Change Is Possible in the Bitterest of Times

Mayor Daley, what was the lesson of Chicago in ‘68?” the reporter wanted to know.

The mayor hesitated, then replied, “that war is evil.”

I agreed, and found myself moved.

This scene was last month, half my lifetime since the 1968 Chicago protests. This Daley who was welcoming me to Chicago was the son of the mayor whose police were somewhat less hospitable in 1968.

The mayor’s words recalled that the Chicago confrontation of 1968 was a passion play set against the larger agony of Vietnam.

I went to Chicago then in bitterness about napalming people we knew nothing about, and bitterness toward a government that threw young men to the dogs of war but denied them the right to vote.

I was bitter that the Democrats, the party of my hope, were escalating a war in 1968 that they had promised not to start in 1964.

I was bitter about my father because of his bitterness, and bitter about all those parents who sided with the government against their own sons and daughters.

My father was a Marine in World War II. Like Mayor Richard J. Daley, he accepted the FBI’s classification of his own son as dangerous. Thinking I had fallen under influences he did not understand, he didn’t talk to me for 15 years.

I was not aware of this brokenness in my life until the day the Chicago judge asked if I had anything to say before he imposed a sentence.

I told him that punishment would never deter our movement, then I blurted out that I very much wanted to have children of my own. “That’s where the penitentiary system won’t help you,” he retorted.

In time, thankfully, my father and I reconciled. I learned to appreciate how much it hurt him to see me reject the career opportunities he had prepared for me. He learned that the FBI had planned to “neutralize” me through covert action, and that the government he served was lying about the war.

Next week I return to Chicago as an elected Democratic delegate. I will sleep in the Conrad Hilton. My grown-up kids will be there.

On some level, I feel ratified. My bitterness was lifted long ago. After approaching the brink in 1968, to my surprise the establishment began to accept reforms: Lowering the voting age to 18 expanded democracy; the process of choosing presidential candidates shifted from back rooms to open primaries; the imperial presidency was trimmed to more democratic size, and our archvillains Daley, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon soon faded into history.

But 1968 was about achieving more than a plastic delegate card or a room in the Hilton. It was about deeper needs that remain unfulfilled.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission reported that America was being divided into two nations by race; the prediction has proved true. Since 1968, poverty in America has risen. Since 1968, family living standards have stagnated or dropped. The gap between rich and poor is widening, the middle class is shrinking. Social programs are being replaced by the largest prison system in the Western world. In California, we have added 10,000 prison guards by cutting 10,000 jobs in higher education. In addition to working for less real pay since 1968, the average worker is employed an extra month per year.

Since 1968, the flow of campaign contributions to politicians has doubled. Government tilts toward special-interest agendas and drives those with modest means into the disenfranchisement of indifference.

Are we as parents, as the generation with authority, in danger of repeating the failure of so many parents in the 1960s to listen to the needs of the young? By accepting prisons and downsizing so readily, are we tacitly admitting that we have given up on a better life for the next generation?

My two kids, now the age I was in the ‘60s, certainly think so.

I will raise my delegate’s card for Bill Clinton because I don’t want to crlminalize abortion or make guns and tobacco more readily available.

But the deeper need is to build the progressive consciousness that was underway before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy turned us into a generation of might-have-beens.

In that spirit, I have been building an event in Chicago that brings the past into the present. Crosby, Stills and Nash will be there and so will stalwart survivors of 1968. Mayor Richard M. Daley will welcome us.

But most important, young idealists of today will showcase their organizing efforts to win a living wage for workers now in dead-end jobs and 200 inner-city youth will present their “peace plan” calling on President Clinton to help them resurrect our cities.

The lesson of 1968 for me is that change is always possible in the bitterest of times. I learned that through the reforms that followed 1968, and through transforming my relationship with my dad. Even when pessimism persuades the intellect, to stay human, one needs optimism of the will.