I remember that first Earth Day. I also remember 10 days later when the man who created the EPA ordered the invasion of Cambodia, followed four days later by the killings at kent State and the national campus strike against the war. A period when every day seemed like a year if you were politically active.
I remember that first Earth Day. I also remember 10 days later when the man who created the EPA ordered the invasion of Cambodia, followed four days later by the killings at kent State and the national campus strike against the war. A period when every day seemed like a year if you were politically active.
When I got back to Australia in 1972, after ten years in France and Italy, there were a whole lot of new words I didn't understand, like "ballpark figure", for instance, and "grassroots". I took a temporary job working for an earnest young man with a beard, doing a lot of water sampling at popular beaches; "e.coli" was easy to grasp, but I had to ask him what "conservation" meant. I don't think Silent Spring was translated into French or Italian. In 1970 I was living in habitually chaotic Italy, and what worried us was the rise of terrorism from the Red Brigades. Two years earlier, the French general strike showed that it was possible for the will of the people to prevail. Then the Russians rolled their tanks into Prague and crushed the freedom Alexander Dubcek had dared to lead. Has anything got better since then? durably better? And yet President Biden's simply worded statement is penetratingly clear.
The current political reality shows that democracy must be vigorously and diligently protected. I thought things like protection of contraception were pretty durable, but after overthrowing (yes, word choice is intentional here) Roe v Wade Thomas began to call into question other very personal rights. Then there is the Social Security/Medicare situation. The social safety net ALWAYS has to be protected from the greedy rich.
And he was one of the 2 in the 7-2 decision in keeping mifepristone on the market. (Guess who was the other.) I hate to throw around labels, like misogynist, but these two qualify. They seem like very unhappy people.
Must have been that other unreconstructed jackhat, Alito. For the life of me I do not understand why Alito didn't follow his misogyny right into the Catholic priesthood, where he could vent his hate on women and the rest of the world without let or hindrance.
MLMinET, YES, two people who are sufficiently unhappy with who they are that they go to extraordinary lengths to appear otherwise, especially the fairly simple decisions about conflicts of interest and gifts and "emoluments" from others. See Lisa Murkowski's comments on being sold a bill of goods, all of us for that matter, who were sold a bill of goods throughout the confirmation hearings for any of these "justices!" They just plain lied.
Yes, they did. And what does it say about the rot in our society that SC justice candidates think they can--and they did--lie their way through confirmation? And, in the case of Thomas, Biden and HW Bush were sufficiently intimidated by declining to nominate a black man (for cause) they caved. And here we are.
JennSH, yes we have to remain ever-vigilant but should be careful to not paste everyone with money as greedy. It is the fundamental nature of capitalism that is driven by continual growth and consumption. We must routinely counterbalance the creativity and energy (often driven by greed) with rational regulation and laws to protect those without the massive accumulations of wealth. Ironically, that is what Nixon started to accomplish despite his other despicable behavior and I think that is what drove the R's to try to control the legislative process, put their very heavy thumb on the scales of that balance between capitalism and the social & environmental welfare.
If you're European, no, that year was one hell of a mixture.
London, May '68. Night classes at the French Institute in South Kensington, an offshoot of the University of Lille in France... We had a wonderful history professor, a woman who, like HCR, knew how to connect up the present with the remote and recent past.
In Paris, the students built barricades and faced down the CRS riot police, trying to get the Communist CGT trade union federation to join them in a general strike. And we in our history classes broke off our study of medieval French history and discussed the uprising and what it meant for France, for Europe, for us.
The way it all ended, we'd come to expect. Yet those were moments that marked a generation.
*
On August 21st 1968 I'd bought tickets for myself, my Polish friend and his daughter to a concert to be given at the huge Albert Hall by the Orchestra of the USSR.
That morning, the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia.
I phoned Iliasz, who'd woken up one morning in 1939 to find Red Army tanks below his window in Lwow, Poland, today Lviv, Ukraine, packed a bag, breakfasted with his parents, then left them and his country for ever, not stopping till he reached England, where he joined the Polish forces and fought through the entire Italian campaign.
