didn't find out, did we. I suppose I thought that was the one thing that would be true.

The Vietnam War was extremely painful for people my age. The draft was a lottery and took thousands and thousands of young kids, truly cannon fodder, and it was the first war that was shown on the nightly news: atrocities and suffering with your dinner. Everything was shocking and unjust and the popular movement to end it was powerful and hopeful. Standing in the streets with 500,000 other ordinary people was astounding. I learned about Dylan and Joan Baez, folk music, and inevitably, started smoking pot. Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Stones, the Dead, Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young all fed our passions and described our dreams, and it united us. There had never been such a large group of people of the same age, a population bump that gave us a lot of social power. We made the most of it.

All of the liberation movements were starting as an extension of the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. My roommate's father and brother were involved in the defense of the Chicago Eight. These men were our heroes when they were accused of conspiracy to riot after a demonstration at the Democratic Convention in 1968. I got to meet them, and some of the Black Panthers, through my roommate. We got to serve drinks to them at a party in Connecticut. I was still naive and immature, but I could see that there were ways to fight the government and the power of the people was real. The deck was stacked against the people but when there was unity, it couldn't be overcome. (This all went away for decades through Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes, and although Jimmy Carter was authentic he didn't have power, and the hope didn't come back until Obama. That was why he was such a phenomenon, because he rekindled that for my generation. Of course I was too cynical to really believe in him fully.)

The student movement increased in seriousness and in 1969 and 1970 it was peaking. My little sister and I were attacked by mounted police that came at us from behind the Washington Monument. We ran for our lives. I was teargassed on campus, in what felt like a battle. Earth Day happened for the first time in April, and the US illegally invaded Cambodia. In the space of two weeks in May, 1970, four students were killed by the National Guard at Kent State, Ohio,(May 3), more were shot at Jackson State (May 14) , University students all over the country went on strike (May 6), I turned 20 (May 5), and my father committed suicide (May 16).

The world changed color for me. It was as if everything was the same but my eyes, and no one could tell. It seems impossible now that the juxtaposition was that close, that I felt the possibility of my own death by my government, and then the floor dropped out of my life. Things started to be bizarre and stayed that way for the next decade as I struggled to fit myself into the world somehow. I find it fascinating that here in Eugene, Saturday Market started at that very same time (May 9).

About fifteen years of brave and foolish deeds crammed into the next five years that someday I will relate, and in 1975 I got to Eugene. Here I found my counterculture and my community. Saturday Market, the Radar Angels, and Country Fair became the life I wanted and could build upon. Mike and I met in 1981, my son John was born in 1990, and then I began my inner journey to heal my trauma and learn to be a mother.
That is another long story that can be told, but these were the things that got me here, made me who I am, and opened me to the family and home that I built. Any questions?