By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
My Dad — bless him — used to talk about the silent majority as if he were a part of it, which seemed to me a kind of psychic rewriting of his past. Back when the nation was experiencing a cultural meltdown prompted by the draft and the Vietnam war, Tricky Dick Nixon won his reelection by identifying youthful protesters as a “vocal minority,” splitting them away from what he called the “silent majority.” It was a clever political ploy, creating a division between those critical of the war and those offended by criticism of American nationalism. The boundaries of authority were already precariously stretched and Dick kicked the can over, spilling it for political purpose. Part of the infamous Southern Strategy, these divisions became a civil war, splitting families, institutions and regions of the country.
These were the social changes necessitated by the Pluto/Uranus opposition, starting with the bright promise of psychedelics, love-ins and peace marches, and ending with Charlie Manson, a series of shocking, disheartening assassinations, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. It was a period of transition for all of us, surely, and some of it was scary, but I don’t remember my father being a stuffed-shirt conservative back in those days. He was always the guy you could go to to talk things out, judgments put aside. For reasons of his own that I don’t understand, he recreated history in his later years to side with fear and repression.
As a member of the Greatest Generation, Dad was marked by the self-protective, traditional bent that so many of the Pluto in Cancer folks brought to the table, but he had an innate sense of cool about him that attracted kids. That’s probably why he became a high school teacher, a mentor and a philosopher, in that order; the last two were avocations when he finally left education, which was largely a political decision. In the late ’60s, education sustained some changes that my father thought undercut his ability to teach. It’s probably no coincidence that right about then education began a downward spiral it’s still struggling to reverse. So Dad gave up classrooms and summers off to join the business community, but even then he always seemed to have a youngster around, teaching them his craft. There was little in his psychological makeup to mark him as a radical. In fact, a lot of people identified my father as their hero over the years. I even heard it a time or two after his passing this July. Dad would have liked that.