I asked him:
"Do you still want to come to this concert?"
His answer couldn't have been clearer:
"Absolutely. The musicians in the orchestra will be suffering horribly for what their country has done. They'll need our moral support."
We went.
The concert closed with Tchaikovsky's 6th and final symphony, the Pathetique.
I wasn't a Tchaikovsky fan but I had and I have never heard anything like the music that evening -- one of the key moments in my life.
The orchestra rose to the occasion, their discipline was matched by an overwhelming, tangible sense of tragedy.
*
Striking to compare then and now, Stalin and Hitler's carving up Poland, Brezhnev's invasion and Putin's, my friend's reaction and the horrors we are seeing today.
I was at UCL in 1968, street protests and all, often it must be said, lead by foreign postgrads agitating away from their own college to protect their status. I remember distinctly "housing" Rudi Deutscke and the members of his "committee" from the german protests in our somewhat downtrodden collective student house in North London. They didn't ask, they just pushed through the door heading straight for the "collective" fridge serving themselves on whatever drink etc they could find....good communist stuff i presume.
I was in the streets with the others and we had just been given the majority at 18. Freedom, Freedom, Freedom! It fealt so good, especially the feeling that the youth of the world spoke the same language and shared the same values.
Unfortunately we have had over 50 years to change the world. The result is far from what it might have been, what we hoped for. But we are responsible for the current mess nonetheless.
Danny the Red is still around politics in France and Germany. A bi-cultural gadfly once, a gladfly always. Today's local supposed followers of Rachel Carson spout dictatorial inanities that would have honoured POL Pot, Stalin, Hitler or whoever of that ilk; banning rugby matches, cycle races, air transport and the christmas tree amongst other ecological "threats" in the towns they control. None have a thought for the people and how they want society and their world to run. They just figure that the people are a little stupid, or as they put it "backward" and that their thinking doesn't work. Ideology replaces personal thought and considered opinion conveniently it would seem for such.
Your last sentence says so much about today's world, not just French ideologues' inability to get their constipated little minds around an issue too big for them.
Ideology is ersatz, an imitation, it is prefabricated thought modules... It may be all too typical of humans but it is not just unnatural, it is contra naturam. Anti-nature.
Both Brezhnev and Reagan were representative mediocrities, champions of mediocrity. The Soviet leader let himself be railroaded into the Afghan war by KGB boss Andropov. He didn't want the war and hated the result.
Reagan spouted propaganda rubbish about the Soviets' "evil empire" while said bureaucratic empire was quietly imploding under the weight of complex reality.
Nixon had seemed bad enough, Reagan was an adman's dream salesman, we thought it impossible to find a leader as inadequate and manipulated as George W. Bush, who bravely made an unbelievable mess of the world then, before the consequences unfolded, proclaimed "Mission Accomplished!"
Yes, the operation was a great success, unfortunately the patient did not survive it... but his disease mutated, spread and became endemic. Well, thank you for nothing...
As it turned out, the fall of the so-called "Evil Empire" didn't put an end to the world's evils, it amalgamated them. America gifted itself a lesser product of Hell for President. And now the acme of evil idiocy has outed himself: Putin, unleashing Hell on Ukraine for its disgraceful failure to conform to His Great Idea of How It Is Supposed To Be.
One man and his demented zombie of an "idea" -- sump of all the evils of the 20th and 21st centuries gathered together in a single shitshow.
Heaven help us all, we humans and our one world, our wretched, beaten, ill-treated wonderful Mother, the ultimate Miracle -- Planet Earth!
In 1978, I joined the Communist Student Union at my university. What I found there were a group of unconsciously privileged, sallow, very earnest young men who thought meetings were a form of action. My assessment at the time was "these guys smoke too much and don't eat enough". I also realized they just spouted Marx as a way to sound more intelligent than they really were. I left after about a month.
Laziness is the original, and perhaps the most damaging, human sin. Racists lump entire swaths of humanity together, never taking the time to see the real people they oppress. Thinkers recycle ideas into smaller and smaller sound-bites. Politicians offer edicts, rather than ears. Algorithms decide what we see and hear in the ever-growing world of cyberspace. More and more, the arcs of our lives are funneled into an imitation of the stories fed to us on TV/the internet. I would mind none of this, really, if so much of the energy we need to keep each other growing and happy wasn't spent on distraction or out and out oppression. Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable take real effort and original thought. I think we're ready.
