Congenial-speak #45

Generational Warfare

Ostensibly I am the offspring of a flower child, the pollen extracted from the pollination. My biological mother was a “hippie.” One story I am told explains how she, and the man she eventually married (not my father) lived on a commune in 1969. She was left in the fall of 1964 bearing me. She was left to deliver me, and then hold me, to decide what to do with me. I was delivered and unceremoniously cut (circumcised) into a world that did not handle interracial couplings with ease, much less the results of them. My conclusion from stories is that the deciding factor to put me up for adoption hinged on the kind of life I'd have.

I was born in 1965. After two weeks in limbo, in a St. Paul facility where babies and children connected (like an umbilicus) to the Children's Home Society are kept, I was adopted by a couple from the “Silent” generation. However they were every bit (possibly more) progressive and idealistic than that generation who, in 1967, went by thumb and VW bus to San Francisco with—or without—flowers in their hair. Those people comprised the counter-culture, the tiny section of “boomers” (1946-64) that gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco presumably to engage in sex and drugs, deplete thrift stores and Salvation Army counters and generally disrupt or ignore the establishment. (Can you blame them? The establishment was forcing them to fight an immoral war whose motives were highly questionable.)

The couple who became my parents in 1965 had, in their respective youths, supported Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace for president in 1948. They were clean. There was no heavy drugs or sex, and in most cases they were smarter and more focused. They also rejected the establishment (or parts of it) but worked for change in a very methodical and organized way. My parents listened to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. They fought for the little guy. My mom was a child during the Great Depression. In the Bronx, although her father was self-employed, she was aware of the struggles of the thousands of unemployed workers. She was tempered by that atmosphere and interests later as a teen towards being outspoken and having a true moral compass. My folks weren't blue-collar. They did not act white-collar either. They saw injustices in the world with a hyper-sensitive eye. My parents aligned themselves with those boomers in the DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor) who moved to end the Vietnam War. They worked with those who submitted resolutions, who caucused and wrote letters to the president, not the ones who levitated the pentagon or laid down in front of troop trains. Howie Kaibel, who I refer to many times in my book Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, was barely 20 when he began working with my mom at the DFL headquarters on Hennepin Avenue. He, as I imagine many in the McCarthy anti-war movement, was the idealistic age of my biological mother. I have no idea how politically active she ever was, but I did later learn she was as liberal as my mom. My biological father, the black part of me, worked in 1972 for McGovern, a little less progressive than my mom (adopted). She spent that spring and summer working for Democratic candidate Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to be nominated by a major party.

It is worth thinking through once in a great while, the legacy, what those flower children (both passed on) left in their wake, their one-time affair time capsule. It worked out for the best, of course, it was the right decision. Being put up for adoption was, I surmise, a combination of situational factors and the social climate of the time. My mother's (biological) father was a bigot, as I've been told. My father's parents were strict southern religious types. They would not have embraced a child born out of wedlock and certainly not one from and interracial coupling. I'd have grown up very differently, to say the least. My parents are both professionals; dad a professor and mom a social worker. My biological mother was a professional too. She taught ESL in Egypt, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. My father played football for the NFL. I'm told that it was only a job to him, a stepping stone it sounded like, a way to connect. I first met my biological mother when I was 19. I knew her for 30 years. One visit to her home in the mountains in Colorado I met one of her friends. Their talk centered around wild parties from the 60s, probably from the time of the commune. Copious wine led to somewhat less copious pot. Her friend was an addict. Cocaine I think. At one point my biological mother asked if I wanted some pot. It took a minute to wrap my head around the concept of my mother offering me pot. I'd done it a few times in college. I accepted, if only for the surreal circumstance in which I suddenly found myself, high in the mountains, sequestered from the radar of any authority figure, not even my possible mother. The weird thing is, now that I think about it, my mom at home surely would never offer me pot like I was in Colorado (mostly because she and her peers, even though it was the beat generation, did not do it). I was 20 or 22 and she'd likely ultimately say nothing if I chose to indulge that one time. I still, though, out of some childish sense of parental authority, because the suburban environment I grew up in was so far off that grid, that “drugs as a casualty” mentality the boomers have, if I wanted the pot I would have felt a need to hide it from her. So I took a few hits, inhaled, and reveled in the irony of my situation, the shadow of dissonance that crept into those that the mountain rocks cast. My biological mother's friend was trying to kick her habit, to get clean. It was not going well. She was a mess. Her son, a bit younger than me, at one point said someone needs to be the parent. I could see his mother was unable to do her job. My biological mother, to my knowledge, never went down that road. My half-sisters, her daughters by the man she married, turned out alright. They struggled with issues common to most teens but it worked out in the end.

