AN AGING-OUT LIBERAL’S PAEAN TO TODAY’S PROTESTORS

On the eve of my 62^nd birthday, I have attained another rite of passage into senior-hood. Wednesday, I’ll go into St. Francis to go under the scalpel – actually the laser – to have my prostate reshaped so that nature might more easily take its course.

I don’t fear the transitory pain or the possible aftereffects as much as the symbolism of being just one more once-upon-a-time hippie who now intrepidly clings to the liberalism of his youth. Now, watching a new generation of protestors march for social and economic justice – just as I did decades ago to protest inequality and an unjust war – makes the serendipity all the more ironic.

We are no surer of the purpose and motivations of today’s protestors than our parents’ generation thought of us. But, unlike so many Middle Americans of four-plus decades ago, I am prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. This, I believe, is the perspective that only an aging-out unrepentant liberal can provide.

Yes, we were naïve back then, too, easily co-opted by the shenanigans of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and largely incapable of perceiving the myriad shades of gray in a world that we insisted was stark black-and-white. And sometimes we were downright stupid.
Time has made us less naive. Experience has made us less gullible. Our own need to be understood has made us more understanding. And even our stupidity seems to be abating. However, I am not so much struck by the changes as I am by the ideals and impulses that time and experience have not changed. I think to myself, maybe just a little too smugly, that beyond my shiny new car and a couple of pinstripe suits, there is a lot about 41 years ago for which I do not feel a particular urge to repent. I pray that it will be the same for our kids.
We have, many of us 60’s liberals, turned our bleeding-heart inclinations toward feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, and defending victims of racism and homophobia. We are the ones who are still committed to building bridges between black and white, Jew and Christian, Israeli and Arab, powerful and powerless. We are the ones who still wonder aloud whether it is better for Nazis and Klansmen to march in the open or to be shoved underground. We are the ones who still wonder aloud whether putting even the most hardened criminal to death has any redemptive value, and whether the reality of poverty at our doorstep is any less “real” than the “reality” of “reality TV.”
We are the ones who still have a healthy skepticism of authority and institutions and power and bureaucracy and political manipulation. We are the ones who are sometimes confused and frustrated by our children’s wavy ideals and quizzical causes. Yet, we, unlike our own parents, we are not so abhorring and judgmental of our children’s music, clothing, antics, and vague glimmers of individualism . . . memories of my Dad, who got up and summarily changed channels three notes into the Beatles’ first appearance on Ed Sullivan.
For however stupid we might have been, I still believe that the world is better off for the presence of unrepentant liberals on their collision course with senior citizenship. And so, for the first time in the longest time I cue up my “Sergeant Pepper” album into the player. “I read the news today, oh boy, about a lucky man who made the grade . . . “
Maybe and maybe not.
“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?”
I think: I am a whole helluva lot closer to 64 than I am to those heady, deliciously naive days of 1970. I live vicariously through images of young protestors whom I watch on the news. Then, I review my pre-op instructions and pop a Flomax, just a bit more sure of all that has changed and all that must somehow, some way, endure.