My youth and politics

Last night I watched this documentary on PBS, which demonstrated how close Nixon and Kissinger together came to dropping a nuclear bomb on Vietnam, and how important the anti-war movement was in preventing that from happening. For me–and for everyone else of my generation–the images of these times were the backdrop of our youths, we know all those politicians’ faces; and it was almost too painful to see all the marchers and demonstators visages, because they were US. I cannot bear seeing any of the horrific footage of the Vietnam War, because it brings back so many memories of boys that I knew who never came home, and of those who did come home and were so damaged. EVERY ONE of them that I knew was shattered in some way upon their return, having witnessed atrocities that no 19-year-old should have to experience.

In such a mood of rumination, I realized that the importance of such a documentary is not for we oldies to reminisce or rue our misguided youth. The service it provides is in presenting history to younger generations, who really know nothing about those troubled times, and may not even know that there was a tragic situation that dominated the coming of age for my generation. And if any younger folk do have some vague understanding of what those times were like, their understanding has been packaged to erase the vagaries of memory and to obscure the realities of who was on what side of the confrontations between The Establishment and the anti-War movements. My own biography is a good example of how easy it is to assume that the attitudes and outlooks we have now are the attitudes and outlooks we have always had. After watching this program, I had to confess to my age mates that contrary to my status now as a left-leaning progressive, as a college student I was not politically involved at all. As an undergraduate, I dated Air Force cadets, and even a sergeant in the Army. When the moratoriums were happening, I was waltzing in Vienna, as I was when the Kent State killings took place. I came home to a different America than I had left in the autumn of 1969. But by the time of Nixon’s second inauguration in 1972, I was working in Portland, Oregon, and was a card-carrying member of the Young Socialists Alliance, selling their newspaper on the Portland streets. I have no idea when or how this transformation had occurred. I think it had to do with having been abroad, living in a different culture, and learning that other human beings had different ideas about how to live a life ethically. And then again, I was only 23, and rebellion was in the air. Unlike many others, I remain radicalized, despite living a bourgeois life with family, home and professional work.

The other, more painful, thoughts that such journeys into the past evoke bring one into the present: how on earth did all that idealism, all that naive faith in progress toward a better future for everyone, devolve into the hateful divisiveness that we are dealing with now? I think I knew that such a view of future developments was optimistic at best after the results of the 1972 election. As I have said many times before, everyone I knew voted for McGovern. His crushing defeat made it clear that we progressive thinkers were always a minority, even in the 70s.The Watergate trials and Nixon’s resignation which were for us such a positive indication that American law and justice would prevail as we advanced into a more liberal world was an unsettling development for those who had to believe that America was the greatest country in the world, despite knowing nothing about any other country. We didn’t pay enough attention to everyone else whose lives did not as easily partake of the American Dream: the disenfranchised, the uneducated, the factory workers who lost their jobs when businesses and industries closed shop. So those so-called “silent majority” folks–as opposed to what Spiro Agnew called “the nattering nabobs of nihilism”, meaning US–continued to seethe as the economy plunged, and the America THEY knew seemed to disintegrate.

Well, enough of these ruminations, you get my drift. I still have a hard time looking at all those scenes of us marching, long-haired and braless, filled with a lot of foolish hope. But the documentary ends with a hopeful message: the moratoriums prevented nuclear holocaust. The last line spoken in the program is “keep up the fight”.

My parents and sad memories

The winter months are hard for me, not only because of the weather, but because I lost my parents, far too young, in these wintry months. Looking for something else, I ran across this photograph of the two of them, probably taken some time in the 1960s, in happier times.

My father Rudolph Esau died on January 25, 1985, only 57 years old. I was living in New Orleans at the time, and my mother was visiting friends in Idaho. She called me with the horrible news. We had to do a real search to get the news to my sisters, since we had all scattered far and wide, and none of us were in regular contact with each other.  I ended up calling the father of my youngest sister’s boyfriend to see if they could track her down. And my other sister was still living on the coast somewhere, I think. We have never gotten over it, that none of us were there with him. I still think of him every day, and I can still hear his voice on the phone; he had called me two days before he died of a massive heart attack. We were planning on flying to California for a job interview in two weeks, and he had called to say he would pick us up at the airport. I couldn’t afford to go to the funeral, so never got there until that proposed visit two weeks later.

My father was my grandmother’s younger son. He had just managed to get her into a good nursing home in Ojai, near where he lived in Ventura, when he died. She was devastated, of course, already 87 when it happened. We were in town, then, and visiting her on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1985, when I think she just decided that the loss of Rudy was enough; she died on that day. Because we were already in such shock at the loss of our father, we never really got to grieve her departure as we should have. Sophie Overgaard Esau was the rock of our family, and loved us all unconditionally.

We had always thought that we would lose our mother before our father, since she had been fighting cancer since 1974. It finally got her on February 25, 1988; she was only 61. We were all there for her passing, in hospice; we had been warned that she was fading and had all come to Santa Barbara, from our disparate parts of the country. I had indeed gotten the job that had brought me to that interview at a convention in California in 1985; I was teaching in Wisconsin by the time of her final illness, so had to take compassionate leave to be with her in her final hours. Her only sister flew out from Massachusetts for her funeral; I think it was one of the only times she had ever come to California. I completely fell apart at the service. In the end, I dedicated my first book to her. She had fought so hard to live; it has never seemed at all fair that she left us so soon.

It’s funny how a photograph can drum up such memories. I’m happy that we’re almost done with winter, and past those sad milestones. Those last years of the 1980s were so tumultuous and filled with so many passings that I’m sure it contributed to my desire to make a complete break and move to Australia.