My folks always gave us choices, my natural born sister and I. Becoming a Bar Mitzvah, for example, as a Reform Jew, was totally up to me. Some Jews I know whose parents were from the “Silent” generation, or even the boomers, had that rite thrust upon them. In one case the kid rebelled, got into drugs and, from the little I knew, the experience only added anger to his life. I think that unbridled idealism was lost on me in the generation gap. The mother that might have, under different circumstances, raised me was of that hippie movement, one of the 300,000 (0 .15 % of a '67 US population) of young Americans who left home in the echos of Bob Dylan. They rejected protocol and went, in 1967's summers case, to San Francisco. It lasted all of five months, from the Monterey Pop Festival (June 16) to the Death of the Hippie (October 6) which they enacted in a mock funeral. That WAS the dawning of the age of Aquarius. It was a renaissance that happened at the Haight. That generation, my biological parents' generation, for better or worse, forever changed how future (and past) generations look at the world. It changed how they approach life, what they put into the air and into their bodies. They were the ones who burned their draft cards, went to Canada, or stayed and spoke out against the war when it reached boiling point with the Tet Offensive January 30, 1968. That was a turning point. It was the year of Robert Kennedy's Unwinnable War speech, the year of assassinations and concessions (by defense secretary McNamara) that no amount of bombing would stop north Vietnam.

I celebrated my third birthday February 1, 1968. I was a well-balanced (rode a bike the following year) clean-cut, crew-cut kid from the suburbs. My folks were true players of politics by the numbers. More in the Tom Hayden sense, Abbey Hoffman—not so much. Hippies spawned Yippies, of which Hoffman was a founder. As I write in my book, Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota, I was raised by and influenced by people who “gave democracy it's day in court.” I quoted New York congressman Allard Lowenstein who, along with Curtis Gans, organized the movement to “Dump Johnson” in 1966. Most of the people that I knew as a kid, the names that are indelible to me, those in an encapsulated roll-a-dex that brought a relished smirk to the faces of those I interviewed, were of my parents' generation. They were the ones safe inside the amphitheater in Chicago, not the Yippies and dead hippies being subjected to Gestapo tactics as “The whole world was watching.” Those young men and women were blue-collar, simply exercising their First Amendment right. Tom Hayden and the older Renee Davis were, according to Chicago's police, the brains behind the peaceful demonstration. They were the “Intellectuals” without whom the single permit to demonstrate in Grant Park during the '68 DNC would have been secured. For the Minnesota McCarthy delegation many, including my dad, were in the convention venue, in some cases unaware of the violence going on outside. Alpha Smaby, US Representative (1965-'69), was a member of the GI generation, or “the greatest generation.” I referred to her book Political Upheaval quite often. In the early 80s she interviewed both my folks and many of the names I'd come to know, then and now. She was the one who saw the “sickness” in the Democratic Party that year in Chicago. The anti-war movement knew no generation. We had the flower children being drafted to fight it; we had their counterparts, parents or grandparents trying to end it.

The GI generation (1901-24) were teenagers during the Great Depression. They went willfully (in most cases) to fight WWII which was a morally right and legal war. The Silent generation (1925-42) were too young to see action in WWII but missed out on the “summer of love.” They were, obviously depending on when they chose to procreate and/or adopt, the elders of those wide-eyed idealists who left home in 1967 as the song “She's Leaving Home” on Sgt. Peppers suggests. They were in search of a life outside the box. They were the boomer generation (1943-64), the hippies who became Yippies and activists. They begrudgingly fought JFK, LBJ, and Nixon's war. To be truly accurate, Vietnam (or the conflict that evolved into the war) was bred on Harry Truman's watch. My dad was of the Silent generation. His war opportunity was Korea. The Cold War began in 1945. The mentality, for the next four decades, indulged the constant containment and paranoid fear of Communism. With the 1952 election of General Eisenhower a hard Republican stance on Communism was expected. For my book's reading, the Vietnam War lasted 19 years, four months, five weeks and a day, to be exact. Historians differ. Winners and losers differ. The contention of dates is a matter of truth versus hubris, of competing for the most honorable mentions (how Nixon had hoped) in history books. When President Eisenhower committed US resources for “military advisement” to President Diem in 1955 the conflict began its proliferation to a war, a full-scale war at which 10 years later a pressured and paranoid President Johnson could take offensive action.

My dad missed fighting in WWII. I missed fighting in Vietnam. I was the generation next (1965-79), or X, succeeding the boomers. The Vietnam War was long, for its day. Many historians, for simplification, for comparison to the 16-year quagmire continuing in Afghanistan, discount the history of foreign rule (part of the problem) and call Vietnam a 10-year war, 1965-75. As far as a war against a war, this is (as my book reads) more accurate. So it is not inconceivable that a war could overlap, call on the next generation. Parents, boomers and their predecessors, feared their children would grow up a get sent to an illegal war. I write that the parents of my peers “did not see the bleak possibility that, under the current administration, the conflict in Southeast Asia could last long enough to draft their sons.” As for me, after the head injury in 1971 my serving in any capacity in the military was off the table (Blog post 5-29-17). The war wrapped up in the tenth year of our lives. Two of my friends from the old neighborhood went into the military. One, I think, was involved in the Lebanon attack. There was no major war though for generation X. Evidently, war skips a generation sometimes. Korea is possibly the most forgotten war ever fought. A “police action” it was called, although it became a concerted effort to beat the Communists north back to China. Even then, as Richard Nixon in his role as Eisenhower's vice president mapped it out on TV, the successive fall of Southeast Asian islands was predicted. Perhaps it is forgotten because it is what led to Vietnam. It was the beginning of the Ho Chi Minh trail, what led us to haphazardly discover the roof of the US embassy in Saigon 30 years later. When my dad took his physical for that war he passed, classified 1A. In 1951 he went to college and got a deferment. As I write in my book I thought he was made hyper-sensitive to violence, human oppression, and social injustice by witnessing the early stages of the Holocaust as a child in Germany. He grew up seeing, feeling, many of the Nuremberg laws enacted against Jews, followed by “Kristallnacht” in November, 1938. They remained in his subconscious, much the way older veterans of Vietnam carry mindful and\or physical scars from their experience. I think that if my dad had been drafted as a ground soldier in Korea those childhood scars would have been triggered. He'd definitely have been a candidate for “operational exhaustion,” that term applied to the mentally damaged soldier that was in WWI simply “shell shock.” I have a difficult time seeing my dad as a ground soldier.

In a story that did not make it into Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I talk to a man who was a teammate of my biological father. He played with him briefly (1965-67) on the Minnesota Gopher football team. My father was drafted—to play professionally. His teammate graduated from the U of M and went to work for Honeywell, the largest supplier to the military at the time. He was a dyed-in-the-wool hawk who had no problem assembling WMDs. I asked him whether my father would have shared his views, been able to justify dropping bombs indiscriminately from 30,000 feet. He said yes, that my father would (which I much later, through my half-brother—his son—found to be far from the truth) have had the same politics. Because he was black, and the teammate was white, my father may have not had the same opportunities when he got out of college (if he even got there in the first place.) I have learned that he was a draft pick from the South, and went to the U of M mostly due to his athletic prowess. Take that out of the story and you have an intelligent black man in the South in 1965. I got the sense that my biological father always wanted to make a living with his mind. The athletic ability just opened many doors for him and, I surmise, kept him out of a war. I was a, according to my parents (adopted), fairly athletic, adroit, kid before a head injury severely affected my fine motor coordination and balance. I probably would have made, like my biological father, a fine foot soldier.

That flowery tune in and drop out summer was a drop in time, a teaspoon in the ocean of history, a modicum of minutia in the annals altered altercations. Wars and people, generations, usually have a link, a chain of causation. At times they miss a link, they miss a son (or now a daughter). They are altered by life, by social climate. They are dependent upon socioeconomic factors or by adoptions. They are victims of history and those who continue to react to theirs. I think about all these factors now on the 50^th birthday of the “hippie” generation, the summer of love, and the paradigm shift that it invoked. I was born of this generation. I consider the bends in mine and my parents' (adopted and biological) histories that made me who I am as well as who I might have been. I look quickly, as the 49^th posthumous celebration of the brief birth of the hippie expires in 17 days.