I get a distinct feeling of deja vu when I watch the news lately. If you live long enough, you get to see it all again.
I graduated from high school in 1969 and started the next fall at Indiana University. Later in my freshman year, four students were killed at Kent State University when the National Guard was sent in to break up a protest against the Vietnam war. Outraged college students walked out of classes nationwide in protest of the violence against the protesters.
You might be surprised to know that I didn’t. I defiantly stayed in class forcing the graduate student teaching that class to be there too. It didn’t make me any friends that day. If you know me now, that story is probably pretty mystifying, but let me explain.
I graduated in 1969, but my older sister graduated in 1965. She went off to the University of Michigan and became involved in Students for Democratic Society. My sister had a troubled relationship with my parents and in many ways a hard time fitting in while she was in high school. When she got to U of M, she found a community where she fit in better than she had ever fit before and her entire focus became the SDS. That annoyed my parents, but they continued to support her at college. But sometime in 1967, she left college and simply disappeared. She had no contact with our family for the next 30 years. She did come back to us in later life, but for 30 years, she was simply gone.
This was a raw wound that never healed for my mother. Her disappearance didn’t happen out of the blue. There had been tension between her and my parents. But they never dreamed they could lose her.
This is the environment I went away to college from. I’m from Michigan, but there was absolutely no question of my going to U of M. I think my parents thought I would be safe from the radical left at their alma mater, Indiana University.
To be clear, my parents weren’t right wingers (even as that would have been defined in the 1960s). They were pretty middle of the road. My dad was Republican and my mom was a Democrat.
But let’s get back to those ‘60s student demonstrations. There’s a lot I’m seeing that seems awfully familiar. Taking over administration buildings. Marching. Encampments. Believing that the world just has to change because of them.
When young people go away to college, they are going to learn more than just how to do a profession. They are learning how to transition from teens living with their families to young adults living on their own. They’re learning what kind of people they want to be and what they’re going to put up with and what they’re going to fight against.
But I have some other observations.
Outside agitators: I’ve heard that term before. My sister came home for Thanksgiving in 1966 and she was all alight with it. She had found out that the SDS trained students to be agitators and she wanted to be one. But, as I remember it, she was talking about students. I’m hearing it now as an excuse for sending it police to violently break up demonstrations. I don’t have any way of knowing whether there are people from outside the campus stirring up the demonstrations, but none of the people talking about it are showing any evidence. Show me somebody who’s been arrested and isn’t a student or local resident. I’m not seeing a lot going on that students wouldn’t do on their own. Students get pretty worked up, don’t you know.
Antisemitism: I don’t doubt it’s happening for a moment. But I question whether sensitivity to it isn’t magnifying it. I’m not trying to downplay it. I don’t condone it — ever. Islamophobia either. I’m just saying, when people get passionate any statement can be extrapolated to antisemitism or Islamophobia. I think that happens a lot. I’m not saying “from the river to the sea” should be ignored, or calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. But we need to find ways to talk about these topics without zooming to the worst possible meaning of every word said. It’s possible.
I think today’s demonstrators have a just cause, just like now, I think those Vietnam protesters had a just cause.
What happened to that rigidly reactionary little girl who refused to walk out of class after the Kent State Massacre? Well, the first time I voted, I voted Republican for Richard Nixon. I never did that again. I dropped out of college and enlisted in the U.S. Navy before the Vietnam War was over. After I got out of the Navy, I finished my degree in communications and had a long career in journalism. I’ve been retired more than a decade.
I’m a liberal. A Democrat. A Peacenik. And if I could go back in time, I would join those protests.