When I first started working there, I checked out a John Lennon CD called "Instant Karma". You have to understand one thing about me. I've never been a Beatles fan, I don't have all of their albums and secretly dream that I could of been part of their band and one of them. But the music created on this album captured my heart. The values that Lennon sung about...."Say you want a revolution
We better get on right away
Well you get on your feet
And out on the street
A million workers working for nothing
You better give 'em what they really own
We got to put you down
When we come into town
I gotta ask you comrades and brothers
How do you treat you own woman back home
She got to be herself
So she can free herself"
It made me long in my heart for a time like this. I wanted to be a part of a movement like this. I wanted to do demonstrations and show people what I believed in by my actions. And I wanted people to hear me.....really hear me.
So I started watching Discovery Channel documentaries on that time period. I started looking in history books at the library and seeing the demonstrations in print. I started watching movies on the Weather Underground, who only thought that their voices were going to be heard if they created some type of violence....a bunch of white kids trying to make a difference for the soldiers in Vietnam, and for the black kids down the street who weren't treated like human beings with the same kind of blood flowing through their veins. I started to read about Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement. I started reading about Martin Luther King and learned about his assassination.
I felt so proud of the two Olympians who won the gold and bronze metals and while on the platform raised their fists in the air showing their voice (who later had their metals stripped from them for being "anti-American") I watched a documentary about a hotel owner, who after a bunch of black kids jumped in the public pool at the hotel, felt that that only way he could get them out was to pour acid in the water that ate their flesh. I was mortified at what I was reading and watching, but I was drawn in and I couldn't stop retaining and learning about this time in our nation's history.
I read a book by Richard Doster called "Crossing the Lines". It was about two Southern reporters who were directly affected by the race riots and who personally met with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on many occassions.It talked about his son who became a part of the sit in demonstrations in Georgian restaurants at the counters, demanding to be served. They would march down the streets, 2 by 2 and then file into restaurants and go directly to the counters. Not reacting in violence when people would spit in their faces and hit them blindsided. They remained calm and chose peace instead of violence.
I was talking to one of my coworkers, Debi, at the library last Monday about this. We were packing up books for the interlibrary loans and the subject was brought up about the Crossing the Lines book that I just finished. I told her how I loved learning about the 60s and just thought it would be so "cool" to live in that time period. Debi, being one that lived in the 60s and 70s and saw all the events first hand just looked at me. She just stopped packing and looked at me. I tried to explain what I meant by "cool", but she just continued to look at me. She said pointblankly...."KIM, STOP romanticizing this time period in history. It wasn't cool. It was heartbreaking, it was terrible. It was a very SAD time in the history of America that we treated other people this way. You're romanticizing the events of this time period, and they were far from being lovely."....
.....................
All I could do was just be quite. Some time pasted and I said, "but wasn't it empowering to live in a time when the things that you believed in were actually heard? Wasn't it empowering to know that the things that were important to you, the things that you stood up for, were being heard by people who thought differently than you and that their opinions were actually changing?"
And all that she said for a couple of moments was...."it looks like in the documentaries that their voices were being heard by people that could be a voice and could actually make a difference, but Kim it was all an illusion."
We started talking about the sit ins at the restaurants. I said "I would of loved to be a part of a demonstration like that." She said very frankly....."Kim alot of people got the sh** kicked out of them....many many young kids your age DIED." Would you really want to be a part of something like that? Would you want to live in a time where the only way your voice could be heard was if you risked your life?"
She said, Kim, there are things that you can stand up for now, that was just like then. There are still injustices happening in the world. There will be times where your voice isn't heard. But you need to keep fighting just like those young African Americans kept fighting. Remained in hope for a better way of life. History repeats itself. Just like there was things that were shameful and broke your heart back then, there are things that are shameful and break your heart now. Keep the hope. Keep hoping. And keep trusting that the things that are in your heart are their for a reason...don't keep silent.
So I'm still reading, I'm still learning. The 60s are facinating to me....but I'm trying to look at things a little differently now....
