Letters to the Editor
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The Year the World Ended
It was the year I continually try to forget but can't, probably because I try so hard. Everything turned on a dime. We were looking at the arc of The Great Society the way we watched Challenger taking off years later, and everything stopped the same way.
I remember standing next to my car in a drive-in restaurant parking lot in Maryland near DC when the news of Dr. King's assassination fell out of my car's radio like dead birds. Apparently others heard it as well, as I heard some triumphant whoops and hollers and a few guffaws. I knew I was in the Wrong Place. I had no idea where the Right Place was. I'd been involved with The Movement since 1960 and hadn't seen MLK in person since '63 at the Great March, which had been the spring of all our optimism. Now, in the spring of '68 we were plunged into winter. I watched the southern skyline, knowing that later there would be a different light above the trees. I headed in that direction.
I was born and raised in DC. The riots are still difficult to talk about or even think about. All I could do was infiltrate the city boundaries with a friend who'd already come back from Vietnam, and make my way to the old places where I'd spent my childhood and teen years, which happened to include the 14th Street corridor and H Street NE. I remember walking along H Street, talking to people there, trying to get a feel for where this was going to go in the days and weeks to come. Since it seemed like the end of the world at the time, I really didn't forsee the decades of looking at those same scars over and over again. The rejuvenation of those neighborhoods now feels almost as strange as the destruction of the riot times.
That summer I went back to hear Bobby Kennedy speak at a parking lot which had been a rubble-strewn area when I was a child -- a strange juxtaposition at the moment -- just a few doors from the apartment over a store where I'd grown up. The apartment where the living room had no windows, on Park Road, the two blocks of that street which in my lifetime have never been anything but slum, desolation row, and now, at its peak, barrio. But that parking lot where the debris had lain for 20 years was a sign of hope. Then RFK headed off to LA and that was soon that.
I watched Marion Barry establish himself in "my" city. Brushes with the Nation of Islam seemed surreal and comical. My father carried a handgun on the seat of his car.
Nothing was real. Nothing mattered.
I'd already failed my physical upon trying to join my friends who'd already gone to Vietnam. No good. Defective. Heart murmur.
I descended into the miasma. Drugs didn't seem to change anything one way or the other. Neither did drinking. It all looked the same all the time.
I married an alcoholic for a while. She was an artist. Dead now, like several of my friends who went to be in the war. The rest of them seem like dead souls now.
There is no way of dressing up that year nor the ones immediately following. It took several years to shake off that hangover. to wake up from that nightmare.
I still routinely dream of it. The past really is no place to live.