Tag: news

October Surprise

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I sit in this cafe in Santa Fe drinking my coffee and reading about the approaching hurricane, billed as potentially ‘one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for West-Central Florida.’ I open the MAPS app on my phone and enter St. Petersburg, Florida, zeroing in on the strip of barrier island beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, until I find the section called Treasure Island. I scan the shoreline to see if there’s anything I might recognize from the time I lived there in 1972. Outside of the main road facing the hotels and resorts it’s hard to imagine that any trace remains of what I knew back then.

Most of Treasure Island at that time was made up of slightly run down motels and beach cottages inhabited by seasonal vacationers, boat people and retirees. In the middle of this were two structures that remained from a previous complex mostly washed away in a previous hurricane. Separated from neighbors by wide strips of beach sand they were inhabited by an odd population standing well apart from the surrounding social fauna. I shared one half of a duplex shack with a high school friend from Cleveland who’d attended college in St. Pete and had taken up with a community of boat builders and maintenance people centered in a nearby boat yard. I was just a year out of college, having dropped out after the Vietnam Draft Lottery missed my number. I’d spent months traveling by thumb all across the western states and through Canada back to the Great Lakes. After working briefly as a dishwasher in the local department store, I left my family in Cleveland, coming to Florida at my friend’s invitation.

A young couple lived on the other side of the duplex. A larger separate dwelling edged closer to the Gulf shore, headquarters for the president of a local motorcycle gang and his occasional guests and associates. ‘Pappy’ is what they called him. His gang, the Pagans, was apparently rather notorious in the region, having carved out territory in competition with a local chapter of the Hell’s Angels. We were young, college educated dropouts that had more in common with Volkswagens than motorcycles. It sounds rather scary, but it worked out quite well all around.

Whenever Pappy’s gang went on extended ‘runs’ to whatever piratical adventures they were engaged in, he asked us to watch over the house and property, and was grateful for our vigilance. When in residence he always treated us respectfully as his neighbors. We assumed his gang’s adventures involved some forms of drug running or other illegal activity, as he appeared to be rather prosperous, if out of place in the neighborhood. He possessed a very nice boat, cars and motorcycles, and had no discernible employment.

The complex appeared to be under regular surveillance by the local cops. Pappy often came out to greet them on their patrols carrying his small pet boa constrictor, the gang’s mascot, around his shoulders. There was often a steady parade of guests in and out of the residence, and when he and other gang members occasionally gathered to drink and party we learned it was wise for us to stay clear. In all other matters, as long haired hippies being also somewhat out of place in the middle of a community of white conservatives, the intimidating presence of Pappy was actually reassuring.

St. Petersburg at the time was divided into distinct social groups. There was the established population of mostly very conservative southern white people. They barely tolerated the presence of a growing insurgent population of young people that orbited various college campuses. A large, mostly segregated black population lived in tightly knit communities along unpaved streets in the semi-rural neighborhoods on the fringes of the city. They worked mostly in municipal service and maintanence jobs, tending the roads and the parks and collecting the trash. On the weekends they gathered in Baptist churches nestled in cozy subtropical tree lined lots.

There was a constant ebb and flow of vacation visitors, spending their money and luxuriating near the beaches or out fishing and sailing on boats and yachts in the Gulf or in the Tampa Bay. Then there were the vagabonds like us, mostly refugees that circulated among all of these groups, taking advantage of the climate and whatever marginal employment that was available.

When I moved south I brought with me a collection of books and articles documenting the decade of political activity that had moved me through high school and then as a college student between 1966 until 1972. Much had come to light in those years for the generation born just after the Second World War. We had been thrown into the first age of television and simultaneously educated through the benefits of the GI Bill and the rough awakening of the Civil Rights and Antiwar movements. The world in those years had been both disorienting and an opening to new possibilities and perspectives.

The so-called progressive environmental movements in those days emerged out of the shock and passions of the sixties toward something more organized and enduring. The seeds had been initially planted by pioneering books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living The Good Life, Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s alarmist The Population Bomb and Stewart Brand’s compilation of alternative resources and philosophies, The Whole Earth Catalog, inspired by the first photographs of the global biosphere taken from space.

I used my time in Florida, while living on the beach, smoking marijuana, listening to music and drinking cheap liquor from the state stores, I reviewed all the currents and options effecting my life. It was sort of a suspended state between the stages of a life as I sought my own path forward in pursuit of a better world.

