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Today is the anniversary of the day when my life began to turn. Even at the tender age of fifteen, it struck me that what happened at Kent State was wrong, wrong, wrong. And if that act by the Gov't was wrong, what else was?
From every adult relative on both sides of my family I heard the same wrong thing: "It should have been done long ago..."
Even at that age, I knew better. I realized that my life was in the hands of people who could not be trusted.
Nixon had turned his rough beast toward another country. Now Cambodia was to be the next domino to fall; not to the evils of "communism", but to the savage bombing, the chemical warfare, and the indiscriminate slaughter due to the pawns on Kissinger's chessboard.
Of course, it was many years before I saw all of it that clearly...why the college kids were protesting, the evil enterprise that was the Vietnam War, the foul calculus that Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon had *all* engaged in.
My education up till then had been in the hands of people who wouldn't have dared to whisper about things like the Ludlow Massacre, Triangle Shirtwaist, Haymarket or Joe Hill. Nor, of course, would any of them even have thought of questioning the Gov't about the supposed "Gulf of Tonkin Incident."
It was soon after that day that I took things into my own hands: surreptitiously, of course. After all, I still lived among untrustworthy adults, and I was still in their power. But I began to read books and papers that would have been utterly disapproved by my relatives. I began to understand the slow creep toward fascism that was evident even in the early seventies.
Now, I look around me, and I despair. That slow creep is still creeping, so slowly that very few people notice it. We're boiling the planet, like frogs in a slow cooker, and our 'betters' are cranking up the heat. Industrial society is poisoning our air and water and soil, even as it sells us Big Macs and Powerbooks. Bread and circuses for high-tech slaves and the plebian underclasses.
This why I write the fiction that I write: to try to turn people's eyes to some better way, in the certain
knowledge that I have little chance of doing so. But there's that tiny bit of hope...forlorn, even ridiculous, but it's there.
From every adult relative on both sides of my family I heard the same wrong thing: "It should have been done long ago..."
Even at that age, I knew better. I realized that my life was in the hands of people who could not be trusted.
Nixon had turned his rough beast toward another country. Now Cambodia was to be the next domino to fall; not to the evils of "communism", but to the savage bombing, the chemical warfare, and the indiscriminate slaughter due to the pawns on Kissinger's chessboard.
Of course, it was many years before I saw all of it that clearly...why the college kids were protesting, the evil enterprise that was the Vietnam War, the foul calculus that Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon had *all* engaged in.
My education up till then had been in the hands of people who wouldn't have dared to whisper about things like the Ludlow Massacre, Triangle Shirtwaist, Haymarket or Joe Hill. Nor, of course, would any of them even have thought of questioning the Gov't about the supposed "Gulf of Tonkin Incident."
It was soon after that day that I took things into my own hands: surreptitiously, of course. After all, I still lived among untrustworthy adults, and I was still in their power. But I began to read books and papers that would have been utterly disapproved by my relatives. I began to understand the slow creep toward fascism that was evident even in the early seventies.
Now, I look around me, and I despair. That slow creep is still creeping, so slowly that very few people notice it. We're boiling the planet, like frogs in a slow cooker, and our 'betters' are cranking up the heat. Industrial society is poisoning our air and water and soil, even as it sells us Big Macs and Powerbooks. Bread and circuses for high-tech slaves and the plebian underclasses.
This why I write the fiction that I write: to try to turn people's eyes to some better way, in the certain
knowledge that I have little chance of doing so. But there's that tiny bit of hope...forlorn, even ridiculous, but it's there.
I'm still writing, wondering if my audience will ever reach some (imaginary?) critical mass.
Gotta go. See ya, folks.