"I also realized they just spouted Marx as a way to sound more intelligent than they really were."
That can be said about every "Marxist" since Marx himself. It certainly particularly applies to the idiots who became The Weatherman Faction and the Revvolutionary Communist Youth (Marxist-Leninist) in the death stage of SDS here in the US. What a collection of clucks, and too many of them still think their only problem was not enough people listened to them.
Tom I taught тАШEconomics from feudalism to the present.тАЩ Personally I much prefer Groucho to Karl. Did you ever read the letter exchange between Groucho and T. S. Eliot?
I was there and met so many young men who could have been Bernie...they were so sure they were brilliant and had all the answers. As for those of the female persuasion; we could fix their meals and warm their beds.
Steve, fantastic summary of human types and pursuits.
We better be ready,
but it is our grandchildren I worry about. If Google ever goes down because of a grid failure or a cascading satellite accident, they won't know how to make a handsaw work, or put up produce--and if they can even find a library to learn how, there might be two un-banned books left.
We need to be passing on every skill we have. NOW.
I was at Michigan State University as an undergrad, demonstrating against the war, and marching through class room buildings trying to encourage other students to leave classes so we could "shut the university down". I passed by a class that was just letting out and asked one of the students what the class had been about. He said "the American Revolution." without irony.
Winter of 68-69 Gus, "Get Oil Out' (GOO) but, the oil just kept on bubbling up for years depositing blobs of congealed oil on the beaches but, not difficult to pick up off the beach & very good for delivering a message. I recall one (1) Isla Vista, UCSB restaurant where the Community was invited to dig up the asphalt parking lot back-to-dirt. A number of students abandoned careers & went 'back to,the country': Sierra' small towns, the Hidden Coast, Oregon, the Rockies. Others, the fighters, became engaged on a still ongoin eclogical obattlefield.
One Urban Refugee built a shack within a few feet of a small waterfall ЁЯТж. Of course, the hut was "red tagged". Dedparate ESCAPE is not a realistic stategy on a round planet. ЁЯЩП
Judith Viorst wrote many wonderful books, including that one about her son Alexander's terrible day. "Necessary Losses" is one I go back to from time to time. In her 90s now, she's still bright and sharp.
The Second Coming of DJT ain't happening, the " man " is coming unraveled mentally & physically, his base is cracking & most of the GOP wants to MOVE ON. I just hope that they don't find a smarter Trump wannabe with less ego, less narcissism & a wider appeal.
TC, I was 10 that spring. Jackson Elementary School in Medford, Oregon. That was the first year that the three upper grades (4th,5th, and 6th) had "tree planting" field trips. We got bussed out to logged areas and planted trees. We learned all about trees, and wild life, and how to care for the soil.
The pure irony in this? The tree planting was monoculture Douglas Fir for the timber harvest companies in the area. I believe that tract of land (probably about an acre, Just outside of Jacksonville, OR) was harvested in 1998.
Make mine a double TC. I got to do both so I guess you could say I was on top of things. I think for once I wasnтАЩt out on the ranges where my luck never changes. I was a new modern worldly debutante. Wheeeeee, my time had arrived. Look out world. Imagine starting life as a footnote to Rachel Carson. I lived that book. Er I mean I loved that book.
YES! And when it seemed the government was making war ON US! ...the kids on campuses, the ones trying to get educated to help us all out of the mess we had gotten into regarding both our environment and now (Kent State) our government! I remember that classes shut down for several days and we traveled to other campuses to talk to other students and see what they were doing about it...a SCAREY time indeed!
I missed the first Earth Day in its entirety. At the time, I had just been drafted and was taking Russian at Monterey. Earth Day, Cambodia, Kent State -- everything other than study was a blur.
