"In the days of the long hair you were so right and I was so wrong"
My father (who is long since departed) wrote me that note, which I cherish deeply, over 40 years ago. He had suffered a stroke some time before that and his use of words, which once came effortlessly to him, had become much more labored. But I knew exactly what he meant, and it couldn't have been more moving to me. In 1967 I became a freshman in college, the first member of my family to attend a university. Intensified by the times we were then living through, my natural liberal tendencies flourished in that liberated atmosphere, and yes I began to let my hair grow long.
I grew up in a working class family in a predominantly middle to upper middle class town. I didn't appreciate all of the contradictions inherent in my upbringing until later when I was exposed to subjects like sociology in college. My father had an eighth grade education. His parents, who had immigrated to America from Sicily, needed help from their children who were old enough to work, in order to keep the family afloat. So my father had little formal education, but he was a brilliant man.
He was also a warm and gracious man whose affections flowed freely. His politics, from what I could understand at the time, leaned clearly Democratic. Dad was a working man with no pretensions of social climbing, but though he wasn't overtly religious, his cultural values veered intrinsically conservative. When the sixties swept over our nation he found it profoundly unsettling. My father quietly coexisted with the then prevailing social order. He thought social mores existed for a reason. He believed authority should be respected. I, however, became a card carrying member of the Question Authority Generation.
Looking back I would have to describe my father as essentially a George Wallace Democrat when I was in my late teens. I have no doubt that my father harbored clear racial prejudices, but he wasn't at his core a racist. Dad accepted each person on their individual merits and accorded everyone personal respect, but succumbed to wide spread racial biases about people "on the whole." The overt racism of someone like George Wallace wasn't the hook that grabbed my father, it was his fear of the nation descending into lawless chaos, the pillars of society potentially dissolving, that drew my father toward right wing populism then.
As I increasingly became an anti-war radical and racial justice activist, my father didn't know the half of what I was up to, and I made sure that he didn't. I avoided having a direct political showdown with my father over my activities, but not because he held any power over me by then. I feared triggering am irrevocable emotional rupture between us. So we had our unspoken dance. Like I said above, Dad was a brilliant man. He may not have known half of what I was up to, but he still knew more than enough to understand that I had chosen a different path for my own life than the one he might have hoped for. My hair grew very long, and my life soon revolved ar0und one cause or another and my father understood that, even if the details remained for the most part unspoken.
My father watched, he listened, and he learned. And one day years later he penned that note to me. The stress our nation is undergoing today is as profound, if not more so, as what he went through in the sixties/early seventies. Many older Americans are, for whatever reasons, now FOX news junkies. They are my chronological peers. I hope their children and grandchildren, while remaining steadfast in pursuit of racial and economic justice in America, manage to avoid burning bridges inside those families. I never knew the exact moment when my father crossed the bridge over the divide that "politically" separated us. Our love refused to sever, and we stood together before he died. That is a testament to my father's benevolent spirit. I am lucky, I know. I could not have turned my father if ultimately he hadn't been open to turning. Some never will see through the fear, and even hate, that blinds them now. Hopefully, though, enough eventually will and our nation will exit these turbulent times with our core ideals intact.
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My background is shaped mostly by my grandparents' generation. My father's parents emigrated from Austro-Hungary before WWI. My grandfather and all of his male siblings refused to be drafted into the Kaiser's army, so they all came to America and settled in the Midwest and farmed, as that is what they knew. As well, many of their fellow countrymen and extended family were already here. So, with that close of a tie to the old country and with their reason for coming to America, mostly we were a family who is anti-war. However, my dad volunteered to fight in WWII for the cause, but was not accepted because of an injury in childhood to one of his knees, which left him incapable of the type of mobility that was required. Ironically, one of my cousins who still lived in Germany at the time of WWII was drafted into Hitler's army as a 16-year-old. It was either that, or he and his entire family would be taken out and shot. Luckily, within the first few months of his service, he was captured by Allied forces and sat out the war in prison. He once told me that on the days the food was good, all the prisoners talked about was food; and on the days the food was bad, all they talked about was women....
Sorry, I'm rambling, but appreciate your post very much.
