“Is this really a thing?  How do you even know it exists?”  As my daughter Sylvie spoke her bright green eyes sparkled with a challenge.  My son Kenny joined her with a puzzled, skeptical look.

I started to respond.  “I know that this IS a THING, because I have been watching it develop for more than 50 years.  I don’t know exactly when it started, but I first noticed it in the San Francisco Bay area more than 50 year ago.  Ever since 1969, I have been watching it develop.  At first, I observed it in isolated events in a few places.  Now, it’s everywhere, and everyone seems to know about it.  Still, it doesn’t really have a name.”

Now, Sylvie was intrigued.  “Well, Dad, here’s my offer.  If you can convince us this THING really exists, maybe we will help you finda name for it and fight it.”   

I was elated to have company.  “That seems like a fair deal to me.”  If I could convince them, maybe I would have help.  Sylvie could usually enlist Kenny into any adventure she wanted to pursue. So, I started to tell them my story …

“After grad school, my first job was at a research lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, near Oakland.  I had taken a lot of STEM courses and landed a research job at a big multi-national oil company.  The start of my research career happened to coincide roughly with the now-famous Summer of Love in San Francisco and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.”

“One day, as I came out of my company laboratory to go home, I saw about a half dozen poorly-dressed boys and girls marching around the building carrying signs with weird slogans scrawled on them.  I say ‘scrawled’, because the wording on the signs was uneven and difficult to read.  I was just out of school, and these kids looked a bit younger than me, and college age, but weird and scruffty compared to Kansas college kids,”

“It was 1969, and I was still wearing a suit and tie to work.  Not a white shirt, mind you, but some kind of dress shirt with a real collar.  You had to allow that these kids were in school, and people dressed more casually in school.  Still, these kids looked really off-color in their un-cut, un-kempt hair, baggy pants, rumpled shirts, and so on.  Plus, they were shouting in a cranky, negative way for educated kids, kind of like losers.”

Sylvie was getting a little bit into the scene.  “What kind of things were they shouting?“

“Let me think.  Stuff like … ‘Down with capitalist pigs!’ and ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win’.  That kind of thing.  I remember one sign said:  “’Stop Capitalist Pigs at War with Asia”  “Down with the Establishment”.  They were mostly related to the anti-Vietnam War movement, I guess.“

Sylvie and Kenny were getting more interested.   Now they understood that they were hearing about their old man as a young straight-arrow kid from the Midwest, in a confrontation with neo-Marxist activists.  

Kenny sought to clarify.  “Dad.  Hadn’t you seen activists and hippies in Kansas by 1969?”

“In Kansas, we had hippies living next door who wanted us chemists to make LSD and tell them where to find magic mushrooms. I didn’t see many activists before 1969.  I was writing a thesis and pretty cloistered my last year in grad school.  There was a riot at Kansas within months after I left where they set fire to the student union building.  I guess I didn’t see that coming, because I had my head down.”

“I had seen civil rights marches earlier, in college and in graduate school, but they were completely different.  Civil rights marches were usually led by black people wearing suits and ties, followed by college kids wearing neat clothes, ironed shirts, corduroys, jeans, and sweaters.  Also, the civil right signs were neatly-lettered and completely legible. You could just read the signs at a civil rights march and know exactly what they were protesting and what they wanted.”

“These Bay Area kids (from Berkeley we guessed) marching at the oil company research lab seemed sullen and disorganized, and their messaging was not clear.  It was hard to tell what they were protesting unless you read the papers the next day.  TV and newspaper reporters would usually interview an articulate professor or student leader who would explain the protest and why it was so great.  The media would then accept their story and print it.”  

“Bing, smash, frizzle, bing!”  Strange sounds emanating from Sylvie’s hip indicated a cell phone call.  Sylvie pulled up her phone, put it to her head, and rushed out of the room, while Kenny retired to the bathroom.

I got up and started to get ready for my next day’s trip.  I had been visiting Sylvie in Boston where she was teaching computer science.  Kenny had traveled from his engineering job in upstate New York.  I had to return home tomorrow for my trial which would begin soon enough.

As I gathered my stuff into a travel bag, Sylvie and Kenny returned and started chatting with each other about a thousand things that were between them.  They had had some conflicts and problems, but they were smart, gainfully employed, not in jail, and there was a nice bond between them.  As a Dad, I felt slightly successful, for just a moment.

Sylvie paused the chat and looked up at me.  “OK, Dad.  We’re not going to bed until you finish Chapter 1 of ‘The 1960’s Student Rebellion, and its connection to this unnamed Thing That is Swallowing America’ ”.

It felt nice that she wanted to get back to my story, so I stood up, and put my shoulders back.  “I will try to get to the point.”

“The student protests we were seeing in the late 1960’s were supposed to be like the civil rights protests in the 1950’s and early 60’s.  You know… ‘we’re all here fighting for justice’. But, to me, the campus rebellion seemed really different from the earleir Civil Rights Movement.”

“In 1964, most Americans who could read and write well (and were not from the South) understood that the Civil Rights movement was ALL about justice.  A Civil War had been fought and won to deliver freedom and full citizenship to all Americans, but, somehow, politics had delayed implementation of the Civil War’s outcome for 100 years.  200 years after the Scottish Enlightenment had delivered the idea that all persons are equal under the law to America’s Founders, and it was well past time to finish the job.”

“Then, suddenly, in 1969, in California, students were scuttling around an oil company research lab protesting capitalism and cheering for Ho Chi Min (the USA opponent in Vietnam) in front of an oil company research lab.”

“By 1969, the Vietnam War was not going well.  The value of Vietnam involvement had been under scrutiny, and a pro-capitalist candidate who proposed ‘peace with honor’ was elected president in a landslide over an anti-capitalist candidate who advocated immediate withdrawl at any cost.”

“But these protestors were not chanting ‘Stop the Draft’ or ‘Withdraw with Honor’, they were attacking capitalism and cheering on their country’s opponent in a shooting war.  Something unrelated to the voice of the people or peace and justice was at work here.  The THING that I first saw outside an oil company research lab in 1969 is now the THING that is swallowing America.”

“While the American Civil Rights Movement was driven by a desire to complete The Enlightenment as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, the student rebellion seemed like the opposite of the civil rights movement.  Rather than seeking to complete the Enlightenment, the student rebellion was the first shot in a culture war aimed at rolling back the Enlightenment and installing nihilism.”

“Wow, Dad.  We need to think about this.”  The two siblings spoke almost the same words almost un unison.

I knew my job was just beginning.  “Take your time, kids.  See you next trip.”

——————————————————————————————————–

On the plane, I thought through the opening arguments for the upcoming trial where I would be suing several parties to try to keep my school in operation.

Categories: Fiction, Life Stories, Stories