Reply #5: It meant high school. College. War protests. [View All]

[aquart]

It meant that any leader who stood up was shot and killed.

It meant friends doing desperate things to evade the draft.

It meant seeing the VietNam drug scandal among our soldiers broken across two full pages of the New York Post with my ex-boyfriend's name in the by-line.

The trial of Queens College's arrested peaceful protestors. (An arrest which caused us to seize the campus.) I remember a boy with a toothbrush sticking up from the vest pocket of his jacket asking me to kiss him, because he was going to jail. So I did and he did.

Sheltered commuter students sitting in a classroom after word had spread about the Kent State shootings, seriously discussing how you make a Molotov cocktail. Because we didn't know if we were next.

Being caught sitting peacefully in a bus, waiting to leave, while the police cleared the emptying field around the Washington Monument with gas, which soaked into our clothes and stayed there, causing us to feel pepper in our throats and cough all the way home.

It meant watching the 1968 convention in Chicago gavel to gavel, seeing the folds in the McCarthy posters because they'd had to be smuggled in, watching Dan Rather knocked to the ground, and hearing the passionate anger in Walter Cronkite's voice, around 2am, as he told anyone in America who was still awake just what kind of act that was.

And, of course, be-ins in Central Park.