Commitment

We watched the film about the travails of Dalton Trumbo tonight.  Newsreels of the time which were introduced to give period flavor took me back to a time I lived through.  The communist menace was something my mother was always talking about, the House Un-American Activities Committee was a subject of furious dispute between her and my oldest sister, a a recent graduate of Swarthmore where she had become a Quaker, and certainly in part to thwart my mother taken a Jewish boyfriend (who ironically enough soon dropped her at the behest of his Upper East Side parents because she was a hick from Iowa!).  She had come to Manhattan and started working for PM a left leaning newspaper funded by Marshall Field where she claimed there were a number of Communists whom she despised because her political tendency was anarchist and she could not abide organization or commitment which of course true blue Stalinists demanded.  I was a teenager living in New York at the time and she brought me around to anarchist meetings but it was all too serious and theoretical for me. Years later I was in Cambridge when Harvard's President Pusey told Senator McCarthy he would not consider firing Wendell Fury who whatever his political leanings had tenure.  McCarthyism was a serious threat that was furiously debated back and forth, and again I did nothing except fret, but then what was one to do?  Time marched on and I became a father of four and totally missed the early Vietnam protests except to sign a petition in support of the war and a week later another opposed to it.  We did I remember march against the bombing of Cambodia, brought all the children to that march, all of us dressed up, because the anti Vietnam war people in Cambridge were trying to get clean cut middle class people to march for the news cameras.  And then I was gay and trying out a persona that just did not work, also marching to Washington for Gay and Lesbian rights, and those marches as you can imagine were a lot more fun. Nut I was so immersed in the workings of parenthood and housekeeping the events of Stonewall never even caught my attention until a year or so later.  When I was being my gay self fun was the operative word, and almost nobody I knew was dying of AIDS so I didn't quite get it, not even after some guys who had been my lovers sickened and died; ACT UP meant little to me.  White people were always talking of protesting, making the revolution, but in fact the great moment in the early sixties was when the black students sat at the counter in the segregated South.   Far more courageous than any of us whites were doing anywhere.  My sister, who had been the anarchist who had never found a protest march she did not want to join was marching in Kingston NY against racism, and met a black man standing next to her in the crowd who was an IBM executive from Poughkeepsie who finally decided he should stand up and be counted.  My sister was more than he had bargained for and went home and became her lover and then her serious partner for the rest of his life.  But it more or less all passed me by.  I was always there at the scene, but didn't quite get it.  Every time.  No moral fiber, I can hear my mother saying that a lot, and she could have been talking about me.