“Young people speaking their minds, getting so much resistance from behind,” are lyrics written by Stephen Stills and recorded by Buffalo Springfield in a song aptly titled “For What It’s Worth.” We were definitely different than our parents’ generation who weathered the great depression and said not a word when asked to fight. A lot of us were seen “Singing songs and carrying signs,” as my shortened junior year of high school came to a close.
Besides running around in my Rambler decorating our friends yards, something I’m sure Donna left out of her campaign materials when she ran for mayor of Milwaukee nearly two decades later, we would often have long conversations about withdrawing from Vietnam, civil rights, and a topic about which she was extremely passionate and I had no clue, women’s liberation.
At the time I didn’t have a clear understanding of why people were protesting the war. My father, who insisted all he ever did was tap out radio signals in a B-24 liberator as it flew over Germany and dropped some bombs, disapproved of young people protesting but thought it was a good idea to get a student deferment to avoid the draft. In one of our discussions Donna pointed out it was the rich and middle class who received student deferments, leaving the poor and minorities to be drafted and fight the war.
She even pointed out how Martin Luther King Jr. and Father James Groppi, a local priest active in the civil rights movement, had drawn a parallel between the struggle of Negroes, as African Americans were referred to during the time, to receive equal rights in education, employment, and elections with the disproportionate number of young male Negroes drafted into service and killed in Vietnam. At the same time, she listened as I told her how one of Miss Steiger’s former students, a Negro officer in the army, came back to our Latin class to tell us about the war, but also how the military offered opportunities to minorities civilian society failed to provide.
Even more confusing to me was the idea that something a group known as hippies had started was somehow related to the liberation of women. She said the commune formed by these people in California was like the kibbutz in Israel with everyone sharing the work and the fruits of their labor. Of course where the whole sharing concept broke down for me was when it came to sexual relations.
As a life long subscriber to the double standard perpetuated by everything from multiple wives in biblical times to Bond girls in novels and film the myth that it was all right for a man to have sex with multiple partners but a woman who followed a similar pattern was a whore had been totally ingrained in my psyche. Worse still was the nagging notion the fair skinned bright-eyed beauty with a voracious appetite for sweat inducing embraces might actually think she would like multiple partners. Here I had finally moved beyond the single encounter or distant flirtation to an actual relationship with a girl, and she has the nerve to point out it may not be enough.
Certainly there were advantages in growing up during a time of great change, but there were also great challenges. We were after all only a few years removed from the Disney stories where the prince rescued the fairest in the land and they lived happily ever after. Imagining Sleeping Beauty telling the prince the kiss was fine but she’d rather hang with Dopey and the boys required a whole new set of glasses, and “For What It’s Worth,” they weren’t always rose colored.
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