Long Time Coming

When I was a kid, I thought history was kind of over.

My parents and other grown-ups had made all the history there was to be made. I could hear them talking about Pearl Harbor and then VJ day. Putting a man on the moon and protesting Vietnam and Dr. King and the Kennedys. But when I looked around, there was only pop culture happening, and all the government people did was talk about boring taxes

I was growing up in the shadow of a more passionate time. When people believed in ideals and were ready to start a counter-culture revolution for them. But not anymore. I found their trinkets in the attic and jokes about it in Mad magazine, but it seemed that everyone else had moved on before I had a chance to even understand what it was all about.

When I got to college I thought, this is my chance. This is where young people come alive and make their mark. This is where the protests and the shouting and the revolutionaries were.

But I looked around and there was none of that. I saw people in class not to think, just to pass the tests. Graduation was not a pursuit of wisdom and knowledge but a ticket to a paycheck. I saw people getting drunk and hooking up and buying clothes.

I read books about the 60s so I could find out what I had missed. I dressed in retro fringe jackets and 60s logo t-shirts and tie dye and grew my hair long. I listened to the stations that were playing protest songs and calling them 'classics'. I joined small campus groups who tried to raise awareness for nuclear disarmament and homelessness and the ecological evils of Styrofoam. We wrote letters to free Nelson Mandela. I directed plays that asked social action questions and wrote enthusiastic commentaries in the programs to try and wake people up. Mostly people would just completely ignore us, not even interested enough to be provoked.

Then something happened. A wall fell. A black man became leader of an apartheid nation. So that was it. History was happening somewhere else.

Since that was the case, I would just get on with my life. And it was good. I got a wife and a daughter. Had good times with my friends and family. Things were just peachy. Then History came home.

My wife held my infant daughter close as we watched the night vision video of a new War beginning. The first Gulf War. History was to be feared.

We joined the protests in the park, and it was a mess. Not because the establishment wanted to squash descent, but because the group that gathered was so pent up with their many disparate and sometimes mutually exclusive private revolutions that the focus was lost and the group fragmented. Before any sort of vision could be given to any sort of cause, it was over.

I began to think I'd never figure out History.

But at 11 o'clock last night History was given back.

It was as if in 1968 the assassinations caused a nation to suck in their collective breath in shock, and we've been holding it ever since. But last night, 40 years later, a nation could breath out again. I believe the hope candidate is going to take us to a place where we can aspire again---instead of just reacting. Where we can lead again, instead of just dominating. The healing amongst ourselves and with the rest of the world can now begin in earnest. That new day has dawned.

History started happening again, and this time I was there for it.