Among the complaints I have read among the various bloviations on the right is that the young people growing up today will have no knowledge of the America of our youth.
I turn 69 two weeks from tomorrow.
I have a couple of reactions to that kind of statement.
First, if they have teachers like me they WILL have knowledge of what America was like when I was young.
And they should be damn glad that they are not living in times like those, for the most part.
Let me explain.
I will consider my youth to have ended in my early 20s. That allows me to include all of the 60s, and thus things like Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement.
It will not include the Church Committee and Vietnam.
Let's begin with sports.
I was born in 1946.
I have no memories of when Blacks could not play baseball - by the time I became aware of baseball, there was a rookie in Milwaukee who caught my attention, and who became my hero for many years, named Henry Aaron. We got used to seeing blacks as hitters, but as pitchers there was still a reluctance. And as managers? Despite outstanding performance as players, there were no black managers. Yes, Joe Black and Don Newcomb pitched for the team most progressive on race, the Dodgers. But few teams had more than a handful of black players.
The Boston Celtics were reluctant to put more than 3 Black players on the court at a time. And despite the wealth of talent among men of color, consider that it was not until 1966 when Texas Western upset the Kentucky team known as Rupp's Runts and let by Pat Riley that an all-black starting 5 won the NCAA. Heck, my senior year of high school the Mississippi legislature tried to prevent Mississippi State from playing its first round NCAA game against Chicago Loyola because that team started 4 black players. Oh by the way, that team defeated two-time defending champion Cincinnati for the title. Yet by then people should have been used to blacks on championship teams, as far back as San Francisco with Bill Russell and KC Jones in 1955 and 1956.
In my high school (graduating 1963), the only sport for girls was sailing. If girls got to play basketball it was 6 on a side with three on offense and three on defense - the ball could cross mid-court but the girls could not.
Or perhaps you would prefer government. While occasionally a wife would be appointed to fill the terms of a Senator who had died, the only woman in the US Senate who was elected on her own was Margaret Chase Smith. It was rare to have more than one woman or one black in the cabinet, with the first black Robert Weaver not being appointed until Lyndon Johnson was President. No Hispanics, no Asians as Cabinet Secretaries.
Schools in the South were segregated by law. Schools in the North were often segregated by housing - after all, the Fair Housing Act which began to overcome these patterns was not passed until 1965, when I was already in college.
Gays could routinely be arrested just for being gay. As a gay you could not work in many fields.
Voting was regularly denied to Blacks. There were counties in the South that were 80% or more Black with not a single registered Black voter, until the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave the Federal government the right to intervene.
There are things of my youth and my young adulthood that are burned into my memory:
Little Rock and James Meredith trying to get into U of Mississippi and George Wallace standing in the door at the University of Alabama. The overt hatred that has unfortunately become apparent again amongst some in their hatred of Obama.
California passing its first serious gun control laws precisely because of Huey Newton and the Black Panther.
I was not yet ten during the Army-McCarthy hearings, which are among my first TV memories.
I saw the talented women who were the mothers of my schoolmates by and large denied the opportunity to use their many skills and talents in the business world, in law, in medicine. My mother as an Assistant Attorney General in New York was an exception. And even my somewhat progressive (by 1950s standards) father could not accept the notion that my mother was capable of earning more money than he could. How different my own life is - I have for two decades been a teacher, while my wife is a GS-13 specialist at the Library of Congress. No doubt who has been the major breadwinner in our household.
But my father taught my mother to cook, and in our household I am the primary cook when we have visitors, or sometimes just to fix a meal for my wife when she comes home after a very long day doing research. That would have been rare in the 1950s.
There are many things wrong in our society. There is still too much racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, religious intolerance.
But believe me, it is far better than it was when I was in high school.
What is funny to me is to listen to the likes of Pat Buchanan arguing that the nature of America is changing because of immigration. He is so ignorant of history that he ignores that when his kind, the Irish, showed up, they encountered signs such as "No dogs or Irish need to apply."
America is still a work in progress.
It is up to each generation to help define what we are, what we will become, as a nation and as a society.
We need to be honest about our history, which far too often we are not.
We cannot allow bigots to distort that history.
One of the most important statements in American history was made by Benjamin Franklin, when leaving the Constitutional Convention which had kept its proceedings secret, was asked by a woman what kind of government he and the delegates to that convention had given the American people, and responded "A republic, if you can keep it."
We have to hope that it is more than a Republic in name. After all, both the People's Republic of China and that of North Korea claim the title, although both have self-perpetuating leaderships, the latter held within one family for now 3/4 of a century to the degree that it is effectively a monarchy.
I find it ironic that some Justices on the Supreme Court with their fixation on originalism and literalism ignore the fact of what their status would be under a truly strict application of that doctrine. Yes, there were Catholics of some note among our Founders. But this nation was heavily Protestant, with a distinct fear of other religions among some. Now there are no Protestants on the nation's highest tribunal.
But it is more than religion. We have a Black man, a Hispanic woman, and two Italians. Is not that progress? The Warren Court had no blacks until Thurgood Marshall, at most one Jew, no Italians, although it had the Irish Catholic William Brennan.
Or think of Congress - we have now had Jews of both parties in the House leadership, a Woman speaker, Blacks of both parties in party leadership in the House.
Women chief executives, some successful, some less so. But they are there.
I have coached girls soccer, and they had their heroines - Michelle Akers and Mia Hamm.
We have prominent people in government, business, and entertainment who are openly gay, and we are beginning to see it in sports as well.
We are richer in human terms as a society because of our increasing diversity.
For the most part, I do not want to go back to the America of my youth and young adulthood.
There are things that are wrong in our society. Some of them are precisely because we are attempting to go back, because we have not learned the lessons of history.
I teach because I want to empower the young people before me. I want them to know their history, to value their diversity, to believe that they can shape their society, as so many of my generation, the leading edge of the Baby Boom, did as we grew up and assumed responsibility.
In three and a half hours I will have a very important interview for a possible teaching position. I will have to demonstrate my ability to plan for a gifted but very diverse population of students. This summer I will be teaching preternaturally gifted young people through the Center for Talented Youth. One resource we too often waste is our population of gifted students who are not challenged sufficiently in too many of our schools.
I look out at my classrooms and I see a different America than that of my youth.
I look at ads on tv, or sporting events, or politics, or business.
I see a different America than that of my youth.
For the most part it is better. It can be better still.
I am proud to have been a part of improving it.
I hope I can still do more.
Why would we ever want to go backwards?