I was born eleven years after World War II, when America thought it had defeated fascism, and the world thought it had so exposed the horror of genocide that we’d never let it happen again. And yet I’ve lived long enough to see America build concentration camps, to see the world’s children starving (or bombed or shot) according to government actions and designs.
I was born 91 years after the Civil War, when there were still people alive who had lived in slavery. It would be another nine years before landmark voting and civil rights legislation would legally enshrine the proposition that all men are created equal. (Women? Another matter.) And while few people were deluded that mere law would end racism, the law at least declared our national aspiration for all citizens . And yet I’ve lived long enough for certain Americans to denigrate that city on a hill into a dark fetid gulch, cheering a racist leader whose sense of history extends only to what he could exploit yesterday.
I was born when American cities, Los Angeles to Denver to Cleveland were gray-hazed with particulates and smog, banked on brown rivers so toxic they could strip paint or catch fire. Americans realized that protecting the environment through clean air, water, and energy actually protected people—including grandchildren and unborn generations. And yet I’ve lived long enough to watch emboldened oligarchs and opportunists care about neither. Worst, they’ve had the power, economic and propagandistic, to sell the world’s future for a buck today, never minding science or the interests and wishes of the people.
I was born during the presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who, whatever his shortcomings, served faithfully and expertly in World War II, who oversaw a blazing economy driven by a 90% top tax bracket, and who warned of the dangers of a military-industrial complex he saw antithetical to the nation’s best future. And yet I’ve lived long enough to see a Republican draft dodger, a 34-time felon, who measures public service only in personal hatred and endless grifting, abetted by stupid, evil, or cowardly (you choose) Republican representatives declining to question anything about him.
There are days I think I’ve lived long enough.
But then there are days like this morning, when I hear from dozens of friends and family around the country who share my bewildered outrage. They are people with a sense of history and the sense of a future born not of greed or vindictive hatred, in which my gain comes only at your loss or oppression. They embrace a future born of understanding that they are neither the first nor the last nor the best nor the only people to live, in America or in the world. They are people for whom “liberty and justice for all,” both present and future, remain our best aspirations.
As I sit on my porch, this 69th birthday, I think of those countless friends. I think of my Mom and Dad, of birthday cake in a small town Iowa park, the world—my world—still full of possibility, naïve but in the very best way.