Most of us walk through life unaware of the events that are taking place around us. Others, like myself, are periodically isolated from the American Experience. As a consequence, there are gaps in my own knowledge of recent American history that are months and even years long -- because I never lived them. Dr. Richardson offers an antidote to this condition, and a reminder of all the things that good citizens should know.
IтАЩm curious why Russian and not Vietnamese, (if there is a brief explanation and you wouldnтАЩt mind sharing it). I never knew that we have a Defense Language Institute before your comment. My nephew learned Chinese while at West Point, and spent 2 years in Taiwan after graduating, so IтАЩm curious if it is a rapid immersion program @ the DLI, intended to prep troops quickly? ЁЯЩПЁЯЩП
In the 1970s, DLI had thousands of students studying a couple of dozen languages at any given time. When I was there in 1970-71, there were over 300 Russian language students, and hundreds of students studying Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and many other languages. The hard language courses were generally one year in length, and other courses were usually six months. Russian language students generally went to listening posts around the Soviet Union.
Tom As Halderman highlighted in his book, тАШNixon didnтАЩt give a shit about the environment.тАЩ For him it was a non issue and he went along with a Democratic Congress and then took kudos for the EPA. 50 years later the Republicans donтАЩt give a shit about climate change.. Just look at McCarthyтАЩs 300+ pages on the budget where eliminating тАШclimate changeтАЩ is his top priority. Remember, in the Trump administration тАШclimate change was excluded from all public documents.
And I remember the rally at Tulane University (NOLA) the next day where a professor taught me to stay near the edge of a crowd in case police arrived. (They did.)
I remember that first Earth Day. I also remember 10 days later when the man who created the EPA ordered the invasion of Cambodia, followed four days later by the killings at kent State and the national campus strike against the war. A period when every day seemed like a year if you were politically active.
When I got back to Australia in 1972, after ten years in France and Italy, there were a whole lot of new words I didn't understand, like "ballpark figure", for instance, and "grassroots". I took a temporary job working for an earnest young man with a beard, doing a lot of water sampling at popular beaches; "e.coli" was easy to grasp, but I had to ask him what "conservation" meant. I don't think Silent Spring was translated into French or Italian. In 1970 I was living in habitually chaotic Italy, and what worried us was the rise of terrorism from the Red Brigades. Two years earlier, the French general strike showed that it was possible for the will of the people to prevail. Then the Russians rolled their tanks into Prague and crushed the freedom Alexander Dubcek had dared to lead. Has anything got better since then? durably better? And yet President Biden's simply worded statement is penetratingly clear.
The current political reality shows that democracy must be vigorously and diligently protected. I thought things like protection of contraception were pretty durable, but after overthrowing (yes, word choice is intentional here) Roe v Wade Thomas began to call into question other very personal rights. Then there is the Social Security/Medicare situation. The social safety net ALWAYS has to be protected from the greedy rich.
And he was one of the 2 in the 7-2 decision in keeping mifepristone on the market. (Guess who was the other.) I hate to throw around labels, like misogynist, but these two qualify. They seem like very unhappy people.
Must have been that other unreconstructed jackhat, Alito. For the life of me I do not understand why Alito didn't follow his misogyny right into the Catholic priesthood, where he could vent his hate on women and the rest of the world without let or hindrance.
He would be a bishop by now.
Embarrassed that he is from NJ
They simply are unable to help themselves. They are powerful men and few powerful men retain their ethics and humanity.
Indeed. I wonder how they would define "tyranny" , if asked without warning.
MLMinET, YES, two people who are sufficiently unhappy with who they are that they go to extraordinary lengths to appear otherwise, especially the fairly simple decisions about conflicts of interest and gifts and "emoluments" from others. See Lisa Murkowski's comments on being sold a bill of goods, all of us for that matter, who were sold a bill of goods throughout the confirmation hearings for any of these "justices!" They just plain lied.
Yes, they did. And what does it say about the rot in our society that SC justice candidates think they can--and they did--lie their way through confirmation? And, in the case of Thomas, Biden and HW Bush were sufficiently intimidated by declining to nominate a black man (for cause) they caved. And here we are.
As if Clarence was the only qualified Black jurist they could have nominated. OK, maybe the only тАЬconservativeтАЭ Black jurist.
