Echoes of the Past

Using today's event to cultivate context with humility

I have a confession.

I’ve never liked the ‘60s. I don’t like the art, I don’t like the literature (what I’ve read of it), and I don’t particularly like the music. And I really don’t like the divisiveness and violence of that decade, in all its forms.

When it became clear that I had to follow the writerly breadcrumbs into the forest of the Vietnam Era, I rather hoped that I could somehow avoid the whole gritty, hippie, dissension thing.

So it was with some dismay that I read the analyses that the current college campus protests were similar to, or even arose out of, the anti-war protests of the late ‘60s.

I searched my files to see what I had written on “protests” in the past and found this 2013 essay/journal entry:

I am in watching the 2005 documentary Sir! No Sir! about the anti-war movement by GIs during the Vietnam War and I feel vaguely queasy. Not because I don’t agree with everything they say, but because I believe my father must have disagreed and I feel a small child’s torn loyalties. It is painful.

Jane Fonda is featured and I love her power and her straightforward, yet very feminine response to the war—musical, talented, vivacious, gorgeous. 

And yet I cannot but help hear my father’s voice full of outrage:  She sat in an NVA gunner’s chair … she sat in a place that was used to shoot down American soldiers! 

I remember the photo, her laughing, her hand on the helmet she wore. I remember thinking about that—that where she sat, under the helmet of the enemy—that that place was the origin of an explosive that took away the life and peace and love of an American family and I share in my father’s revulsion.

But I share also in the revulsion of the soldier who cries on film thinking about how he had to tally the body count of Vietnamese (North or South, it matters not). The BODY COUNT that he had to tally. Is that what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they penned, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of freedom?”

And I see and hear the angst of the black men speaking of how the oppression of the Vietnamese is so similar to what is happening to them in America: why should they be in a foreign country doling out what is being doled out to them at home? I feel strongly for their statements over the years and across many lines, racial and otherwise. 

How can I try to encompass all this?

I’ve cried a lot of tears recently and they wear on me, but I do not think they are wasted tears. I think I am weeping the weight of the world. I recognize this could be a sort of conceit.

Still, I adhere to my conviction: At this time, anyway, I do not think these forays in the tragic nature, into the horrorificness, of our world encompasses is a self-indulgent exercise.

I feel something new being born and I am digging in the dirt, cultivating it into soil. Every tear I shed is easing the drought, is paving the way for a new day. Not just for the world, but for me.

I’m not sure how I feel about the hopefulness of these words now; they seem a little naive. I do, however, like how I use the idea of “cultivating soil” from mere dirt. It may seem subtle but there is a distinct difference between the two. According to Science News Explores:

. . . soil is the diverse but integrated community of living and nonliving things that make up the ground beneath our feet [but] dirt? It’s a group of runaways or kidnapped soil particles that can no longer be easily associated with the site in which they developed.

In other words, dirt is soil that has lost its context.

In one sense or another, whether we are active protestors or part of the “great silent majority” we are engaged in sifting through layers of unconnected bits of information (dirt) and may yet have the opportunity to cultivate them into an integrated topsoil that is capable of supporting growth.

Writing this essay has helped me sift through more of my thoughts and feelings about the ‘60s, and I think the thing I’m most uncomfortable with is my perception that the decade demanded us to be strident in our convictions and excessive in our actions.

I found great comfort then in a paragraph from Nicholas Kristof’s recent N.Y. Times column on the protests:

A thought: Humility is an essential tool in persuasion . . . The challenge is to take an unflinching moral stance while acknowledging that one may eventually be proved wrong. Holding onto that contradiction curbs the tendency toward self-righteousness and the impulse to shout down others — both of which have persuaded exactly zero people ever.

Until next time,
Kat ❦

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