I was born on May 4th: the anniversary of Kent State, the Haymarket Riots, and the student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. It is also the anniversary of the formation of Greenpeace and the UK General Strike. It is the anniversary of the day the first Freedom Riders in Washington D.C. climbed on buses destined for the South. Coincidentally, my birth was also in 1976, 200 years to the day after Rhode Island became the first colony to renounce allegiance to King George.
I don’t know much about astrology, but it would seem I was born under a turbulent star.
In high school, I went through of a phase of idealizing the 1960s. My friends and I dubbed and re-dubbed cassettes of The Doors, the Fifth Dimension, the original Broadway cast of Hair. We went to Turtle Hill Beads after school to sculpt Fimo clay baubles and burn Queen of the Night incense. We opted out of A.P. Biology in favor of Ecology, where we happily traded dissecting baby pigs for building solar ovens and sowing wildflower seeds out by the football field. I tacked postcards of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison on my bedroom wall, right by the poster of spinning tie-dyed peace signs that read “The World is a Wheel and It Will All Come ‘Round Right.” (Deep, man…) My senior year I even successfully lobbied the student council to skip whatever dumb saccharine tune they were planning for class song and instead use Break on Through, which at the time seemed super subversive, and so, so TRUE, YOU KNOW???
Good lord.
The funny thing is that despite all this, I was such a God-almighty goody-goody. I wanted to be Janis Joplin, but without the sex and drugs…and frankly not TOO much of the rock and roll, because after all, I needed to save time for speech meets, National Honor Society, and Students Against Drunk Driving. My spinning-peace-sign poster came from the most anti anti-establishment store ever, the Deck the Walls at the Burnsville Mall. And although I knew every lyric to every song in Hair, I didn’t know what half of them meant. I distinctly remember once going to the oversized three-volume dictionary we kept in the living room and learning a LOT. (Although I also remember there was no definition for Kama Sutra, so I had to wait and learn that at a college house party like everybody else.)
There aren’t many pictures of me from high school, because it was pre-digital and pre-social media; in the pictures that do exist, I’m mostly wearing a play costume, or band uniform, or choir robe (all VERY rock ‘n’ roll…) But I do have a photo of me in this macramé vest I wore ALL THE TIME. I was positive that, in it, I ceased to be the quiet, shy nerd I’d been for 16 years, and was instead transformed into a psychedelic, flower-child mash-up of Stevie Nicks, Cher, and Mama Cass. Are you ready for it?
Yep.
YEP.
The way we see ourselves is often so different from how we actually appear.
(Yes, those ARE tiny satin roses. Also, it’s only half a vest, because it was stitched to the front of the t-shirt. JUST LIKE JANIS.)
Now, there were times I wove beads into my hair, and times I wore my uncle’s Army coat with my round John Lennon sunglasses, and I ALWAYS had a peace sign pin on my letter jacket (hard-core, man), but for the most part, I looked like a teenage volunteer librarian.
I was the poster child for “square.”
But regardless of what I looked like, inside I’d started to change. The Gulf War happened my freshman year of high school, and my sense of safety cracked a little. A tiny hairline fissure, to be sure, but it was there.
Freshman year was also when I had US History, and by the spring we’d gotten to the late 60s: Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, the assassinations of MLK and JFK and RFK, the nascent environmental movement, and seemingly perpetual protests, marches, and riots. I imagined how exhilarating it would have been to have lived then, with society on a precipice. And from the comfortable vantage point of the future, (and the unearned certitude that comes with being 15) the right answers seemed so obvious. I was POSITIVE I would have done something to make the world better.
Fast forward to sophomore year and I’m standing outside the high school, handing out daisies to bewildered students as they head to homeroom.
I was ready for a REVOLUTION.
Now, you might be wondering what I, with my tucked-in t-shirt and mom-jeans, would possibly need to revolt against. And that would be a fair question. I didn’t really understand it then, but I was raised with a tremendous amount of privilege. I was a white kid in a white town, middle-class and healthy. I was straight (as far as I knew), cis (I didn’t know what that was), and good at school (except for gym.) My parents encouraged my sister and me to join any extracurricular activity we wanted (even if there was a participation fee), and take any class we wanted (even if it required a TI-81 Graphing Calculator.) And although I wasn’t a cool kid (reference picture) I wasn’t an outcast either. I had a pretty easy life.
So why this desire for revolution? Who knows. I mean, I was always a real weirdo, so that was probably part of it. But also, as much as I thought everything exciting had happened in the 60s, a LOT of stuff went down my sophomore year of high school. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, for one thing. Also, the beginning of the Bosnian War. Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court despite the testimony of Anita Hill, and David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana despite having been Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Magic Johnson tested positive for HIV. Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted, and the cops who beat up Rodney King were not. And in case that wasn’t enough, that fall was the infamous Halloween Blizzard.
It was not a quiet year.
But the more obvious reason for the fixation was that our school’s spring play that year was set during the Vietnam War. The play was pretty terrible, but the music our teacher used was great: Scott McKenzie singing San Francisco, Jimi Hendrix’ rendition of The Star Spangled Banner, fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower, and perhaps most especially, the I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag by Country Joe and the Fish (the version recorded live at Woodstock.) And suddenly, all these Gen X theatre nerds are sitting around the cafeteria, singing “And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam…”
(As an illustration of the kind of non-filthy hippies we were, I’ll point out that most of us only hummed the word “damn.” I mean, what were we, anarchists?)
