A Generation Defined

I have been having an ongoing conversation with my father about the Occupy Wall Street protests going on around the nation and how they compare to the protests of the 60's.  I was born in the 60's, 1967 to be exact and less then a year later Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were both dead.  I wish I could say I remember it but I believe I was likely more concerned with the flavor of my creamed spinach.  As a result in order to gain perspective I have turned to someone that was much more cognizant of the changes going on in the nation.  In an odd way, we tend to remember the period with some nostalgia yet my father reminds me that it was the seeming hopelessness of it all that drove both him and my mother independently of each other to migrate to Alaska.

Bloody Sunday, Selma AL

I wanted to know if the protests of the 60's as undefined and counter culture as they were, had an impact on public policy.  My father's conclusions were that they did and he listed a number of achievements defined by Civil Rights, Environmental Rights and Social Rights.


1964 Civil Rights Act
1965 Voter's Rights Act
1965 Affirmative Action
1970 EPA
Failed Equal Rights Amendment
End of the War

Vietnam War

It is fascinating to look at this list and realize that over 40 years later we are still fighting about the same issues.  Every Republican candidate wants to dismantle the EPA.  Conservatives despise Affirmative Action.  In state after state the Republican party has worked to make voting less available and more restricted excluding those they feel oppose them under the guise of nearly non-existent voter fraud.  This all begs the question, have we progressed?

It seems like the iconic photo represents every generations struggles.  My father sent me a few that stood out in his mind.  These past few weeks as protests have spread around the country fighting against the inequity of the controlling one percent of our society a number of brutal images and stories have emerged.  The protestors are criticized for their lack of focus but are they really so different than those that swarmed the streets a generation ago?  One thing seems clear, power doesn't like to be challenged and once again it is the voices from the right that are shouting down challenges to authority.  They do it every Sunday and in the twenty four hour news cycle.  They try to de-legitimze the protestors by attacking them as caricatures of people they are not.  Presidential contender Newt Gingrich tells them to  "Stop whining, take a bath and get a job."  As if there were jobs to be had.

Iraq Veteran, Oakland Protest

In Oakland California two Iraq War veterans were nearly killed.  One was hit with a tear gas canister, the other was kicked by Oakland Police until his spleen ruptured.  Both are men that went to war to protect the rights of a nation whose authority chose not to respect theirs.  Their right to disagree.  My father told me that he hardly even thought much about the Vietnam War until a friend of his that went off to fight, came home dead.  Another name on that long black granite wall.

We all know that university campus's are hot beds for the growth of a movement.  I went to college during the Reagan years and there was so much resentemnt and apathy my university actually voted to get rid of the campus affiliation with OSPIRG, a group that proudly touted the passage of a recycling bottle bill.

Yet today on campus there seems to be an ember of fight as students attend classes and wonder what kind of a future they will have when it is all over.  Will there even be a job for them or a place in society?  There was a time in America when kids fled the nest to find their own way in the world of opportunity.  Today it seems more likely the nest will remain their home.  On the University California Davis campus a group of young people had the audacity to sit silently, arms linked across a road.  They wanted simply to protest rising tuition.  This in a state where prior to Governor Reagan, university tuition was once paid for by the state.

Kent State

The response to these students was brutal exercised by a few sadistic police force officers.  They doused the students in pepper spray making sure they got their due.  The spray was intended to be utilized from at least fifteen feet away yet for the students it was shot point blank.  Those that tried to cover up even had their shirts lifted to ensure contact with the skin.  Some went to the hospital, others were sick.  The police initially claimed they had to use the spray because they were surrounded and felt threatened.

A generation ago it was the killings of protesting students at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guard soldiers that enraged a nation.  During the Bush Administration the laws of Posse Comitatus enacted after the end of the Civil War to control the use of Federal forces in the post war South was essentially repealed.  It forbade the use of Soldiers in domestic law enforcement.  Now presidents are free to order the use of the American Military to end civil protest. 

Watts Riots

My father told me that the 1965 LA Watts Riots created an understanding within him of what true bigotry and racism was.   Since the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 following the Rodney King Verdict America has thankfully been free of large racially motivated protest.  Maybe we have made progress in Civil Rights yet the brutality of state reaction to largely peaceful protest in recent months has sent a chill down my spine.   In New York an 84 year old woman was shot in the face with pepper spray.  God Bless her for still caring.  


One of the most chilling tales of possible police over reaction came out of The Stranger a news source in Seattle, Washington.  Ironically some of the most liberal areas in the country, Seattle and Oakland have witnessed the most drastic responses.

"I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in," she says. "I was screaming, 'I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.'"

At that point, a Seattle police officer lifted his foot and it hit her in the stomach, and another officer pushed his bicycle into the crowd, again hitting Fox in the stomach. "Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut," she says.

She was fine for a couple days, until she started feeling sick.
Jennifer went to the doctor and found out her baby had no heartbeat. "They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too."

While this story is still un-verrified by Seattle news sources it is a chilling tale and if ever proven to be factual is truly tragic.

Have we progressed?  Will these images be the ones that define this generation?

In 1989, the year I graduated from college I was driving down the Oregon and California coast with my new wife headed to Los Angeles to visit my grandmothers.  The news reports were filled with protest news coming from China.  The Tiananmen square protest was in full swing and over 100,000 students were marching through Bejing.  For an instant I felt like China was going to change.  One of the most iconic images in modern history emerged from the event.  As the un-restrained Chinese Military began cracking down on the protest (Think Posse Comitatus) a lone man whose identity has never been confirmed stood in front of a column of Chinese tanks impeding their advance.  He was said to have been an accountant but no one knows for sure whatever happened to him. At least no one aside from a very secretive government.

In the West this image defined the protest.  It defined a horrendous over reach by authority and the death of an infant democratic movement.  The funny thing is, the vast majority of people in China have never seen this picture.  It has been hidden and blocked.  Scrubbed from the national consciousness.  While visiting Shanghai I asked my Chinese friend about this photo.  She said she had only recently seen it while attempting to peer beyond the curtains of authority.

The national protest movement in America is now three months old.  Like it's predecessor it is trying to define itself.  In three months while beaten and battered, cold and hungry it has succeeded in one major way.  It has changed the national conversation and focused it on who are the winners and who are the losers in our society.  It is defining a reality long ignored.  A reality that one percent of the nation is phenomenally wealthy.  As America declines their wealth increases.  There is little correlation for them between success as a nation and their personal bank accounts.  For the other ninety-nine percent of us, we have suddenly started to rethink our society and how it is structured.  We have started to ask the question, "Is this the America we want to live in?"


Forty years ago we battled and shed blood as a nation for the very rights that seem to continue to be under attack today.  The right to have clean water and clean air.  The right to have your vote counted in a democracy.  The right to be treated equally and not singled out. The right to stop spending our blood and treasure in a foreign land.  The right as a people to have our voices heard.  Not the voice of special interests.  Not the voice of the fantastically wealthy.  Our voice, the voice that gets up every morning, goes to work and does our best to care and provide for our families.  The rights of our children to find a land of promise and a place within our society.  If we can learn anything from the voices on the streets once again crying out it is that our society still has a long way to go.