Talk of the Town - Remembering to remember December 05 2001

First there was the thinning hair.

Then there was waking up in the middle of the night to pee. Then came the oral history.

Yes, you know you’re reaching death’s door when college students come around to interview you for their “oral history project.” A few weeks ago, I was visited by a Georgia Tech student, Russell Virgilio, who wanted to talk to me about my work as a student activist in the ’60s.

Like most baby boomers, I have no sense of graceful aging. In a world without mirrors, I’m sure I’d think of myself as 22 with an oddly uncooperative body. So the experience of someone thrusting a microphone in my face as if I were Miss Jane Pittman going on about the slave days, was akin to yesterday’s arrival of a cheesy male underwear catalog and an invitation to buy burial insurance for my “final needs” in the same stack of mail.

It got worse. I couldn’t remember half my experiences — though my hands didn’t shake and I didn’t call Russell a “whippersnapper.” Eventually, my memory began to unfurl its decrepit self, and I did begin to marvel at the great distance between now and then.

One curious aspect of this experience of memory was to realize anew how important a brief time, a single adventure, could be in a person’s life. My involvement in the student movement was only a year or two, mainly while I was a freshman at William and Mary, where I happened to become a co-chair of Students for a Democratic Society, and was involved in organizing anti-war demonstrations, an underground paper and a “free university.”

I joined the infamous march on the Pentagon Oct. 21, 1967, that pivotal event memorialized in the enduring image of yippie activists inserting daisies into the barrels of soldiers’ rifles. Others practiced civil disobedience and had the hell beaten out of them. And in that, the march was — as Russell reminded me — the site of the movement’s splitting into those who insisted on passive resistance and those who became more and more aggressive in their civil disobedience.

I fell somewhere in the middle of those two camps. I couldn’t abide brain-dead hippies, but I couldn’t see myself blowing up buildings as a Weatherman, either. At the Pentagon march, I most enjoyed the teach-in led by Noam Chomsky. Ultimately, I found the ideal way of avoiding a decision where to ally myself. I became a journalist and could thereby engage in controversial scenes without having to commit myself fully to an ideology. Or at least I didn’t have to risk being arrested.

While I never donned the full uniform of the Revolution — I couldn’t bring myself to wear a Che Guevara T-shirt, much less a tie-dyed one — this experience has colored my life deeply, just as LSD did. But it isn’t the content of the experience so much as the lesson of adventuring, of struggling with the struggle itself, that is important.

Even during the most conventional periods of my life — like when I was married or when I was running a city magazine — there was always, in the back of my mind, the map of the universe I beheld during an acid trip on the James River after an afternoon of digging for clams. Or the memory of the week I was marooned in a Washington, D.C., ghetto apartment while a “race riot” raged in the streets and my African-American hosts protected me like a Jew hidden in the attic during the Holocaust.

One can dismiss mystery, LSD’s window on the numinous, the passion of conviction and the sheltering kindness of different-colored strangers, but — for me, anyway — the memories always percolate back to the surface. They are benchmarks. “Where is your passion? Are you living pleasurably? Are you talking about what’s important to you? Are you isolated?” All are questions they ask.

It’s as if the young me dialogues with the middle-aged me.

“Death is coming,” the middle-aged me replies.

“Damn right, so stop acting like you have unlimited time,” the remembered me replies.

Youth has its own wisdom. When we can’t hear our own memory, sometimes youth, like death, comes knocking at the door.

Russell asked me about my feelings about the wave of patriotism that turned 99 percent of Americans into flag-waving robots after Sept. 11.

I replied that the experience was difficult because, as someone with a history as an activist, I find most flag-waving a cover for a conservative agenda. But, I said, from a psychological perspective, I also realized it was a way for people to manage their anger and grief. So, like the good psychologist and adult I want to be, I told Russell that, although I was critical of the current administration’s policy, I realized it was probably fair to let people rant for the time being. When emotions start to cool, then we can pose the really difficult questions.

Of course, the remembered me would never have made such a statement. And Russell, who attended the global conference on racism in South Africa earlier this year, instantly reminded me why. It’s at just that moment — when we have turned our attention away — that we lose our rights. Thus the ghastly USA PATRIOT act with its remarkable sabotage of the Fourth Amendment, opposed by a coalition so diverse it includes Bob Barr and Ralph Nader.

My point here is not to diss the PATRIOT act, but to remember the importance of remembering. And what I mean involves more than all that bromide about being doomed to repeat the past if we forget it. I mean that in forgetting the passions of our adventurous youth — or, as it often is among today’s youth, too often forgetting to live adventurously at all — we forget everything. And that includes the present.??