Also, we really DIDN’T know what we were fighting for.
But suddenly I was Abbie Hoffman (if Abbie Hoffman got all his homework in on time and wore turtlenecks and stirrup pants.) I passed out the aforementioned daisies, bought at Teri Jo’s Floral on Main Street. I helped my buddy Bill spray paint a peace sign on his gas cap. My friend Stacey and I petitioned Mrs. Busse (the A.V. lady) to borrow the big rolls of colored paper she had for students to make banners for wrestling meets and pep rallies. The next day everyone arrived at school to discover the halls had been papered with cryptic posters that read “BEADS”, “FLOWERS”, “FREEDOM”, and “HAPPINESS.” Our activism was enthusiastic, but curiously unspecific.
Until it wasn’t.
That was the year I went to my first protest; it was a sit-in in the high school gymnasium. A new health elective had been added to the course catalogue and among other things, it covered methods of birth control (SCANDAL) and a segment of the town’s population had managed to get it shut down (WHY IS THIS STILL A THING). The student body, equal parts livid at the outside control of our curriculum and thrilled at an excuse to get out of class for an afternoon, organized a demonstration. I was torn. It seemed like a cause I ought to fight for, but also, I didn’t want to miss English. This will probably come as a surprise to absolutely no one, but ol’ Merit-Scholar-Timothy-Leary here never skipped a class in her life.
At Prior Lake Senior High, sophomore Depth English was taught by Arlys Johnson, who was famously feared as a teacher who actually made you work for your grades. But although she was definitely tough, she had a dry sense of humor and an ability to make Julius Caesar interesting that indicated she might be a little more approachable than the other kids realized. So I caught her outside the English office the morning of the sit-in and dumped my dilemma on her eminently sensible shoes.
She said “I can’t give you permission to miss class. It is important to stand up for what you think is right, but sometimes there are going to be consequences for that. I will say this, though. I will probably forget to take attendance this afternoon.”
So I went.
The first follow up to that story is “Let’s hear it for Ms. Johnson.”
The second is that it worked. We got the class back.
We’d made a difference, and it felt GOOD.
Fast forward to 2020, and I’m protesting at the Governor’s Mansion, holding a giant poster that says “Defund the Police,” and walking pointedly toward a cop, with a very sharp knife hidden in my backpack.
Full disclosure: I’m still JUST as much of a goody-goody as I was in high school. The poster was randomly handed to me by a complete stranger, the cop I was headed toward was my buddy Phuong, and the knife was in my backpack because I’d just come from cutting rhubarb at a neighbor’s house. (Yep, I protested with a backpack full of rhubarb, which is possibly the most Minnesotan thing ever.)
I’ve never been through anything quite like the Twin Cities during the “unrest” following the murder of George Floyd, and that includes living in New York City on September 11. I put “unrest” in quotes, because that’s what people are calling it, I guess. But calling this “unrest” is like calling the Covid pandemic “a little bug that’s going around.” This is enormous. Society actually is on a precipice, which means I got exactly what high-school-me wanted.
And it sucks.
That’s the thing about revolution. It’s not all macramé vests and Buffalo Springfield albums. The Boston Tea Party was not a party. The Freedom Rides weren’t a road trip. Woodstock was a filthy, rainy, congested mess to which most of the promised acts didn’t show. Even the high school health class we fought so hard to get reinstated turned out to be significantly less salacious than we’d hoped.
But they were all still worth it.
Listen, I’m never going to be the one out looting and rioting. I’m not even likely to be arrested for civil disobedience as mild as breaking curfew. My activism is measured; some might say “timid.” My protesting is stridently peaceful. I like my fellow demonstrators to have Covid masks and reusable water bottles. And if I’m 100% honest, I prefer working community clean-ups and food pantries, and researching and learning. (“Okay, Google... ‘defund the police’: meaning…”)
I think I might be a terrible coward.
In the last 25 years I’ve learned how very privileged I actually am, and yet I’m still struggling with what that means about my place in the new order.
I’ve learned how many mistakes I’ve made in the past, and yet I’m still making new ones, every single day.
I’ve learned how few things I actually see as black and white, and yet I nervously avoid confrontation with people who don’t acknowledge shades of gray.
Most especially I’ve learned how scared I am of revolution.
And yet I still want to be part of it.
Because 25 years from now, some teenage girl who isn’t even born yet is going to idealize Right Now. She’ll be obsessed with, I don’t know, fashion masks and K-pop, and when she’s taking US History and they’re studying 2020 (they will be) and the world isn’t fixed yet (it won’t be), and she’s learning about George Floyd, and Covid, and the impeachment trial, and climate change, and Black Lives Matter, and whatever else is still coming this year because IT’S ONLY JUNE, she’ll imagine how exhilarating it would have been to have lived Right Now, with society on a precipice. And from her comfortable vantage point of the future, the right answers will seem so obvious. She’ll be POSITIVE she would have done something to make the world better.
And I want to be able to tell her that I did.
