The Passing Parade

Like it or not we are both in the parade and witness to it. Children and grandchildren of Nazis must have asked their fathers what the hell they were thinking and doing. Collectively they were a nation of sociopaths. Will future generations wonder what happened to America in this era of crime, imbecility and megalomania? We seem to have made a virtue out of this perverse sludge. Whether this period of incivility is the last gasp of neglect, male domination and race-hatred or the first breath of fascism, remains to be seen.

Shortly after WWII a radio program aired on CBS called You Are There. It was a dramatization of pivotal moments in world history as if the current technology was present to broadcast the event. With my face close to the speaker, I listened to Joan of Arc at the stake, Socrates downing his hemlock smoothie and the signing of our Constitution. By 1953 the show moved to T.V. hosted by Water Cronkite whose voice alone lent it further authenticity.

Recently, with the death of Daniel Ellsberg, my friend Adele remembered attending a small gathering in the immediate aftermath, with some Rand employees instrumental in xeroxing those Pentagon Papers. History was being made which eventually ended the war in Vietnam.

In 1949 I was in Peekskill, N.Y. with my friend and family attending a Paul Robeson concert when our bus was hit by a barrage of rocks thrown by a mob of vigilantes. We took to the floor along with broken glass, among the first to say we were stoned at a concert. This was a preview of armed violence sanctioned by police.

Over the decades I arranged for speakers to address civil rights and civil liberty issues and disarmament at the Unitarian Fellowship. Also at rallies, vigils and phone-banks, none of which absolves me from being just a tiny footnote to the chronicle of degradation.

We are all part of what has happened and still unfolding. I fear for my children and all those younger than I, which is just about everybody. The trajectory of history seems to be in retrogression but I choose to regard it as a blip in the upward spiral. I stand at the barricade in the forum of public opinion believing in the force of goodwill and that the precepts of the world’s first Democracy will prevail even as our past misdeeds of human bondage have been exhumed. 

Walter Cronkite’s voice is in my ear saying, You are there.

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