Kent State – words are all i have

Let’s not get silly and compare what Colin Kaepernick is doing to Muhammad Ali’s refusal to heed Uncle Sam’s call to arms.

Yes, Kaepernick has taken a stand by sitting/kneeling during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at National Football League games, but when the San Francisco 49ers commence their 2016 crusade he’ll be the backup quarterback. His protest against police brutality and the oppression of black people/people of color hasn’t cost him his livelihood. His bank account is no less ample. He’s in no danger of being arrested, cuffed, hauled into court and sentenced to five years in prison.

Ali was dealt every bit of that hand. And more. Including death threats. Yet he was all-in. He had “no quarrel with them Viet Cong” so he wasn’t going to drop bombs on, or shoot bullets at, innocent brown people come hell or hoosegow.

By way of comparison, Kaepernick’s posture has, at worst, earned him enemies who see him not as a caped crusader for colored people but, rather, as an anti-anthem, anti-military and an anti-America ingrate who ought to just play football and zip his lips unless he plans to pledge allegiance to a country that he believes has come undone.

But when did doing and saying nothing become acceptable?

Maybe Rosa Parks should have given her seat to that white man and moved to the back of the bus where the black folk belonged to save herself from finger printing and time in jail.

Maybe Martin Luther King Jr. should have stayed home to mow the lawn instead of marching through the southern United States and spending time behind bars.

Maybe Gandhi should have just bought government salt rather than walk more than 200 miles to collect his own and spare himself yet another stretch in jail.

Maybe Tommie Smith and John Carlos should have played nice by putting on their shoes, unclenching their hands and smiling for the cameras.

Maybe Jesse Owens should have skipped out on the 1936 Olympics and let Hitler have his way.

Maybe Harvey Milk should have stayed in the closet.

Maybe students at Kent State should have gone to class instead of carrying signs, marching and shouting.

Maybe all those young people shouldn’t have taken sledge hammers to the Berlin Wall.

Maybe Marlon Brando should have accepted his Oscar as best actor for his role as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather rather than send an Apache woman, Sacheen Littlefeather, to deliver a speech about the misrepresentation of Native Americans in film and on TV, at the same time drawing attention to Wounded Knee.

Maybe John and Yoko shouldn’t have acted like a couple of layabouts and gotten out of bed.

Maybe Johnny Cash should have worn more colorful clothing.

Maybe Nellie McClung should have stayed home to cook and clean for her hubby and their five children rather than make so much noise about women voting and being “persons.”

Maybe the drag queens, transgender individuals, cross-dressers, butch lesbians and gay men at the Stonewall Inn should have simply tucked their feathered boas between their legs and peacefully piled into paddy wagons rather than kick up a fuss.

Maybe all those draft dodgers who sought refuge in Canada should have been turned back at the border.

Maybe punter Chris Kluwe should have kept silent and not exposed homophobia among the Minnesota Vikings coaching staff.

Maybe Branch Rickey should have hired Jack Roosevelt Robinson to shine his shoes rather than sign him to a Brooklyn Dodgers contract that made him the first black man to play Major League Baseball.

Maybe what Colin Kaepernick is doing won’t amount to anything. He’s no Ali. He’s no Jackie Robinson (who, by the way, would not salute the flag or stand for the anthem toward the end of his life). He’s no Rosa Parks. He’s no Gandhi. He’s just a backup quarterback clinging to a high-paying job that grants him a lifestyle of privilege.

But, he’s got people talking. And thinking. He sees something that he believes isn’t right. He’s trying to fix it, as are other athletes who have begun to parrot him. How can that be wrong?

It was my mother, upon witnessing the arrival of The Beatles to North America and their initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, who first advanced to me the discomforting suggestive that civilization was on the eve of destruction.

“What,” she submitted in a tsk-tsk tone and with a wistful sigh, “is this world coming to?”

She could be quite the prude, my mom. A dear lady of Christian carriage who played the church organ at Sunday mass, she stood firmly on the side of buttoned-up. So the sight of all those screaming, weeping, hysterical, fainting teenage girls and those mop tops on John, Paul, George and Ringo, plus their very un-Sinatra musical renderings, gave rise to apocalyptic notions.

