New York and Points South

Here's where we're staying. The night is warm, the City is jumping, though of course somewhat subdued, since the Detroit Tigers eliminated their mighty Yankees tonight. How sweet!


I think my little companion has had a good trip. We interviewed her stuffy, Hugs the dog, who revealed this has indeed been a good trip for her. Therefore, I can only assume it has been a good trip for her owner as well.

Julia is my sixth and presumably final child. She is in line to become an aunt in three months, when I will become a Grandpa. When life is kind enough to span enough decades, you get to do what I've done, and that is to take all six of my children on business trips.

How much of what they witnessed on these trips is comprehensible to them is questionable. Julia yesterday listened as Tom Hayden -- the primary author of the Port Huron Statement that launched SDS in the'60s, and who is now in his 60s -- discussed whether it is time for progressives to issue a new manifesto.

Others in the room, whose memories or at least whose studies reach back to the '30s and '40s, debated the meaning of the word "liberal." Hayden, as an elder statesman for my generation, the Baby Boomers, rejected liberals, as we all did. Instead, we were "radicals."

But, as American radicals in the '60s, we were not Communists. This is a distinction the establishment of the time couldn't handle: Unlike earlier generations of American progressives, we were not immigrant revolutionaries, but the homegrown kind. Even those among us who were "red diaper babies," i.e., the children of Communist sympathizers, identified with new ideas, the kinds of things expressed in the Port Huron Statement, my copy of which I occasionally pull out to show younger people, few of whom have ever even heard of it.

When I first visited Mississippi, 38 years ago, those of us with long hair and northern license plates could only stop for gas or food at certain select locations throughout the state. This was literally a mater of life or death at that time. Water fountains and bathrooms were still labeled "white" or "colored" and woe to he who violated this ancient divide.

My readings on those first few trips through the Deep South included W.E.B. Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk, where I learned the old slave song, "Oh Freedom!", which I have sung to all of my kids to help them get to sleep at night these past 30 years.

I suppose I'll sing it to my grandson too.

The other book I remember reading on those trips was Jack Newfield's A Prophetic Minority. This was the quintessential New Yorker telling the story of the vanguard of that revolution.

Of course, according to conventional wisdom, we failed.

Which would be one reason we are faced with the mess that is America today.

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