Beginnings

I can't for the life of me remember where I was when the ball dropped on 1968. Funny, I can remember where I was in 1969, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, but not 68. Of course, this is consistent with my experience and life story - it was the last year of my youth, my "preconsciousness". After my spiritual awakening of August 1968, my life has been a consistent, accountable whole. From that point on I was an actor, an intention, a will, upon the world. Before then, I was merely a passive entity in it.

I don't remember much about the tumultuous events that were happening around me in January 1968. That is, I remember them, but they had little or no impact on me. I, as I believe most of the country, still felt that the JFK assassination was a tragedy, a random act of violence, and that nonetheless it did not, was not, deterring us from going about the business of perfecting the world. I did not really understand Viet Nam outside of the paradigm that it was a just and necessary war simply because we were involved in it, and we were, after all, the good guys - the purveyors of truth, justice, prosperity for the regular guy. My father, the WWII/Normandy vet stood for what we were all about - doing what had to be done to straighten out the mess back in the old country. Once we won we would help them get back on their feet and then go away and everybody could live a decent life. The stories of the first generation, the immigrants, still weighed heavy in our, the Boomers', consciousness - many if not most were of the immigrants were still with us and could aver that life outside this country was brutish, hard and unfair.

And look around! We were not rich, by any means, and by today's inflated expectations we would be considered quite poor, but we felt so materially well off that even as a freshman in HS we had discussions, debates really, about how materialism was somehow ruining us as a generation. More than once I had brought up what was the true feeling of most of my generation, yes, even us low middle class kids - our parents wanted us to have everything they did not have. Of course, that was material goods and comfort. Unfortunately, what we wanted most was everything they DID have - community, family closeness, a sense of belonging.

I didn't really get the civil rights movement either, despite the fact that I had been listening to "black" radio stations since 1965. In those days, in the NYC metro area, there had been 3 Top 40 stations - WINS, WMCA and WABC. By 1965 I was bored with it, with the Beatles and the British Invasion, with the inanity of most music they purveyed outside of the Beach Boys and Four Seasons, my great influences. My cousin, who was in HS in an integrated school, told me about the "black" stations - WWRL, WLIB and WNJR, the latter out of Newark. I began listening to these stations instead, and discovered a whole new world, both musically and culturally. They had relatively weaker signals, and I actually had to go to Two Guys and get a better transistor radio (which I got from my paper route money) and had to position it in certain spots to get these stations in. There was an optimal spot for each of the three stations.

I had never gotten the racial thing - It just never made sense to me. So Negros are dark. So what? Chinese have slanty eyes. So what? They have brains, right? They can speak, right? They can think, right? I used to try to listen to a local show on the local radio station, WJLK, the "Gospel Train" - I loved the music. Mysteriously, my mother used to change the station at that point, to WNEW. I chalked it up to her not liking Gospel music for some unknown reason (she was very religious). I never got the message that it was a racial thing. My father worked two jobs, and one of them was at a local supermarket, frequented by many blacks, but also many whites. I never saw my father treat black people any differently than whites. Both local high schools were totally integrated. Back in the early 60s, during the Freedom Rider days, I can remember being in the car with my family and the radio on, and when the news came that Wallace had to let the blacks into the University of Alabama, we all cheered!

If there was race hate around, I never got the memo. I found it odd when, by 7th grade, I was called by some a "nigger lover". I didn't take it as an insult - I just found it a really odd thing to be called. Of course I'm a nigger lover! I'm a whitey lover, too! And a Chink lover! Isn't that what they're teaching us in Sunday school? Ridiculous...

It's not that I didn't know racism existed - the Huntley-Brinkley Report demonstrated night after night that it did exist - in the South. But here in the north things were okay. We lived in an all white town, but had to drive through all black neighborhoods to get to church, shopping and Grandma's house. I could not tell the difference between their neighborhoods and ours - the houses looked the same, the cars looked the same. There were no riots, no violence. When I met black people I smiled and was friendly as I would be to anyone, and they smiled back and were friendly like anyone. Sure, they spoke differently, but so did my grandparents. What's the big deal?

