Adventures in Inflection Points-1966 thru 2025

A Boomer Responds & You Can Humm Along

[Please, please if you read this and like it even a little, remember to click on the little heart at the end so I will know you were here. Thanks]

Because I'm an old lady, as my son keeps reminding me, I have lived through a few periods of extraordinary change in our country and the world. How have I survived, ocassionally thrived? Is this just another inflection point?

Through a Glass Brightly

Let's start with the 60s meaning the late 60s, early 70s. We've heard so much bad stuff about the dangerous and disruptive 60s. It gets unfavorabley compared to this scary time we're in.

Of course, I don't remember them that way at all though I know people who do; but that often had as much to do with temperament as politics for some of these folks-discomfort with confrontation, etc. Of course, I know there were bombings and riots but even the bombings were designed to destroy particular property, not people although they sometimes did that too.

Am I nostalgic? Yes I am. Did we succeed? It seems to me that the depth of the continuing backlash proves that we did, to some extent, succeed. It looks as if the Nixon-Regaern-trump years have really been one long and continuing backlash.

Of course, that's silly. The promise (if not the reality) of the Clinton years signaled change and the Obama years produced enough of that change to compound and accelerate the ugliness of the backlash…besides the whiplash some felt because we elected a Black man.

1966 to 1970

I was at San Franciso State from 1966 to 1970 and joined first the peace movement, then the fight for Ethnic Studies as a member of SDS. I was a novice at “revolution.” Most of my comrades were “red diaper” babies- their parents were leftists; and by their teens they were Marxists; or an unreasonable facsimile of. I, you may remember, was raised in a suburban Rockefeller Republican household. [well, not my father who liked to call himself an anarchist but was in reality, a champion bridge player and an avid reader.] I knew only one person who supported JFK (hi Carol!)

I remember violent police mobs, being mistreated in San Francisco's downtown jail, learning which way to run when police were preparing to attack and friends who were learning how to use a gun.

I also remember mornings on the streets of Oakland-playing chicken with angry drivers trying to get to work-as OPD attempted to corner us, but we did shut down the Draft Center for a day or two. And, of course, Free Huey rallies at the courthouse by the lake. We would ride in my boyfriend’s VW bug back to campus feeling we had left the scene of battle. Actually, we had.

Some of these experiences felt dangerous, some were sporadically violent but I never did learn how to use a gun and kept myself just out of the reach of the Billy clubs somehow.

But what I felt was exhilaration, a sense of being fully alive. Two things stood out and kept me involved: the knowledge of learning something new everyday whether from books, experience or the people I was meeting; and a sincere, in my bones, feeling that we were making a difference, that the world would change.

No I never did take psychedelics though people often told me I seemed like I had dropped a lot of acid, hmmm, weird.

It wasn’t always a time of Sex, Drugs and Rockn Roll, more of Sex, Riots and Folk plus Motown, but it worked for me.

It was Judy Collins and Smokey Robinson, I Second that Emotion, with a side of Country Joe. I preferred house parties where we would dance to the Temptations Greatest Hits, I guess you'd say, what can make me feel this way, album (still got it) rather than flinging my self around on Hippie Hill but we did hear Janice and Big Brother there for free.

Ain't no time to wonder why, whoopee, we're all gonna die…….

The Strike for Ethnic Studies that lasted months, was pivotal. Well-known community members came out to speak at our campus, and many of us went to jail for our troubles-we didn't regret it. We learned from it.

But when Cambodia and Kent State happened, I'd say, we fell apart. Our supportive professors had all been fired by then, many of us had gone to jail or had suspended sentences. After that, I left the country to backpack around Europe.

There every American I met told me they were also from San Francisco but then I would discover they had left Iowa to hang out for a few weeks in our magical city. I did run into folks who had been to my flat in the Fillmore though. There was a circuit and try as you might to leave it, you were on it, even on a tiny Greek island.

You who were on the road, must have a that you can live by….

Backpacking-Amsterdam-Florence-Munich-Greece

I've begun to write about that backpacking period but am not ready to publish it nor am I sure of the interest in it. There is lots of music to remind of that time- rock, folk, Motown, and pre-disco dance tunes, but let's leave this Dylan song as a meme for my travels.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=OADlrLHfYW4&si=zvGRIRVE23P8BRlX

Oh I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

Eventually I returned to the City by the Bay and even did a stint in the country with friends in what we called the People's Republic of Soda Canyon Road in Napa. Landlord problems ended that idyll along with an invasion by Yuppies, those precursors of gentrification.