Adults feared the worst. They were convinced that those four lads from Liverpool were Satan’s foot soldiers, sent to our shores to share their foul fruit and corrupt an entire generation.

“Heaven help us all if this Beatles nonsense carries on!” the grown-ups would caution. “Ship those yobs back to the U.K.! And tell them to take those scruffy ruffians, the Rolling Stones, home too!”

It was such a false, foolish fear. But a fear, nonetheless.

Us kids, we knew better. When the Beatles arrived with their guitars and Ludwig drum kit in February of 1964, we didn’t recognize them as the enemy. There was nothing to fear. Paul was cute. George was dark and mysterious. John was witty and clever. Ringo was teddy bear cuddly. Their music gave a young decade a fresh vibrancy and steered our minds away from the reality that there was a whole lot of nasty going on.

I recollect this due to a conversation the other day with a lass in her early 20s. In many ways, Ashley reminds me of a ’60s kid. Free-spirited and blessed with youthful innocence, she has a healthy awareness of equal rights. She digs in her heels at the very hint of discrimination. Were she a child of the ’60s, she surely would have worn a flower in her hair. And probably would have gone to San Francisco.

She knows today’s treachery (read: terrorism), to be sure, but she has been taught a romanticized version of the 1960s.

Those of us who wear the Baby Boomer sash seldom gave ponder to terrorism during the 1950s and ’60s. We didn’t turn on our television sets or open our newspapers each morning and see graphic, horrifying images and footage of airplanes flying into tall buildings, the beheading of journalists or gun fights on Parliament Hill. Thus, we tend to paint the days of our youth with gentle brush strokes of innocence and kindness. We romanticize about Woodstock, hippies, flower power, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Neil Armstrong taking a lunar stroll long before Michael Jackson made the moonwalk all the rage.

Don’t let anyone sell you on the snake-oil notion that they were more innocent, gentler times, though. They weren’t.

We watched two Kennedy men and Martin Luther King Jr. gunned down and killed.
The death count from the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles was 34, with another 1,032 injured and 3,438 arrests; the five-day 12^th Street Riot in Detroit in 1967 resulted in 43 deaths, 1,189 injured and 7,200 arrests; officials turned guard dogs and fire hoses on children and bystanders during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963 in Alabama.
We watched the Ohio National Guard gun down and kill four of its own citizens at Kent State University scant days after the 1960s had given way to the ’70s.
The United States was dispatching its sons—freshly scrubbed young men not old enough to vote or drink but old enough to kill and be killed—to the jungles of Vietnam for a war few understood or wanted.
Charles Manson and his gang of cutthroats slaughtered innocent people in Los Angeles.
The Ku Klux Klan, with its bombings and lynchings, was every inch the terrorist group in the ’50s. Ditto le Front de liberation du Quebec, whose violent lawlessness included bombings, kidnapping and murder during the ’60s.

We also knew a terror with a face the youth of today are only now staring at, with United States-North Korea posturing and name-calling—nuclear war. That was our dread. The Cuban Missile Crisis took us to the edge of never. We were on the Eve of Destruction (watch this video).

We were reminded the end of the world was nigh each time we heard the wail of an air raid siren. Was it only a drill, or had that nasty man Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union finally pushed the button and launched a nuclear attack to blow us all the hell up? Underground fallout/bomb shelters were built to serve as strategic sanctuaries for the leaders of the land during the Cold War. Diefenbunkers is what we called them, named after Canada’s prime minister of the day, John Diefenbaker. Many families built their own below-ground, bomb bungalows.

Whenever we heard the air raid sirens, we were told to duck and cover beneath our school desks, to save ourselves from a nuclear bomb. As if.

I loved growing up in the 1950s and ’60s. Especially the ’60s. But they were frightening times. Very scary. My mother didn’t know what the world was coming to, but neither did we. We just wanted to make it a better world.

Trouble was, a lot of adults didn’t want to let us make it a better world. They thought it would be a better world if they used bullets and bombs and banished the Beatles.