Jim thought on FB (fwd)

[Noelle <noelle>]

 > From: Bhavani <http://www.gmail.com/~bhavaniowl>
 > Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2016 09:11:43 -0700
 > 
 > Apocalypse  Now?
 > 
 > I went to bed early last night.  It had been a long day.  Things were
 > trending badly.  As I kissed Judy before she went back upstairs to
 > the TV and I to my NYTimes crossword in bed, she said, â??I
 > didnâ??t want to have to wait up for the returns from Hawaii
 > but it looks like I will.â?? It was probably over before
 > then.  But before I climbed into bed I sat down and wrote a note to
 > my daughters.  This is an expansion of the thoughts I shared then.
 > 
 > I have been involved in the political things since I was a kid.  As
 > one of my aunts expressed it when meeting a friend of mine from
 > college, â ??All you have to know about me is that I am a
 > Catholic, a Democrat and a Red Sox fan.â?? I had eight sets
 > of aunts and uncles, To the base of a sprawling Irish working class
 > family had been added a German uncle, an Italian one, a Polish one
 > and other aunts and uncles best described as mongrels with admixtures
 > of many European strains.  We were a mini-UN before there was a UN.
 > None of the families were firmly middle class save one, but, as kids,
 > we all thought we were.  The sixteen cousins were a happy group for
 > the most part.  There were religious differences among the families
 > but no religious bitterness.  There was racism and probably some
 > anti-Semitism but, where they existed they were minor traits.  One of
 > the activities I happily worked on in this campaign was voter
 > registration at Community Colleges some of which involved speaking to
 > classes.  I truly enjoyed the atmosphere at North Shore Community
 > College and others because the beauty and optimism I saw in Lynn and
 > Danvers, Lowell and Framingham, reminded me of that period of my
 > life.  I wanted young people to vote, to become part of the political
 > process.  The young students themselves would benefit from
 > participation in the political process as would the culture and the
 > society in general.  Part of my standard talk was to rhetorically ask
 > the question, "Can things be any worse than they are right now?"  To
 > which I would provide a ready answerâ?¦"Yes.  I've see it.
 > I've been there."  (I was always the oldest one in the room) I came
 > of age in the 1960s, a decade that started with a sense of real
 > optimism.  JFK's election made the future look bright and beckoning.
 > There were some early problems in his presidency--the Bay of Pigs,
 > the Cuban Missile Crisis--but we survived them and, not only that, we
 > survived with aplomb.  Optimism was in the air.  When Martin Luther
 > King led the March on Washington in 1963 it was a demonstration that
 > significant problems persisted across our country but, after
 > Kingâ??s great â??I have a dreamâ??
 > speech, MLK and other leaders were invited into the White House to
 > meet with the President.  Then came November 22nd and the
 > assassination of John F.  Kennedy, ushering in a new and broadly
 > unsettled sense of life in our still young lives.  I was twenty years
 > old.  Still, I worked hard for LBJâ??s election.
 > â??Let us continue,â?? he said.  And his first
 > couple of years were very good ones indeed.  Tremendous advances were
 > made in civil rights and health care (at least for the elderly) and
 > the President wanted to deal with poverty and race relations in the
 > broadest possible way.  But, in the same period Medgar Evers was
 > killed and then Malcolm X.  The Republican Party nominated Barry
 > Goldwater with a clearly racist message.  Fear of minorities found a
 > voice from the heartland not just the South.  The Vietnam War
 > steadily expanded.  Then came 1968, a truly pivotal year, ushered in
 > by the Tet Offensive which called into question the whole idea of the
 > Vietnam War.  Suddenly Martin Luther King was assassinated followed
 > by Bobby Kennedy.  All across the nation cities were going up in
 > flames while Richard Nixon stalked the landscape and thousands died
 > in Vietnam.  The Democratic National Convention was marked with
 > riots, Richard Nixon came to power.  The decade came to an end with
 > the shootings of students at Kent State and Jackson State as
 > thousands marched against the continuing war in Vietnam and the
 > Cambodian incursion.  As May 1, 1970, dawned parts of the city where
 > I lived were occupied by national guard troops in anticipation of
 > thousands of angry, violence prone activists and supporters coming to
 > New Haven to protest the trial of, Bobby Seale, a leader of the Black
 > Panther Party.  Army trucks with helmeted troops cruised the streets.
 > It was like being in a horror movies from the 1950s.  As this current
 > election approached, I explained to the Community College students
 > that it is possible for domestic tranquility to disappear quite
 > quickly.  I didnâ??t want the kind of chaos experienced in
 > the 1960s to return although, it must be said, our black friends have
 > continued to faced a chaotic and murderous reality that we did not
 > adequately understand or address until the cell phone camera provided
 > technical testimony to their status.  This morning we are again at an
 > historic crossroads.  After eight years of a scandal-free
 > administration led by Barack Obama we are faced with this deeply
 > frightening prospect...Donald Trump as President.  I went to bed last
 > night not knowing what Iâ??d find when I awoke.  But I knew
 > then that whatever happened...there would be work to be done.  And no
 > one can do that work other than ourselves.  God help us all.