JennSH, yes we have to remain ever-vigilant but should be careful to not paste everyone with money as greedy. It is the fundamental nature of capitalism that is driven by continual growth and consumption. We must routinely counterbalance the creativity and energy (often driven by greed) with rational regulation and laws to protect those without the massive accumulations of wealth. Ironically, that is what Nixon started to accomplish despite his other despicable behavior and I think that is what drove the R's to try to control the legislative process, put their very heavy thumb on the scales of that balance between capitalism and the social & environmental welfare.
1968. A no- good, horrible, very bad year....
If you're European, no, that year was one hell of a mixture.
London, May '68. Night classes at the French Institute in South Kensington, an offshoot of the University of Lille in France... We had a wonderful history professor, a woman who, like HCR, knew how to connect up the present with the remote and recent past.
In Paris, the students built barricades and faced down the CRS riot police, trying to get the Communist CGT trade union federation to join them in a general strike. And we in our history classes broke off our study of medieval French history and discussed the uprising and what it meant for France, for Europe, for us.
The way it all ended, we'd come to expect. Yet those were moments that marked a generation.
*
On August 21st 1968 I'd bought tickets for myself, my Polish friend and his daughter to a concert to be given at the huge Albert Hall by the Orchestra of the USSR.
That morning, the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia.
I phoned Iliasz, who'd woken up one morning in 1939 to find Red Army tanks below his window in Lwow, Poland, today Lviv, Ukraine, packed a bag, breakfasted with his parents, then left them and his country for ever, not stopping till he reached England, where he joined the Polish forces and fought through the entire Italian campaign.
I asked him:
"Do you still want to come to this concert?"
His answer couldn't have been clearer:
"Absolutely. The musicians in the orchestra will be suffering horribly for what their country has done. They'll need our moral support."
We went.
The concert closed with Tchaikovsky's 6th and final symphony, the Pathetique.
I wasn't a Tchaikovsky fan but I had and I have never heard anything like the music that evening -- one of the key moments in my life.
The orchestra rose to the occasion, their discipline was matched by an overwhelming, tangible sense of tragedy.
*
Striking to compare then and now, Stalin and Hitler's carving up Poland, Brezhnev's invasion and Putin's, my friend's reaction and the horrors we are seeing today.
I was at UCL in 1968, street protests and all, often it must be said, lead by foreign postgrads agitating away from their own college to protect their status. I remember distinctly "housing" Rudi Deutscke and the members of his "committee" from the german protests in our somewhat downtrodden collective student house in North London. They didn't ask, they just pushed through the door heading straight for the "collective" fridge serving themselves on whatever drink etc they could find....good communist stuff i presume.
I was in the streets with the others and we had just been given the majority at 18. Freedom, Freedom, Freedom! It fealt so good, especially the feeling that the youth of the world spoke the same language and shared the same values.
Unfortunately we have had over 50 years to change the world. The result is far from what it might have been, what we hoped for. But we are responsible for the current mess nonetheless.
Danny the Red is still around politics in France and Germany. A bi-cultural gadfly once, a gladfly always. Today's local supposed followers of Rachel Carson spout dictatorial inanities that would have honoured POL Pot, Stalin, Hitler or whoever of that ilk; banning rugby matches, cycle races, air transport and the christmas tree amongst other ecological "threats" in the towns they control. None have a thought for the people and how they want society and their world to run. They just figure that the people are a little stupid, or as they put it "backward" and that their thinking doesn't work. Ideology replaces personal thought and considered opinion conveniently it would seem for such.
Your last sentence says so much about today's world, not just French ideologues' inability to get their constipated little minds around an issue too big for them.
Ideology is ersatz, an imitation, it is prefabricated thought modules... It may be all too typical of humans but it is not just unnatural, it is contra naturam. Anti-nature.
Both Brezhnev and Reagan were representative mediocrities, champions of mediocrity. The Soviet leader let himself be railroaded into the Afghan war by KGB boss Andropov. He didn't want the war and hated the result.
Reagan spouted propaganda rubbish about the Soviets' "evil empire" while said bureaucratic empire was quietly imploding under the weight of complex reality.
