THE MIDDLE-PAUSE EARTH MONTH PROMPT
What Have I Done for Mother Earth?
Less than I once thought I could, but not nothing
In the 1960s, when I was in my 20s, most of my acquaintances were going to rock concerts and competing with one another to see who had the bellbottoms with the widest hems.
Bellbottoms be damned, I was busy going to Black Panther meetings to discuss plans to provide free school breakfasts, manufacture and distribute free shoes, and do good things for poor people.
Some plans were never put in place. Others were but failed. It was difficult for us to do good things when the police were doing so many bad things to us. Police brutality against the Panthers was on a scale that most of us white folks alive today will never experience.
But we tried. Remember, “We’re going to make the world a better place to live in”? That was us.
During the next decade, my hippie acquaintances became young, upwardly mobile professionals, the so-called “Yuppies.” Eschewing bellbottoms, most of them got married and shopped for slim-fit suits and cufflinks, large homes, and BMWs.
I also got married but soon after became widowed. So, I was raising three kids in a too-small rental, driving a 20-year-old Datsun with almost…
