I love the comments your pieces get. People go off on delightful tangents and miss the point. There is some truth to all of them. But there is a point I hear in your piece that I think is being missed.
When I was 16, 1974, ‘Hearts and Minds’ came out. My parents went to see it and came back in tears. My dad was an American History and Literature professor. He was at Harvard with the ‘best and brightest’. He was a Dean of Students when they burnt the ROTC at his university. My mother studied Russian history and literature, shopped at the coop before it was cool. They were text book liberals. They came home in tears and said, we were there, we didn’t do anything. We should have stood up. We should have said something.
That is it in, in Austin Powers’ little nutshell.
Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s the ‘dirty tricks’ department up to their old game, the oldest game by far, older even than that other game that claims to be the oldest profession. Maybe it’s collective inaction where individual action needs to happen. Maybe it’s all or none of the above. But we must raise a generation that stands for and stands up. The voices of darkness are not abashed to toot and tout and rant about. They spin cloaks of reason like the three tailors did for the emperor. Seems it had to be a child that piped up that time too.
