This past weekend Mary Ann opened her email inbox, and there it was—an announcement of the upcoming forty-year reunion of our high school class. Ours was the Class of ’69, and we were every bit as hopeful, optimistic and confident of our ability to change the world as were the classes of ’01 or ’99 or any year in between.
On this day in 1969 militant black activists (most of whom were students) were occupying buildings at Cornell University by force of arms, brandishing rifles and shotguns, and spurring similar demonstrations, protests, takeovers and general unrest at other campuses all across the country. God, my generation was an occupying, demonstrating and protesting bunch if ever there was one!
While the Vietnam War raged on and showed no promise of ever coming to an end, the nation eagerly anticipated the Apollo 11 space shot, only a couple of months away, that would land an American on the moon. It was a prospect both of wonder and national pride in a country desperately in need of something to be proud of.
When, finally, the big day came, Mary Ann learned the details of the moon landing from an elderly couple who had stopped in for supper at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress through high school and during the summer following our graduation. I listened to radio accounts of Neil Armstrong’s anticipated first steps onto the lunar surface as I drove through the streets of south Atlanta in my black ’64 Ford Falcon trying to sell enough Orkin pest control services to pay for my first semester at college. Many of my not-college-bound friends learned the details of the landing in the pages of the Stars And Stripes, reading between patrols through the jungles of Vietnam.
Today we are embroiled in two military conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan, our economy is reeling from the effects of fraud, corruption and greed, and millions of us are again looking around for something to be proud of, a space shot for today. So, now forty years on, the Class of ’69 asks if we can be proud of ourselves. We set out to change the world, but somehow time just got away from us.
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A lot of things got in the way. Life, kids, just tending to the basics. We all romanticize the past, so somehow the 1960s in spite of all the problems still seem like a better time to those of us who were there. We should have done more but there’s nothing to say that we can’t get started again now.