Nixon had seemed bad enough, Reagan was an adman's dream salesman, we thought it impossible to find a leader as inadequate and manipulated as George W. Bush, who bravely made an unbelievable mess of the world then, before the consequences unfolded, proclaimed "Mission Accomplished!"
Yes, the operation was a great success, unfortunately the patient did not survive it... but his disease mutated, spread and became endemic. Well, thank you for nothing...
As it turned out, the fall of the so-called "Evil Empire" didn't put an end to the world's evils, it amalgamated them. America gifted itself a lesser product of Hell for President. And now the acme of evil idiocy has outed himself: Putin, unleashing Hell on Ukraine for its disgraceful failure to conform to His Great Idea of How It Is Supposed To Be.
One man and his demented zombie of an "idea" -- sump of all the evils of the 20th and 21st centuries gathered together in a single shitshow.
Heaven help us all, we humans and our one world, our wretched, beaten, ill-treated wonderful Mother, the ultimate Miracle -- Planet Earth!
Too true, Peter, too true. First wrecking the education system helps, of course!
In 1978, I joined the Communist Student Union at my university. What I found there were a group of unconsciously privileged, sallow, very earnest young men who thought meetings were a form of action. My assessment at the time was "these guys smoke too much and don't eat enough". I also realized they just spouted Marx as a way to sound more intelligent than they really were. I left after about a month.
Laziness is the original, and perhaps the most damaging, human sin. Racists lump entire swaths of humanity together, never taking the time to see the real people they oppress. Thinkers recycle ideas into smaller and smaller sound-bites. Politicians offer edicts, rather than ears. Algorithms decide what we see and hear in the ever-growing world of cyberspace. More and more, the arcs of our lives are funneled into an imitation of the stories fed to us on TV/the internet. I would mind none of this, really, if so much of the energy we need to keep each other growing and happy wasn't spent on distraction or out and out oppression. Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable take real effort and original thought. I think we're ready.
Jeeze Steve. Laziness prolongs life. If you get too busy, time flies.
Time flies regardless.
Pat, I think I learned the benefits of laziness too late in life. But I'm still here....
"I also realized they just spouted Marx as a way to sound more intelligent than they really were."
That can be said about every "Marxist" since Marx himself. It certainly particularly applies to the idiots who became The Weatherman Faction and the Revvolutionary Communist Youth (Marxist-Leninist) in the death stage of SDS here in the US. What a collection of clucks, and too many of them still think their only problem was not enough people listened to them.
Tom I taught тАШEconomics from feudalism to the present.тАЩ Personally I much prefer Groucho to Karl. Did you ever read the letter exchange between Groucho and T. S. Eliot?
Would I be burned at the stake if I say Bernie?
I was there and met so many young men who could have been Bernie...they were so sure they were brilliant and had all the answers. As for those of the female persuasion; we could fix their meals and warm their beds.
You did well to draw the distinction, TC.
There are a few worthy followers like Gramsci but most don't come up to Marx's knees. And many have used the name as a flag of convenience.
Steve, fantastic summary of human types and pursuits.
We better be ready,
but it is our grandchildren I worry about. If Google ever goes down because of a grid failure or a cascading satellite accident, they won't know how to make a handsaw work, or put up produce--and if they can even find a library to learn how, there might be two un-banned books left.
We need to be passing on every skill we have. NOW.
AR-15's can't fix things or grow food....
maybe if they're beaten into plowshares?
I was at Michigan State University as an undergrad, demonstrating against the war, and marching through class room buildings trying to encourage other students to leave classes so we could "shut the university down". I passed by a class that was just letting out and asked one of the students what the class had been about. He said "the American Revolution." without irony.
It's not given to everyone unfortunately to see beyond the end of their nose and appreciate the wider context and the deeper meaning of events.
Excellent story, Peter. Thanks much!
