In 1967, I graduated college and began my career as a teacher at the age of 21. In 1968, I was 22 and poised to be able to vote for the first time because back then the voting age was 21. In college I had begun to question everything….religion, society, history. It had been a slow process, this “coming of age” that went back ( when I think about it), to reading MAD magazine in my early teen years, watching “The Twilight Zone”, listening to Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Smothers Brothers.
Politically speaking I was leaning left though I registered R my first time because my Aunt who worked in our then very republican county could help get me a job as a “county recreation director” between my junior and senior years. I changed my registration but I am not sure when….it didn’t matter. I already knew for whom I would and would not vote . After all, there I was a young, idealistic teacher, working with 5th and 6th grade students when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, followed by Robert F Kennedy. I had already gone through the life changing shock of JFK’s assassination as a freshman in college. Now, as a young adult, I had to help young children absorb, understand, get through this horrid thing. I always tried to keep MY politics out of my classroom but I never hesitated to use PEACE signs, wear PEACE sign pierced earring to school. To me, wanting PEACE is not political.
But I digress. I was changing, learning, protesting…..pro civil rights, anti war…….and singing with friends and cousins Dylan’s “The Times, They are a changing….” for our somewhat cynical parents. They needed to learn.
Then came the 1968 Olympics….and the fist raised at the medal ceremony by Tommie Smith and John Carlos. OMG (though we did not say that then…). What an uproar in our family! For me, it was simple. I wanted to be patriotic and loved our country but I had been learning in college, through reading, from older friends how much history, the not so pleasant history, I had never learned about segregation, about injustice, about violence against people of color.
For my family, of which I was a first generation citizen on my mother’s side (she had been born in Sicily), and second generation on my father’s side, this cause many loud emotional discussions, arguments. I felt along with some of my cousins that these men had every right to raise their fist. But many, even the more liberal of our parents, struggled with it. Our grandfather, deceased before we kids knew him, had emigrated at age 14, brought over his wife to be when she was 20 to make a new life in a great country. Yes, sometimes they were called “dirty little foreigners”, and sometimes they hid their immigrant status when possible, and only spoke in Italian when with family. But still, our grandfather had raised 11 kids, all of whom survived a depression, and four of the males fought in WWII, and two daughters worked in the Pentagon when it first opened; and had 29 grandchildren many of whom, (like me) were going to college or graduated. We were taught to be PROUD of what the USA had afforded us in opportunity despite us being swarthy and different. STIIl, we the cousins, argued that without JUSTICE FOR ALL, including black people, it was not really a just country. I was as certain then as I am now that protesting is the right of every American whenever, wherever they choose to show it.
So here it is 2017, almost 50 years after those long, loud, emotional arguments and I read 52% of Americans are upset with the NFL protests. Are they f**king kidding me??? Seriously??? Have we gone that far backwards that a majority fails to recognize who are the real patriots (those players, people fighting for justice for all) and who are the treasonous traitors, as in Mango Mussolini, his VP, the entire republican congress and anyone still supporting those a**holes. THIS is my rant. I AM JUST SO ANGRY. I needed to rant.