A Pilgrim’s Digression

Bus Ride Shook a Nation’s Conscience

As in the east, the weather in Detroit looks pretty miserable today, cold and cloudy with a strong probability of rain. The rain is already pouring here in Washington. It’s worth noting that on a day of storms, Rosa Parks died, one of the last Civil Rights pioneers.

When someone who is very elderly dies, I always wonder if the world they are leaving is anything like they imagined it would be when they were younger, or if all of them are disappointed. I know a couple elderly people in their nineties, both women, and I have asked them to tell me their impressions of how the world has changed. On the one hand, they tell me anecdotes about how a sister died in the great 1919 flu epidemic, or how their earliest memory is of sitting on their papa’s shoulders and watching the soldiers in parade down Philadelphia’s Broad Street, returning from Europe in 1918. On the other hand, they inevitably say times were better in the past, before this or that. Those two women are white women. I don’t think Rosa Parks would agree with them. The world she leaves behind is infinitely better for people of her race than the world into which she was born in 1913.

What I find remarkable about Parks is that here is an ordinary person with no special qualification to have influenced societal change, yet through a confluence of events and personality, she changed the course of a nation in a way that few Presidents could even manage.

In a way, maybe her kind of activism was not so uncommon at the time. I’ve been watching “No Direction Home,” the Martin Scorsese documentary about Bob Dylan. In the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, young and old alike were energized by the effort to effect change in a society that was corrupt at its core. One might argue that by the late sixties, the counterculture had descended into self-destructive decadence, but from 1955 to roughly 1967 or so, there was a genuine, moral force at work in the country.

I recall back in the nineties hearing Rush Limbaugh deride Rosa Parks as just another “paid protester” of the kind Liberals routinely round up to shout slogans and picket businesses and governments. It’s funny how Conservatives berate Liberals for being ideologically driven or affiliated with ideological organizations. When Conservatives criticize someone like Rosa Parks for not being “pure,” that is unencumbered with ideology, the false implication is that they would take Rosa Parks seriously if she hadn’t been a member of the NAACP, and if she hadn’t made her decision to remain seated from a standpoint of ideology as well as ethics.

Today, the entire generation of “radicals” who fomented unrest in the sixties are denounced as un-American, Socialist, disruptive of the American way of life, and childish. The same people who despised the Liberal youths of 1960 are the same people who despise them today, only today these Conservatives hold power in the highest offices of the land, in the radio broadcast booths, and on cable television news. Baby boomers are the single-most despised generation in our nation’s history. I don’t think there has ever been a generation just written out of official history, as described by those in power, as irrelevant, unimportant, morally questionable, and unworthy to be called Americans.

Today, a former Senator of the stature of Jesse Helms can dismiss the entire Civil Rights movement as irrelevant because the nation would have moved peacefully in the direction of desegregation anyway, eventually; and he is not denounced by those who walk through the halls of power. In fact, many express quiet agreement with him: the sixties, and everything that went with that decade including Civil Rights, were an unfortunate aberration.

Tom Brokaw made the badly overstated claim that the generation who lived through the Depression and fought World War II were the “Greatest Generation.” The truth is, there is greatness in every generation. It’s time Americans stop beating up on the generation born in the forties and raised up in the fifties and sixties. On a day when someone not of that generation, but inextricably part of its movement has died, let’s give credit to the greatness of the generation that freed a people right here in our own country. This was a generation that taught us that patriotism didn’t mean taking whatever shit the government handed you, telling you to eat it like it was cake. Sometimes change can result from small acts of defiance; saying “no” once, on principal, can speak louder than whole volumes of the legislative record of the Congress. There is greatness in the generation that said “no,” as well as the generation that answered “yes.”