Winter of 68-69 Gus, "Get Oil Out' (GOO) but, the oil just kept on bubbling up for years depositing blobs of congealed oil on the beaches but, not difficult to pick up off the beach & very good for delivering a message. I recall one (1) Isla Vista, UCSB restaurant where the Community was invited to dig up the asphalt parking lot back-to-dirt. A number of students abandoned careers & went 'back to,the country': Sierra' small towns, the Hidden Coast, Oregon, the Rockies. Others, the fighters, became engaged on a still ongoin eclogical obattlefield.
One Urban Refugee built a shack within a few feet of a small waterfall ЁЯТж. Of course, the hut was "red tagged". Dedparate ESCAPE is not a realistic stategy on a round planet. ЁЯЩП
Judith Viorst wrote many wonderful books, including that one about her son Alexander's terrible day. "Necessary Losses" is one I go back to from time to time. In her 90s now, she's still bright and sharp.
Indeed, Gus.. 'you' know it my friend. Pax
Every day when Trump was in office seemed like a generation. Or a CENTURY.
Indeed it did.
The Second Coming of DJT ain't happening, the " man " is coming unraveled mentally & physically, his base is cracking & most of the GOP wants to MOVE ON. I just hope that they don't find a smarter Trump wannabe with less ego, less narcissism & a wider appeal.
Right! From joy to hell in record short time.
TC, I was 10 that spring. Jackson Elementary School in Medford, Oregon. That was the first year that the three upper grades (4th,5th, and 6th) had "tree planting" field trips. We got bussed out to logged areas and planted trees. We learned all about trees, and wild life, and how to care for the soil.
The pure irony in this? The tree planting was monoculture Douglas Fir for the timber harvest companies in the area. I believe that tract of land (probably about an acre, Just outside of Jacksonville, OR) was harvested in 1998.
Of course it was.
Make mine a double TC. I got to do both so I guess you could say I was on top of things. I think for once I wasnтАЩt out on the ranges where my luck never changes. I was a new modern worldly debutante. Wheeeeee, my time had arrived. Look out world. Imagine starting life as a footnote to Rachel Carson. I lived that book. Er I mean I loved that book.
YES! And when it seemed the government was making war ON US! ...the kids on campuses, the ones trying to get educated to help us all out of the mess we had gotten into regarding both our environment and now (Kent State) our government! I remember that classes shut down for several days and we traveled to other campuses to talk to other students and see what they were doing about it...a SCAREY time indeed!
I missed the first Earth Day in its entirety. At the time, I had just been drafted and was taking Russian at Monterey. Earth Day, Cambodia, Kent State -- everything other than study was a blur.
Most of us walk through life unaware of the events that are taking place around us. Others, like myself, are periodically isolated from the American Experience. As a consequence, there are gaps in my own knowledge of recent American history that are months and even years long -- because I never lived them. Dr. Richardson offers an antidote to this condition, and a reminder of all the things that good citizens should know.
IтАЩm curious why Russian and not Vietnamese, (if there is a brief explanation and you wouldnтАЩt mind sharing it). I never knew that we have a Defense Language Institute before your comment. My nephew learned Chinese while at West Point, and spent 2 years in Taiwan after graduating, so IтАЩm curious if it is a rapid immersion program @ the DLI, intended to prep troops quickly? ЁЯЩПЁЯЩП
So many good things to know!
In the 1970s, DLI had thousands of students studying a couple of dozen languages at any given time. When I was there in 1970-71, there were over 300 Russian language students, and hundreds of students studying Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and many other languages. The hard language courses were generally one year in length, and other courses were usually six months. Russian language students generally went to listening posts around the Soviet Union.
Thank you so much!!! And thank you for sharing your varied perspective on the first Earth Day.
Tom As Halderman highlighted in his book, тАШNixon didnтАЩt give a shit about the environment.тАЩ For him it was a non issue and he went along with a Democratic Congress and then took kudos for the EPA. 50 years later the Republicans donтАЩt give a shit about climate change.. Just look at McCarthyтАЩs 300+ pages on the budget where eliminating тАШclimate changeтАЩ is his top priority. Remember, in the Trump administration тАШclimate change was excluded from all public documents.
And I remember the rally at Tulane University (NOLA) the next day where a professor taught me to stay near the edge of a crowd in case police arrived. (They did.)