An essay in Salon magazine titled "An open apology to boomers everywhere" has the subtitle "Your earnest, self-important prattle has gotten on Gen X nerves for decades. But now we finally get it."
Sorry, but no, you don't. The author writes "when we watched Barack Obama's victory speech on Tuesday night, we looked into the eyes of a real leader. ... Suddenly it makes sense, what you've been trying to tell us about John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr."
While your euphoria is understandable, consider the analogy. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. Now that Obama has defeated the conservatives, considering their worship of guns, has he just become their moose? How long will your euphoria last?
Besides, JFK, MLK and RFK weren't really our leaders. Euphoria isn't what it was about. Martin Luther King, Jr., became famous with Rosa Parks and the bus boycott of Montgomery Alabama. In 1955. The first of the boomers were nine years old. John F. Kennedy was elected in November 1960 when the oldest boomers were just starting high school.
It wasn't the speeches nor leadership of either JFK or MLK that inspired the boomers. It was in February of 1960, long before JFK even became the nominee, when some college students sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Jim Crow South had shrugged off MLK, but they couldn't ignore the sit-ins. The audacity of their protest swept the nation, sit-ins started in other cities.
But the Greensboro business community knew that once summer came the college students would leave. So they stalled, and when summer came the college students left. Only then the local high school students took over the sit-ins and the business community caved.
The sit-ins inspired the Freedom Riders to take integrated buses across the south in 1961. But when the buses were burned and riders beaten, the ride was called off. Again, it was students that rallied to restart the ride, continuing on through more mob beatings.
This wasn't a time marked by coded rhetoric and hidden racism like the Palin rallies of late. Lynchings were still occurring in the Jim Crow South. The rides started in May, Medgar Evers was shot to death in June. The protesters weren't inspired by JFK or MLK, it was the other way around.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired by the sit-ins, organized a 1963 protest march in Birmingham, Alabama. The police nonviolently arrested the protestors and in his memoirs MLK recounts how he and his leaders were defeated. Until they decided to call on the local high school students. The massive marches by these kids caused the police to turn violent and the international outrage over the beatings of children caused the business community to cave.
After MLK's dream speech, students in Birmingham tried to integrate the schools. Mobs were blocked by police. Still, four children were killed by a conservative bomb a few weeks later. Being beaten and killed by conservatives was a constant occurrence for boomers. Peace protests later were regularly attacked by "hardhats" with clubs. In Chicago, in Grant Park, a police riot savaged protestors in 1968.
The fundamental belief of conservatives is that more violence solves everything. Beat protestors, lynch leaders, bomb countries, kill political opponents, torture, maim, and intimidate. The audacity of nonviolent sit-ins to defy the intimidation of conservatives was an afront to their very existence. For conservatives, it still is.
It was, in fact, the nonviolent protests of boomer high school and college kids who inspired MLK and JFK, not the other way around. Similarly, it was the nonviolent anti-Vietnam War protests of the mid-1960s that inspired MLK to oppose the war, and for Robert Kennedy to oppose the war. It was being beaten and killed during their protests as if they were pariah that made the endorsements of JFK and RFK and MLK so significant to boomers.
The boomers were inspired in their youth by ideas. By the horror of the emerging knowledge of the Holocaust. By the nonviolent protests of Gandhi. And by the affluence amidst the poverty and racism that surrounded them. It was not a stretch to connect the deadly hate against Jews of Hitler with the Jim Crow South nor to bridge the racial divide with communal sex, but you have no idea of the vehemence that it provoked among the adults. And so the boomers in their youth were American pariah disdained by their parents as often as their adult neighbors.
So when JFK and MLK and later RFK broke the taboo and endorsed their protests, gave credence to their lives, and seemingly removed their untouchable status, there was a form of euphoria among the boomers. But each of these endorsements met with adult retribution.
As each of them endorsed the boomers, each was assassinated. It was seemingly our euphoria that killed them. They died when they vindicated our protests, our ideas of right and wrong. And that was what our "self important prattling" was about. Ironically, your euphoria now in Grant Park occurred at the exact place where our next round of beatings took place the same year MLK and RFK died for our sins.
If all you think about is euphoria, while the devil is still in the White House, you may well be on your way to repeating history. You think that conservatives who reveled in torture and laughed about executions will just join the Kumbaya when Obama becomes President?
Sorry, but no.
When Richard Nixon left the White House a congressional delegation went to Fort Knox to ensure that the gold reserves were still there. But the devil in the White House now smirks with 700 billion dollars in his swag bag. Singing bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran. You will be very lucky if in his last hours of contempt he doesn't bomb Iran and laughingly watch the armaggedon of a closed Strait of Hormuz in flames. Burn, baby, burn.
Sorry, but no.
The Salon author wrote "We never want to go back to our old way of thinking. Sure, we'll still be our irreverent, self-deprecating, exasperating selves, but we also want to believe. We want to follow this man, and trust him, and give him our full support."
Good luck with that. Look at the vote count. Half the population still worships the devil. The firehoses of conservative vitriol and racism will start soon enough. Are you prepared to be the new American pariah and stand against them? Watch the video of Palin ralies. They don't believe you are Americans. They believe real Americans revel in torture and bombing and bigotry and killing.
You think I'm prattling again. You think one person is going to change the world. While you watch. You think the Cheneys and Bushs and Feiths and Yoos and Addingtons have been vanquished instead of fading among your neighbors to brew more evil.
Sorry, but no.