Sitting beneath the parachute canopy that blew gently in breezes from the Gulf, I watched the sun rise and set over the always restless waters and imagined new possibilities as alternatives to the industrial wilderness I’d grown up in. It seemed possible that humanity would awaken from its nightmare of wasteful conflict and pursue collective survival and the chance for contentment.

I look at the present map of those beaches on my iPhone and see that the roads have all been closed to traffic as the communities have mostly been evacuated. The expected storm surge is predicted to be as high as 15 feet. There have been over 40 tornado warnings so far across the state of Florida, and at least one large tornado has already devastated parts of Fort Myers, south of St. Petersburg, then cut across the Interstate 75. Millions of people are fleeing on roads away from the Gulf and most of the gas stations are out of gas. This has been called a ‘once in a century’ storm, but it follows by barely a week the previous ‘once in a century’ storm. Milton follows Helene, with two more months of hurricane season to go.

When I left Florida I moved to the West with the thought of devoting my life to pursuing possible alternatives in a world drowning in waste and ignorance. Having grasped and accepted a new understanding of history and what we are responsible for, I found it impossible to turn away. Since those times, for more than 60 years, many of us struggled and hoped and achieved a greater clarity of our options. We went from dreaming to innovating. We constructed new technologies to harness our visions. At the same time we watched as the fear of change grew into the fierce backlash of denial that now threatens to throw us backward into the destructive cycles of the past.

I remember the innocent days when the most extreme harshness of the backlash kept us out of bars along the beach because our hair was too long. We were young and arrogant and resilient and we flaunted our sense of pride and indifference. The petty prejudice we encountered we saw as a relic of the past. If at times we felt like strangers in a strange land, we mostly shrugged it off as we faced the future with what we thought was a clear sense of its possibilities.

I remember sailing free over the clear waters that could be both gentle and sometimes overwhelming in its sense of awesome scope and majesty. I remember the fear inspired by lightening and thunder over the distant waves in the night, and the warm currents that caressed my body as I floated beyond the breakers beneath an endless sky. The world moves in crazy currents, just like the wind and the oceans, and we are only human. We navigate the waves and sometimes get caught in the backwash and sometimes we get swept away.

We were so young, and we thought we could reshape the world, just because we believed we could. We threw ourselves on the currents and trusted them to take us to where we needed to be. Hippies, motorcycle gangs, college students, even Christians and communists, believed we could push the whole world toward the good as we released our imaginations and accomplished miracles. But we forgot in our pride that advancing our vision required that we leave no one behind.

I now look at the map and see images of the storm’s advance, I know that the world I remember will be changed beyond recognition, and feel some pity for those forced to flee the wrath of the waters and the wind.

I no longer live near the sea. Where I live these desert heights often seem like a calm island floating above rough weather and the waves upsetting the rest of the world. Looking at my screens with their views of the storm, amid the world’s violence, ignorance and misery, my heart sometimes threatens to turn to stone. I know that, unlike the ocean, stone eventually gets worn away and vanishes to nothing. Once totally open and filled with hope, now I often feel almost empty and ready to blow away in the wind.

Neither time nor history flows backward. The tides and cycles repeat, the days and years pass through darkness and light. Whenever we grow complacent we’re jolted awake. The world and human civilization has passed through many fevers. We’ve survived cataclysms, ice ages, plagues and world wars. Through each cycle the lessons have become more obvious and the stakes have become greater. We learn again and again the lesson that we all share the same small planet and the borders between us are mostly illusions.

“Shut Up and Get Back To Work”

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I could only be somewhat amused at U. S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s performance addressing students and the press at Columbia University, telling them to stop their nonsense and get back to classes. Behind him stood a grinning Elise Stefanik, joining in the act, both performing for stock footage to be used in the upcoming fall campaigns.

It struck me that a major lesson to be taken in a week of escalating campus demonstrations across the world, was the apparent inability of generations in power to learn from history or to avoid repeating the same tactical errors again and again.

For me the events are somewhat nostalgic.

