At 6:22 am Eastern Time today, I turned 54. (It’s tough having your birthday sandwiched between those of Dan Quayle and Ronald Reagan . . . I take comfort in celebrating my mutual birthday with Adlai Stevenson.)
Forty years ago, when I was 14 and the Vietnam War was still in the headlines, and Roe v. Wade hadn’t been decided and the United States was less than two decades past Brown v. Board of Education, I imagined that things would be so different by the time I was my parents’ age – although I am older now than they were then.
By the time I was 14, President Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had all been assassinated – and their deaths (as well as the nightly news reports about the Vietnam War and the death of a brilliant young man whose brothers I knew therein ) had become a part of my daily landscape – a piece of our daily lives. By the time I was 14, college students had been murdered for protesting against the war at Kent State University in Ohio.
By the time I was 14, Ms. Magazine was just about to launch. When I was 16, Ms. published the horrifying story of Geri Santoro, (warning: graphic photos) a victim of domestic violence who died a horrifying death in a California motel room as a result of an illegal abortion. I will never forget that story and I will never, ever be anything other than pro-choice as a result.
By the time I was 14, the Stonewall Riots were two years in the past. I “didn’t know” any gay people when I was growing up . . . of course, I did. And I was lucky enough to have my eyes opened and my heart expanded in college and thereafter.
When I was 14, I belonged to an experimental theatre group (thank you, Mom and Dad!) where we met and did theatre exercises and wore bell-bottoms and sat on a dirty floor eating pistachio nuts and saw Birth of a Nation and talked about everything.
That seemed the thing then: talking about everything. And listening. Of course, the listening was easy when what you were hearing was what you believed.
There is so little listening now, it seems. And I don’t fault those who would do it in a heartbeat if there was anything worth hearing.
When the national discourse is driven by those who seem to believe that the steps toward progress taken are somehow against our national interest – when it is driven by people who think that the rights of women, our GLTB community, minority ethnic groups are not essential to our progress as a nation – that is disheartening. Well, more than disheartening – frightening, actually.
Because so much good has happened because of progressive voices and progressive politics in the years since I was 14.
But so much more needs to be done.
Forty years ago, when I was 14, I thought so much more would have been done by now. I didn’t expect an African-American President, I didn’t expect that a woman would have made a serious run for the Presidency, I’m not sure I expected a country in which DADT would have been repealed (I’m not sure I thought about it).
What I did expect, though, back when I was 14, was that by the time I turned 54, being pro-choice would be the national norm, being anti-war would be celebrated, embracing differences among us would bring us together as a nation.
Maybe I was naïve.