Mother, mother, there's too many of you crying….

Iraq war years

Of course, many years later my family and I marched against the Iraq War in SF and then the Republican Convention in New York. I wore my flag dress that I made in the 60s before it was a symbol of MAGA. And despite the whole world marching with us, the war went on.

Occupy Oakland

I mark the next Inflection point as Occupy Wall Street and our own Occupy Oakland. It was a turning point during which much of the country seemed to realize that the extreme inequality we'd gotten accustomed to was wrong and not inevitable.

The Occupy which set up in Oakland at first welcomed in a creative spirit, an openness much like what I had experienced in the 60s. I can remember leaving my house, on top of a hill near the Lakeshore shopping district, at dusk to run down to Ogawa Plaza where Ocuppy was happening and then walking slowly, luxuriantly back home around the Lake-at night.

The high point was the General Strike, a day we all marched to the Port of Oakland in the late afternoon, thousands of us together including some councilmembers and the mayor's husband. I have pictures somewhere of people rallying on the overpass in the sunset. It was glorious solidarity.

Photo by Pamela Drake

And yet there were many dark moments including the police riot put on by Police Chief Howard Jordan which almost managed to kill a veteran of the Iraq War. It was done while the mayor was out of town and against her wishes but she would always be blamed for it.

At some point the atmosphere began to grow stressed and toxic. Someone was killed and the camp was torn down again but this time under the watchful eyes of the Labor Council which rallied to separate the campers from the cops.

Still it was a sad day to see all the art and the tent homes discarded-despite my becoming discouraged by the changes I had seen, the negativity I'd begun to experience.

But the concept of the 99% of us who struggled through life while the 1% controlled all the wealth and opportunities stayed with us, now we refer to it as the oligarchy.

The Rise of the trump Reich

Now I have reached the final acts of my life. I'm still living in and dedicated to Oaktown, and I love my little hundred year old cottage on a hill-so lucky to have it.

I may be underemembering the turmoil and danger of the 60s. It could also be that I was a young adrenalin junkie, not yet invested in my old house and my neighborhood businesses. I'm also invested in the lives of my grown children, in their health, economic futures, and their Blackness—so my reaction to this regime is visceral. And my love for my grand baby knows no bounds.

In the 60s we saw the Tac squad ride their motorcycles up and down our sidewalks, grab and drag young women by their hair, and regular cops murder Black activists with impunity.

But now…now all of the above and more, much more is being organized by our president ( OK, yes, LBJ did sanction all of the above.)

But I do not remember federal official Brownshirts, as vicious as any Nazi brownshirts, marauding all over our cities, towns, and even farmlands, attacking random, or semi-random Americans and disappearing them. Semi-random because they must be Brown or Black to be subject to this brutality.

I'm not going to list all the depredations that Trump et al pile on us day by day, minute by minute.

The most obvious of the outlaw activities of this crowd is the gangs of armed thugs wandering our neighborhoods and into government buildings brutalizing the most vulnerable.

But there is no one who will escape the destruction-starting with the degredation of the planet we all live on, to the demise of the successful American economy and the erasure of the sliver of belief left by our allies in our leadership. Oh then there are the courts, and finally the end of the reputation of the West as places in the world where fairness, opportunity, and safety might be found. This last cannot all be blamed on Trump.

When Biden, Macron and recent leaders of Brtain and Germany pretended not to see war crimes committed by Israel and especially that good Ole Joe paid to commit them, the end of trust in the West arrived. What little hope the Global South still had in our ultimate goodness, was finally blown up along with Palestinian hospitals, universities and poets.

This is truly a time of monsters. No bipartisan future can be envisioned when one of our ruling parties has gone full Nazi while the other looks on in complicity or with mild distress (still babbling about donors and the problem of wokeness.)

Whatever you were going to do to protect your family or community from these forces, however shocked you are at where our country is now, we are running out of time. Be creative, be brave, be bold, be compassionate but not stupid- there is a difference.

Love you all,

Draketalkoakland