Lughnasa Honey Moon
It’s happening again. Today. We’re getting all historical and misty over an event that happened in my lifetime, while I was in high school.
That speech in 1963. When I went to Washington, D.C. in March I walked past the Obama Whitehouse out to the Lincoln Memorial. There’s a plaque there, on one of the steps, that marks the spot where MLK stood.
I’d like to say I remember the speech and the reactions to it, but I don’t. Or, at least, those memories have become submerged in the later, copious reactions in print and in other media. I can hear his voice, as I imagine you can, soaring and dipping. “That check came back marked insufficient funds.” “I have a dream.” It was the rhythm of call and response preaching, a hallmark of the black church, a tradition that retained, and retains, a respect for rhetoric, for the art of speaking persuasively.
In those days, those same tumultuous times, President Kennedy had authorized American military adviser’s presence in Vietnam. So even as Dr. King spoke in Washington the seeds of another great domestic conflict were sown, the dragon teeth of Cadmus, and they would come to life in a great battle fought conterminously with the expanding civil rights movement.
And there was more. As the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement blossomed into a decade of radical protest, another cri de coeur had begun to gain critical mass, the feminist movement.
This was at the end of my first phase, all this roiling pitching crowded press, idea upon idea, action upon action, analysis followed analysis into praxis with the quiet, inhibited era of the post-war atomic age bulging at its anger constricted arteries, veins pulsing with affronted blood.
How could I not have been shaped, reshaped, torn down and built up again by exposure to the racism, the militarism, the sexism that was my birthright, a right mess of potage handed down to me as God’s honest truth? No wonder those old ties sundered, split apart by cultural sclerosis.
It was King, yes, but it was also the times, the zeitgeist. This was a moment almost out of time, a moment when the old was no longer adequate, when antiquity could no longer be a reason. It was a time like the one Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted:
“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
Today we are still learning how to put enough into the bank so the check will not come back marked insufficient funds. Today we are still learning how to control a military adventurism that displays American imperialism and idealism in equal measure. Today we are still learning how to integrate women into all phases of our social existence. And more. Now we are learning, too, the same for LGBT citizens, for Muslims, for the disabled and the old.
Yes, things have grown quieter again, but that is only because the zeitgeist is not one of boiling change. At least not here in the U.S. That does not mean the problems have been solved or that the need for protest is past. It will come again.
