{"id":46676,"date":"2011-10-04T19:06:13","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T23:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=46676"},"modified":"2011-10-04T19:47:44","modified_gmt":"2011-10-04T23:47:44","slug":"leaves-of-autumn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/leaves-of-autumn\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaves of Autumn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teach your children well,\u00a0their father’s hell will slowly go by<\/em>
\nAnd feed them on your dreams, the one they pick’s the one you’ll know by.<\/em>
\nDon’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry<\/em>
\nSo just look at them and sigh,\u00a0and know they love you.<\/em>
\nGraham Nash<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last Tuesday, I took off work to visit the doctor. My twenty-something niece Felicia came with me for the exam, and afterwards we decided to take a drive into the city to kick up our heels.<\/p>\n

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Listening to the news while crossing the bridge, I turned to her and said, “I’m so sorry the way this world is turning out for you.”<\/p>\n

She asked, “How so?”<\/p>\n

“I mean, it’s lucky that your parents are pretty secure, but I know it’s so very hard for you and your brother to find your way in the world as it is right now. Everyone seems to be tearing everything in two. We can’t seem to talk to one another. We can’t seem to get things done. And we’re going to be leaving you with an awfully big mess to clean up.”<\/p>\n

She said, “Don’t worry, Auntie Fe. We’ve grown up with a lot of kids who have been home-schooled. Some of them devout Christians and Republicans. Some of them even Tea Party kids. But we’ve learned we can talk to each other. That we can<\/em> talk to each other.”<\/p>\n

I took a breath. With those words between us going across the bridge from Berkeley to San Francisco, I realized my niece and I were also crossing a bridge to another distant shore: the generational divide.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Looking at the Plutonic eras of Leo and Scorpio — the divide between me and Felicia — is like looking at two different time stamps, similar to comparing the differences in a vintage of wine or distilled spirits. Our generations were in different climates — political, social, economic and meteorological — and though our worlds overlapped, our experiences of the world shaped us like a lathe into patterns distinct for our eras, and there was more to the divide than a slightly different curve to the wood.<\/p>\n

My parents not only escaped from war, they left it so far behind that in order to survive, the memory of war was something to be suppressed, never to be spoken of with the children. We were given the most any kids could get for a new immigrant family: two nice homes, the second in a better neighborhood. And of course, there was the television: Ed Sullivan, the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of the president, the Beatles. A snapshot of us in 1960s showed us posing as a family — Mom, Dad, me and my sister — looking a lot like the official White House photo of LBJ, Lady Bird and their two daughters.\u00a0We could have been a model minority family had my sister not entered puberty during the 1960s, and life became a movie about how everything changes. That included how we would behave in the world, seeing, probably for the first time, what kind of world it really was.<\/p>\n

We were dumbstruck by the struggle for racial equality in the South, knowing somehow this would affect us — but how we were uncertain. That alone brought us fear and for my parents a need to conform even more in order not to draw the ire of the white majority of our home town. Yet within that movement lay the groundwork for a freedom my sister and I could not yet name.\u00a0We were amazed by how white Americans were protesting against their President.\u00a0In 1969 when my sister’s boyfriend got a low draft card number — meaning he could get called early to service in Vietnam, we both participated in the growing anti-war movement in high school.<\/p>\n

For a family of immigrants trying to remain invisible, I’m sure we must have terrified our poor parents. To this day I remember mama’s single wordless gesture of exasperation: holding her head in both hands and throwing her arms up as double-exclamation points to her multi-lingual invective about our skirts being too short and “those dirty hippies.”<\/p>\n

The hard-wiring that came with being formed in the crucible of the 1960s stays in your life like a burl on a tree. The tree keeps growing, but it leaves layer upon layer on top of the burl, the burl growing in proportion with the tree. The system, the Man, the Power we all fought remained, and we also carried with us, running inside us like a secret spring, our distrust of them.\u00a0We developed our first physical and spiritual muscles holding up protest signs and placards.\u00a0We also carried with us the hope of change and the power of joining together in the struggle for human and civil rights. Our lives and the lives of our loved ones were at stake. And we have, to a certain degree, been\u00a0very successful, as well as reluctant — out of necessity — to give up our wariness. ‘Us’ versus ‘them’.<\/p>\n

Yet, looking at my niece’s and nephew’s formative years,\u00a0we saw what we built through the struggle of the 1960s and 70s and the reaction to it and realized that some things don’t change easily: the ‘me-first’ generation of parents aspiring to greater heights of consumerism, the rejection of social consciousness, the unexpected and senseless violence of Columbine and Virginia Tech, the false flag attack on Sept. 11, and the more recent self-inflicted global financial meltdown built upon decades of escalating unregulated avarice — these experiences were their lathe, their distillation of character. It shaped how they see the world and each other in their generation. And now they see it in how it is leaving them without a future. They couldn’t help but see the world — it came crashing into their living rooms and classrooms, intruding upon their innocence in a way that they learned they needed each other, regardless how far left or right their parents were.<\/p>\n

These days, I look at the thousands of faces in Zucotti Park, and check the websites and see those bubbly red Google landmark points crop up across the map of America, showing where the #Occupy movement is happening next. The map is almost blacked out by points. I see these kids and their iPods, notebooks and iPhones, like the kids we saw earlier this year in Tahrir Square — peaceful, joyous and persistent. Van Jones has named this movement the American Autumn<\/em>, a response to the Arab Spring. It’s a name that even Adbusters Magazine<\/em> has taken to heart, as evidenced by their October cover.<\/a> But it’s also an autumn for those of us from the summer of love to embrace as the kiss of appreciation from those kids we brought into the world, taught by example, embarrassed ourselves in front of, and are learning painful lessons from today.<\/p>\n

I released the breath I held while taking in Felicia’s words,\u00a0“We can talk to each other.” <\/em>Breathing out, I said, “It’s so messed up, I’m not sure I will still be around to help you when you guys take your turn to fix it.”<\/p>\n

She said, “Don’t worry, when we’re ready, we’ll know what to do. We already know now that we have to do it together.”<\/p>\n

Together. She knew it even without reading Planet Waves. These kids are going to teach us well.<\/p>\n

Teach your parents well, their children’s hell will slowly go by,<\/em>
\nAnd feed them on your dreams, the one they pick’s the one you’ll know by.<\/em>
\nDon’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,<\/em>
\nSo just look at them and sigh and know they love you<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teach your children well,\u00a0their father’s hell will slowly go by And feed them on your dreams, the one they pick’s the one you’ll know by. Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry So just look at them and sigh,\u00a0and know they love you. Graham Nash Last Tuesday, I took … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46676"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46676\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}