Déjà vu all over again

I thought we were done with this shit.

As much as I’d like to deny it, I am an old person—a senior citizen. Elderly. Over the hill. Fucking ancient. But one thing I am not is new to this protesting stuff.

Even as a child, I sensed that my father’s racist jokes were ugly and hateful, although almost everyone in our family and “social circle” (read: blue collar neighborhood in pre-hipster Brooklyn) yukked it up to these knee-slappers. My mother, who considered herself a Democrat, would roll her eyes but then make some cringeworthy comment about her Jewish boss. My best friend was a boy across the street who came over every day to play with my Barbies. Needless to say, this gave my father plenty of material for his deplorable comedy routines. (That best friend, Andrew, grew up to be a beautiful gay man whom we lost in the first wave of AIDS, before we even knew what it really was. My father outlived him.)

Somehow, in the fourth grade, I decided to get political. I think it had to be MAD magazine, because song parodies were my thing. Weird Al, I was ahead of you, man. To the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In”, I recruited some other fourth graders and we stomped around at lunchtime and sang:

We hate your guts (yeah yeah yeah)! We hate your guts (yeah yeah yeah!) Oh Gold-wa-ter we hate your guts. Don’t vote for him on November thir-erd…Gold-wa-ter we hate your guts.

We love your guts (yeah yeah yeah!) We love your guts (yeah yeah yeah!) Oh L B J we love your guts. Please vote for him on November thir-erd…L B J we love your guts!

This served me well. It made me feel powerful, creative, and pissed my dad off to no end. But when he started supporting George Wallace in 1968, I knew I had to get serious.

I was 13, and while my parents viewed themselves as strict Italian-American prison guards, they were also clueless. I started smoking weed and educating myself about the importance of protesting the Vietnam War and about the Civil Rights Movement. Much of this education came from the aforementioned Barbie-afficianado, Andrew. We took the subway to Manhattan to march in the streets, and if you know anything at all about the NYC subway system in the 1960s, you’ll know that we were lucky to survive it. But we were willing to tolerate the sights and smells and innumerable perverts to make our voices heard.

At 14, a good friend in my freshman year of high school got pregnant. Her parents sent her to a convent to serve out the term of her pregnancy, give birth, and hand her baby over for adoption. Two years later, she got pregnant again. This time, she got into a taxi from Queens to Scarsdale, NY, with a business card that she handed to the driver. Alone and terrified, she had an abortion that she thankfully survived. She didn’t tell us about it until she came back. She was afraid to get her friends in trouble if they knew. We thought, “Fuck this shit. Where is the nearest bra-burning protest, because WE ARE THERE.”

I was unsuccessful in my bid to go to Woodstock, but that didn’t mean I didn’t hang on every single word of the music that came out of that event. I wrote to soldiers who suddenly stopped writing back. I waited for some of the guys in our neighborhood to return from the war, and many did not. The ones that did return came back as zombies or heroin addicts or both. Once, accompanying my 22-year-old junkie-boyfriend, I sat in a shooting gallery in another part of Brooklyn, watching these sad souls transport themselves away from their pain.

Who knew that fifty years later, we’d have to march and scream and yell about civil rights, about women’s rights, about war?? Is it because many of the people who don’t see the problem weren’t alive back then? I always ask, “When, exactly, was this ‘great’ America you want to go back to?? And who was it great for?”

I’ve got two older sisters. The middle one embraced the bigotry of our dad. She grew up to be a NYC realtor, married to a former senior partner at Arthur Young & Co., and if I were speaking to her today, I’m sure I’d find her to be full-on MAGA. The eldest started out as a trad wife, but went to college when her kids were teenagers, and it completely turned her around. No wonder Trump hates universities! That education even managed to give my sister the strength to leave her sexist husband after 30 years of marriage. Horrors!

Anyway, at this point in my life, I’m torn between wanting to be a protestor, an activist (I’m a volunteer for Democrats Abroad), and just wanting to pack it in. There’s a reason my favorite movie quote is: