Soapbox Junkie

In our previous episode, our impressionable young protagonist was a high school student in the early seventies. This was not only a time of great social and political upheaval, it was also a time during which the effects of that turmoil split American society, more starkly than at any time since the Civil War, into liberal and conservative camps.

I felt that societal split quite keenly. It was virtually impossible to be an American male teenager at that time and not be vehemently against the war in Vietnam. After all, we each had our draft cards and wanted desperately to end the war before our numbers came up in the draft lotteries. Unlike boys of previous wartime generations, however, we were exposed to the horrors of war BEFORE we were drafted, in living color during every evening TV news broadcast. We knew what lay in store for us if we were drafted, which made protest and activism easy choices.

Where the MLK and RFK assassinations made us doubt, the Kent State Massacre made us fear. We could see that if we didn’t force the government to end the war, its continuation would be forced upon us at gunpoint. Many of us believed we faced a choice between being shot on the streets here or in rice paddies over there.

It’s a point of honor among many in my generation that we ended the war in Vietnam, through mass protests and political activism (and WITHOUT social media, or even cell phones!). We created a popular uprising that forced the most powerful government in history to bend to our collective will. Of course, reality was a bit more complicated, but that was, and has been, our mindset. Which is why, I believe, my generation has had such a love-hate relationship with government and why we have failed to create a cohesive and coherent political consensus during the past 35 years. We want government provide for our needs and guarantee the rights of all people, yet we fly into a rage when government exercises the authority necessary to do so. We’re just funny that way. And, as we age, I suspect we’re going to get a lot funnier.

One of the other pivotal events of that time, and one that was particularly important to me, was the rise of the environmental movement. Back then, the focus was primarily on pollution and secondarily on overdevelopment. Global warming was only hinted at by a handful of scientists back then and only among close colleagues. In short, this was way before environmentalism was chic and before green had a significance beyond St. Patrick’s Day.

I grew up in a rural area of New York State where lakes, streams, and thickly forested hills dominated the environment. When I was very young, the area was rich with wildlife. By the time I was a teen in the early 70s, however, the loss of bio-diversity was unmistakable and it deeply saddened me.

In 1972, I became part of the movement in an official sense when I joined the crew of the sloop Clearwater. That vessel was an authentic reproduction of an 18^th century Hudson River Sloop, the principle form of conveyance on the river for more than 200 years. The Hudson River Sloop Restoration was the organization that owned and maintained the Clearwater and launched it as a living symbol and classroom in the fight to rescue the river from more than a century of industrial pollution. Legendary folk singer Pete Seeger became the spokesman for the organization and a symbol for environmentalism in his own right. I was privileged to spend three summers on the Clearwater, often with Pete, and have treasured memories of sitting on deck singing great old folk songs with him and the rest of the crew. Those were magical summers.

Those were also the summers during which I was introduced to Big Brother. Wherever we docked in towns and villages along the river, and took school and civic groups on educational day sails, a nondescript pickup truck with a camper back would always park within sight of us. The driver, a middle-aged man who always wore the same bad blond wig and gaudy blue Hawaiian shirt, would get out of the truck and film our activities several times a day using a Super 8 movie camera. During my first summer on board, I asked one of the ship’s officers about our watcher. He told me, quite casually, that the funny man with the camera was the FBI agent assigned to us. The fellow had apparently introduced himself at one point. From then on, I made a point of waving at Big Brother whenever I saw him filming us, and always in a friendly manner. I’ve often wondered what my FBI file contains.

Thus began my journey through the left side of American politics, when I first embraced the principles of environmentalism (which demonized big business), the collectivist hippie counterculture, civil rights, a disdain for authority, and liberalism. To this day, my mother insists that I was anything but a hippie. And, if we still spoke to one another, I would respond with, “But Mom, you drove me to the boat!”

Next: Chapter 3, in which I recount how a high school teacher assigned The Communist Manifesto and I was the only one to take it seriously.