Wow, just wow.
That was my response after reading Kathleen Parker’s column, headlined “This is already a summer I’d like to forget,” from the July 5 Washington Post.
Not that I disagree with her main point. This has been an awful year in so many respects, and especially with the mass shootings, which only our country seems to have to endure.
Her point seemed to be that life was so much better when she was young, or at least it seemed that way to her.
That’s where the “wow” factor came in as she recalled a carefree childhood of summer camps, waterskiing until the gas ran out and sweet smell of Florida orange groves. As for the world, as she put it, newsmen “Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite managed to wrap things up in about 30 minutes.”
By my math (and judging from her Wikipedia page), Parker was born around 1952. So she lived through desegregation in the south. She was around 12 years old when the St. Augustine protests – and violence – broke out in her home state of Florida.
She was about 13 when the Vietnam War kicked into high gear, and with it the massive social change and protests of the time.
Her teen years coincided with the race riots that ravaged our major cities from roughly 1964 to ’68.
Does she remember school drills where students were taught to hide under their desks in the case of a nuclear attack?
Was she paying attention? Apparently not. She was waterskiing instead.
It seems like there must have been a lot of privilege going on. Her father was a lawyer, so that’s probably not a surprise.
I’m about seven years younger than Parker, and my memories of the ’60s are a bit less rosy.
As a white male, I had – and have – my own level of privilege, but I grew up poor in the country about 50 miles south of Buffalo.
I came from a loving family, and we grew much of our own food, so I ate well, and our home was filled with books. But my memories of the ’60s are a bit more intense.
Once we finally got a TV in 1966, I remember seeing news coverage of the riots on Buffalo’s East Side in 1967. As an 8-year-old, I thought, “Hey, they really do have a lot of reasons to be angry. I might be burning things down, too, if I were them. … I wonder when they’ll come down our road and get to our houses and barns.”
I saw the news coverage of Vietnam on TV and wondered about whether my brother, who was Parker’s age, would have to go fight in the jungle. And what would I do when my turn came?
There is certainly plenty to worry about today, and gun violence is one of the biggies. Today, instead of being herded to the school basement as if that would help in the case of nuclear attack, students are being taught to throw the objects in their classrooms at armed attackers.
Now in addition to the danger of nuclear holocaust (a possibility that still exists), we face the existential threat of climate disaster.
Parker concludes by saying, “That was, alas, a very different time.” Well, it was … and it wasn’t. It depended on whether you had the luxury of not paying attention.