Here's to Bohemian Rhapsody

I am a child of the Sixties.  Not that I remember any of it.  I just experienced it.  I was against the war, for Eugene McCarthy (not Joe McCarthy), into recycling, love and peace. I went to San Francisco and wore flowers in my hair.  I worked at a draft counseling center in Tacoma.  I worked on a recycling hotline in Portland.  I wanted to change the world.

When we pulled out of Viet Nam, and the movement got bad press from a few violent apples, the energy also left.  I, like many others who were not badly damaged by war and drugs, went on to continue our lives.  I felt I could not change the world, but I could change my own world.  So I buried my self in my studies, my friends and building a business.  I was only slightly aware of the situation in Nicaragua, South Africa and the Iran-Contra scandal.  I only paid attention to Reagan when he cut student loan programs and I almost couldn’t finish vet school.  Oh, yeah, and when he broke the PATCO strike.  That ticked me off, but what could I do about it?

So for almost 30 years, I was asleep.  Politics was merely a matter of choosing Tweedle-Dum over Tweedle-Dee.  Then, in 2001, I woke up.  It wasn’t 9/11 that did it.  It was when congress passed The Patriot Act.  That’s when I woke up into a nightmare.  Each morning, the lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody would run through my head:

“Is this the real life?

Is this just fantasy?

Caught in a landslide,

No escape from reality.”

I could not believe that people weren’t up in arms about this attack on the Bill of Rights.  So, I tried to read it for myself.  All 242 pages of it.  Legalese, obfuscation and lots of stuff I couldn’t interpret.  This was passed and signed into law on Oct. 26, 2001, about 45 days after the attack on the WTC.  Forty-five days to come up with the idea, write it up, and pass it through both houses of Congress.  How many people do you suppose really read it?  It sounded like hysteria to me.  Then, the more I read the more outraged I became.  You can read about it, if you wish in my prior blog, which I can’t access to post on since I changed email since then and am so techno-challenged that I couldn’t figure out how to continue that one.

http://wormjourney.blogspot.com/

Parker Palmer has written a book called Healing the Heart of Democracy, published in 2011.  The Tacoma Friends Meeting is having a discussion group to go through it chapter by chapter.  The prelude is called The Politics of the Broken-hearted.  I read it, and it is as though he followed me around for the past decade.  Looking back now, I can see how my response was of someone with a broken heart.  I can see that I went through a grief response.  Denial, bargaining, anger – lots of anger – and depression.  Again from Bohemian Rapsody:

Nothing really matters, Anyone can see,

Nothing really matters,

Nothing really matters to me...

And this is where I am today.  On the ledge.  There was a lot of hope for change 4 years ago.  Now?  Well, I am still in this system for at least another 3 months or so.  I guess the next place is acceptance.  But acceptance of what?  That our country is broken?  That one person can’t make a difference?  Accept that I keep beating my head against the wall?  Will that mean living outside of what one person at Sandhill Farms calls ‘Babylon’?