That didn't post right. Here's a second go. That's what I get for copy-pasting a post a 2am.

I appreciate your stories and your passion. But the implication that "four dead in ohio" and the other things that you list trumps any of our experiences in later decades is an example of exactly the type of self-importance that Heather was talking about.

I grew up learning about, understanding, and appreciating your generation's struggles, and time and time again (as in your post) getting the sense that because issues that existed during your era have been resolved (or at least transformed) somehow that means that we have not had to face and overcome comarable struggles. But just becuase our struggles have been different and our reaction to them has come in a different form than yours does not mean that they are any less formative and valuable.

1. You experienced sexism and sexual repression in high school. I came of age during the era of AIDS (and watched it killing thousands while our government was silent for years) and experienced this new reality crashing headlong into the vestiges of the sexual liberation you fought so hard to achieve. You worried about the length of your skirt - and the unfairness and psychological repression that came with those worries - in high school. I worried about drugs and guns. People on the tail end of my generation were the first to have to walk through metal detectors to get into their public schools.

2. The high-pitched, keening screaming of other students in my high school watching a young boy murdered by a gang. The high-pitched, keeining screaming of mothers losing their children to drugs, to street violence. The quiet, extended sorrow of mothers watching their children eat ketchup soup for dinner because there wasn't any money for groceries.

3. My brother waking up every day wondering if he was going to get beat up again for being a "fag." People getting murdered for being fags.

4. Watching footage of Bobby Kennedy, JFK, MLK, and longing for someone like them to believe in. Experiencing these men through the hindsight of their deaths without ever experiencing the inspiration and optimism that they inspired while alive.

5. Watching my husband try to survive a serious illness with no health insurance and medications that cost $500 a month.

6. Hearing for years about potential impending global disaster due to the disregard and profligate practices of our capitalist culture and seeing leaders do absolutely nothing about it.

Imagine what life would be like if you couldn't go to safe schools, if everything beautiful and free about your schools was gutted bit by bit (music programs, art programs), if you saw prison populations exploding at exponential rates and drugs taking over your neighborhoods and factories closing one after the other. If your peers entered the military and died in wars not becuase of a draft but becuase they are too poor and their educational opportunities too inadequate to give them any other reasonable avenue for gettinga better life; if at the same time their veterans' benefits were getting gutted. If you watched every friend you knew growing up suffer the heartbreak of divorce and never felt secure about your family. If you loved watching your mother live her dreams and follow her career path but came home every day to an empty hose and watched other families eat dinner together on t.v. while you ate Taco Bell alone. If you grew up with the near-certain knowledge that the environment was being destroyed and all of the social safety nets your parents took for granted were likely to be long gone by the time you qualified for any of them (but long after you'd paid through the nose for what was left of them). If you longed to change things but experienced time after time that the wonderful freedom to protest that our parents worked so hard to achieve also resulted in defanging protest practices and rendering them pedestrian and ineffectual. Needing a new way to make change, being told that such new ways lack the magic, commitment, whathaveyou of days gone by.

I could go on.

But look, my point is not that we've had it worse or that it's your fault. I don't believe that. I know that the struggles of the sixties were profound and important and difficult and worthy of telling and retelling. I just take issue with the idea that the wonderful advances made by your generation to gain freedom, equality, the right to be different didn't also come with a pricetag, and that my generation has not also had its profound and profoundly moving struggles. We just show it in a different way. We may not have "four dead in ohio," but many of us could tell you about four dead, forty dead, from a lot of other things, and those kids lives and deaths go unnoticed and unsung.

-- DonaQuixote [Read DonaQuixote's other letters]Permalink Friday, November 7, 2008 02:07 AM

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That my previos post included some of your narrative by mistake, makign it look like I was claiming it as my own story. How incredibly ironic.

Well, whatever, nevermind. ;)