I recall an evening in 1970 when a large part of the student body at Case Western Reserve University gathered in the student union cafeteria to debate a response to the newly launched expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. The meeting was part of an escalation of activity centered that had been building on campuses for many months after events at New York’s Columbia University in March and April of 1968. Partly In response to the war and touched off by resistance to plans for the university to build a segregated gym on the fringes of Harlem, students and ‘outside agitators’ occupied buildings, debated one another, conducted ‘teach-in’ activities and generally obstructed normal college business. Eventually Columbia administrators called in the NYPD, who proceeded to brutally attack the demonstrators, injuring many and arresting over 700 participants. The consequence was an expansion of actions in solidarity driven by organized coordination on campuses all across the country. (Governor Abbot and DeSantis take note)

Listening to the rising militancy of rhetoric in that student union meeting it became obvious to my friend Robert and I that impending action was in he works, and Impatient with all of the talking we headed over to the ROTC building which had emerged as the likely target. Being the first to arrive at the location we took positions seated on both sides of the steps leading to the front doors. Just then a closeted group of middle aged men in suits looking somewhat bewildered and uncertain, apparently summoned from their evening cocktails, approached from across the plaza. Foremost in the group was the University president. He cautiously approached the two of us sitting like quiet Buddha’s on the steps and asked who we were. In a moment of smart ass mutual inspiration we both replied that we were ‘gargoyles’. The president gazed at us blankly for a moment, then turned back to the little group, leading them away into the night. A moment later the large group of students arrived from the irmeeting, marched up to the front door and proceeded to occupy the building for the next few days.

The student movement in those days was responding to an unpopular war and a rising awareness of racial injustice, but it was more than that. We were addressing fundamental questions about the relevance and responsibilities of our educational institutions in addressing inequities in the larger world. In virtually every classroom deep questions were being asked challenging the growing dissonance in times of accelerating change, between what and how we were being taught, and how it related to the outside world. The challenges were made using every conceivable form, from classroom debate to teach-ins and street theater, to poetry and artwork, to obstruction of business as usual. Outside of campus social activism began to explode in the streets. Inmates were taking over the asylums. Before the tide had receded and things returned to a new normal, many changes were made, and in spite of the forces of reaction the social movements of those decades laid foundations for the movements and counter movements we are seeing today.

Societies thrive and advance to the degree that they respond to ever new realities of the present. Intelligent leaders and pioneers must be encouraged to think and to continually question the status quo. Universities are designed to be laboratories for discourse and discussion. Students are ideally trained to be more than receptacles for predigested opinions and established ideologies. The young see the world with fresh eyes that are less tolerant of dogma and hypocrisy, and more willing to take risks and learn from their mistakes. Inexperience and ignorance are to be overcome, but they are not a crime.

When faced with the spectacle of injustice the young are more outspoken and generally feel they have less to loose. Back in the day, when president Richard Nixon held up the ‘silent majority’ of middle America as his standard for patriotism, angry college students were portrayed as irresponsible and out of touch, or else as naive victims of shadowy bands of outside agitators and ‘far left’ college elites. It appears that nothing much has changed in the rhetoric of reaction since those times.

The Mike Johnsons and Elise Stefaniks will always find hooks and divisions upon which to hang their campaigns based on fear and self righteousness. In the sixties the paranoid establishment along with the media exploited tactical squabbles between black and white protestors in order to divide them and pacify dissent. Today the tactic is to label any objections to Israeli military excess and apartheid policies as ‘antisemitic’, even while campus protestors include Jews, Muslims, Christians and people simply appalled at the horrific images seen everyday in the media. In some cases the diversity of participants’ backgrounds and opinions have led to heated disagreement and sharp debate. Irresponsible actors on all sides have at times resorted to harassment and even occasional violence. Some students and teachers have felt alienated and fearful. Never missing an opportunity to fan the passions of a moment, politicians and instigators portray every unfortunate incident as the norm. In fact, the preponderance of violence in nearly every instance has been perpetrated by the forces of law and order.

The gap in life experience between generations raised in the last half of the 20th century and those now coming of age in the 21st is almost unbridgeable. The decades that followed the last World War were characterized by an almost constant state of expansion and innovation. America stood at the center of a global project to build the new world order. Whatever flaws existed in America’s self image were covered over by almost continual economic growth and innovation, low unemployment, low inflation, huge stock dividends and an overlay of conspicuous consumption.

The new century brought an unrelenting succession of national traumas. It began with the dot-com crash and recession in 2001, closely followed by the attack on the World Trade Center. Then followed two decades of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan, a housing crash and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. After brief respite of hope and civility in the Obama years came the daily nightmare of the most ethically challenged presidency in United States history. All of this was interrupted by the worldwide COVID pandemic along with the rapid proliferation of disastrous consequences in the wake of climate change. Finally the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war in Israel have brought about the most destabilizing global situations since the Cold War.