So by January 1, 1967, when there had been riots, they seemed remote - Watts, Detroit, even Newark seemed like they were as far away as Selma and Jackson and Mongomery. More importantly, they seemed to be a continuation of the inexorable drama of justice, just like Nam seemed to be part of the inexorably pageant of freedom. And just like all the new housing developments going up all around were part of the inexorable march of progress and a better life. It would be a stretch to say that I took such movements for justice, freedom and progress for granted, but only a slight stretch.

And they were part of my own family's story as well. The first generation came here to escape poverty. The second generation fought to ensure and spread freedom. And now it would be our turn to forward progress - scientific progress, social progress, hygenic progress. It was all part of the inexorable plan.

The Communists would eventually be defeated, just as the Nazis had been and the Huns before them. Freedom and democracy would prevail because it just made sense. I mean, look at us! We had freedom, democracy, and nice houses and cars and schools and good health and all the toys and stuff you could ever want. They were all part of the same thing. Who wouldn't want that?

And now we knew our destiny was space - we not only had the Jetsons, we had the reality of Mercury and Gemini and now Apollo. Sure, there had been a set back - 3 astronauts, including the popular Ed White and Gus Grissom, had died. But it had been an accident, and we weren't about to slink off. The moon was in reach! Can you believe it? We will be on the moon before I am out of HS! At this rate I'll be able to take my kids on vacation to Mars!

(Later in 1968, when "2001 A Space Odyssey" came out, its depictions of Pan Am flights and Bell video phones and Hilton Hotels seemed not just plausible, but inevitable.)

We were just a couple of years removed from the 1964-65 World's Fair, which I had the great fortune to live nearby. My family and I went perhaps 4 or 5 times. The Fair was steeped in the promise of technology, of progress, changing our lives dramatically in the very near future. AT&T, GM, GE all had pavillions that stressed how exciting and better the world was on the precipice of being, thanks to American technology. We were indeed the good guys!

It was hard not to see a sparkling, sterling future ahead, nuclear annihilation be damned!

Even given all this, the fact of the matter was that I was 15, a great student, a great athlete, attractive, into girls, sports, music and most of all, the aggrandizement of my own ego. I had grown up in the 60s, and living in the 60s more stuff happened of serious note and import in one week than we could expect nowadays in an entire year. That we had Nam, Civil Rights, Space, an impending presidential election, the Cold War (even Korea, as we would soon be reminded, by the Pueblo Incident in late January) going on in the background did not register much except as discussion topics in social studies classes. We had lived thru Civil Defense drills in grammar school, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination, all by 5th grade. It was part of the scenery, of the pageant, but not the substance of my life at that time.

No, it was all about, as Reggie Jackson would later put it, the magnificence of me.

I was also somewhat of a juvenile delinquent at the time - drinking heavily on the weekends, roaming the streets with a gang, doing petty prankish things, rumbling, intimidating. Later that year, when I ran for class president, one kid came up to me in astonishment and said, "Wow! I had no idea you were smart!" I was truly someone of multiple minds...

The only thing of note of that January in 1968 that I can recall is a basketball game where I came in off the bench and became the high scorer, grabbing rebound after rebound, getting steal after steal, making shot after shot. The next game I was benched again. I asked the frosh coach why? He told me the varsity coach wanted to develop taller players. I lost interest in basketball after JV the following year...

Oh - and there was this brief romance with Barbara. Barbara was beautiful, shapely, and had the sweetest personality. We went steady for pretty much the whole month. She dumped me and felt guilty about it. No matter. My ego wasn't dented - after all, it was she who had cheated. Boy, I must really have been overbearing...

Such a little thing like that was not about to dent the ego of the Imperial Me!

So that's how we entered 1968 - full of optimism, of inevitability, of egotism. Both me, and the country.