FORTY YEARS
This whole year has been periodically emotionally charged for me, as I’m sure it has for many others of my generation. 1968 was a remarkable time. The more I look back at it, the more I come to know that it created a long arc of future for me, and for many others. Compressing all that into a short essay is impossible. The personal and societal facts alone could take a book, so I won’t even try.
It seemed a time of dreams – dreams dying, dreams deferred, and dreams being born. In January, I went to a Sunday night church service at my school, Wesleyan University. Not something I would ever do, the only one I attended during my time there. But this one was special. I was taking a number of religion courses then, not because I was devout, but because it seemed a more realistic way to learn about human aspirations towards ultimate truth than delving into philosophy. I had a strong sense that the biological basis of life had an underlying link with man’s drive to merge the infinite with the temporal. Evolution, DNA, ecology, merged in my thoughts with Buddha, Jesus, and other icons.
The religion department was sponsoring a special guest minister that night, one who would simply lead the service, preach a sermon, and guide us in prayer – Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wesleyan had been a pioneer a few years earlier in outreach to black students, striving for 10% of our incoming class to be African American. Dr. King at that time was not a celebrity any more. He was seen as increasingly irrelevant in a world where violent confrontation was becoming more accepted as a way to achieve equality between (not yet among) the races. When I sat down in the pew at Memorial Chapel, the seats were barely half full, with maybe 40 students and faculty present, and only a scattered handful of Black faces.
Dr. King strode out in robes, not a suit, and looked every bit the minister he had trained as. He provided a traditional service, quite recognizable to me from my years as a youthful Presbyterian and Episcopalian, He lead a few hymns, helped by a lone organist, gave a brief lesson, and all seemed bathed in tranquility – no editorial comments on societal healing or aspirational dreaming tonight, I thought. The agenda announced a sermon – the topic I have long since forgotten – but again it was a dissertation on a bible verse, as most sermons are. What stayed with me were not the words, but the clarity, passion, and depth of feeling he possessed about his vision for America, translated through his vocation as a minister. The timbre of his voice, the choice of words, the sheer charisma of his delivery – I knew I was in the presence of a VERY SPECIAL man, one who had been anointed to teach and lead us. It was like being at an intimate concert with John Lennon singing and playing acoustic guitar. Days later, I thought, “If only a man like this could someday be President, maybe our world could become a better place.”
That year, despite the good spirits of college life, and the added drama of high hippiedom, proved the world was NOT a better place. Dreams died with King and Kennedy’s assassinations, the dismal downward arc of the presidential race from McCarthy to Humphery to Nixon. It seemed like the sudden flowering of youthful power – “The Times They Are A-Changing” – and growth of antiwar sentiments was stomped, by the boot-like face of power, in Paris, in Prague, in China, and by our own Silent Majority. I stopped believing in the possibility of an Aquarian age, and started getting on with grubbing for my own life.
A President embodies the desired persona of those who vote, and for the past forty years, I have marveled at the myriad ways they – the Presidents and the voters – can fool themselves and disappoint us all. The civil rights leaders of the fifties and early sixties often used allusions to the wilderness and the promised land to help keep the faith in future progress. Direct references to bondage in Egypt and 40 years of wandering in the wilderness were part of the church based faith many of the workers had.
For the past ten months, I have slowly let myself build towards a similar hope, that we, the American people, after 40 years in a wilderness of our own making, can at last, through sheer attrition if nothing else, find our way to a better place. Barack Obama, with his eloquence, intelligence, determination, perseverance, equanimity, and, oh that smile, can point the way. But only we can go there. Yes, we can.