My generation was the first raised on television and under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Almost from birth we were exposed to images of war and mayhem in foreign lands running counter to the idealization of America’s self-image. The moral pontification propagated in our churches and schools and in the mainstream media became increasingly detached from the reality of people’s lives. We were told that all of the ‘bad’ people and situations were somewhere else. By the time we arrived at college our view of American exceptionalism had changed dramatically from that of our parents. They’d suffered through the horrors and triumphs of a World War, in which the very foundations of democracy had been nearly defeated by the forces of totalitarianism. We were summoned instead to serve and support a futile war against a small foreign nation while watching on our daily screens our cities catching fire, our most admired leaders being assassinated, and our sons and brothers killed in the jungles and brutalized on the streets. We questioned, and then we rebelled.

Not only is the current cohort of college age students much more diverse than it was in the sixties, it’s a generation that’s experienced first hand the cracks in the foundations of the American dream widening almost beyond repair. Our established institutions appear to languish in denial. Justice has been challenged and has failed repeatedly. The truth is continually subverted by lies and fantasies. Freedoms that have been won through centuries of struggle are being discarded while the very survival of civilization is threatened by changes in the weather. Our political institutions appear inadequate or unwilling to address these situations in any meaningful way.

The campus movements of the sixties culminated in the execution of four students by the Ohio National Guard in May of 1970. Although this event didn’t stop the inevitable momentum toward change, it made us take a hard look at the consequences of poking the beast head-on. These days, when I hear the rhetoric of people like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton and the words and actions of leaders like Greg Abbot and Ron DeSantis I wonder whether their ultimate goal is to provoke violence and fear in order to justify the suppression of all alternative points of view. Are they pushing for another Kent State massacre? Do they imagine that this strategy will work any better than it ever has? I guess if your ‘go to’ strategy is _God, Guns and Trump,_ there isn’t much of an alternaive.

I question whether these purveyors of fantasies of the past can presume to know, evaluate, or judge the motives of young people, whose entire living experience has born witness to the breakdown of those very illusions?

These students are the future, and the future will not be denied. Like we who grew up in the fifties and sixties, they see much more clearly how the world has changed than their parents who cling to the status quo. Ultimately, the young will prevail because they must. Like every human generation they have to grapple with the world as it is, and not as we wish it to be.

The catalyst for the current uprising on campuses is a costly war between nations and peoples who’ve made a long series of unfortunate political and strategic decisions that have lead into a death spiral of almost imprenetable anguish. Both sides in this war have dehumanized their opponents in order to justify horrific violence and the daily spectacle of unchecked slaughter. Both sides are committing violence against the rest of humanity, as the constant stream of images are in fact its extension. In such an ongoing ‘all or nothing’ conflict neither side will achieve the final resolution it desires, while each player appears willing to pull the entire world into the struggle.

Perhaps we can understand motivations on both sides of the war. Both see this as an existential struggle deeply rooted in generations of displacenent, appropriation and vengeance. But more than understanding is required to bring about a pause in the conflict. Concerned nations need to intercede forcefully to bring the violence to a halt. The Land of Palestine has long been a regional proxy for the very powers that both persecuted Jews and colonized the people of the Middle East and Africa, and for the forces that have risen in resistance to empire. All nations in the region and beyond share responsibility for the repercussions. America, as Israel’s ‘unconditional’ ally, has the biggest role to play.

Until the violence stops the protests will not stop, and attacking the institutions of higher education, firing college presidents or advocating military or police interference will most likely backfire. If conservatives have their way this internal conflict could escalate, and increasingly authoritarian measures could fuel even more destructive cycles of resistance and repression. History repeats, but it never goes backwards. The young, who grow frustrated with the refusal of governments to deal realistically with their concerns, will eventually inherit the earth and all of the powers that play upon it.

It was the eve of my 20th birthday. After the occupation we wandered back to the campus radio station, where Robert conducted a late night show playing eclectic music and recordings and where we had access to the Associated Press teletype and got the latest news of the day as it was being generated.

That evening a brand new album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had just arrived, and we ended up playing the first song.’Carry On’ repeatedly, all through the night.

Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice

But to carry on..