http://www.texaskaos.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2585>>>>snip
An old memory came to me yesterday afternoon as I read the news about the madmen who are running our country piling more ships of war into the Persian Gulf. It is a memory set in a brilliant spring morning in the capital city of Texas, one of those Austin days of early May when the blue sky and the lush greenery and the bright flora can meld into a vision of eternal springtime so inviting it makes the heart ache. And yet it is a memory of a morning when the world was not a bright place.
It was the day after the Kent State shootings. News of the shootings had spread during the evening like a white-hot wildfire across college campuses that were already tense over Nixon's surprise invasion of Cambodia just a few days before. This was something completely new and chilling for white middle-class America - its young shot dead by American soldiers on an American college campus, as a result of the rapidly metastasizing cancer within our body politic that was the Vietnam War.
Sometimes that morning seems like three lifetimes ago and sometimes it seems like yesterday. There we were, thousands of us, crowding together in the sunshine on the main mall of the UT-Austin campus giving our rapt attention to the amplified voice of a brilliant speaker by the name of Mickey Leland, whose eloquence and passion struck harmonic chords in all the thousands of us in unison. Mickey Leland spoke not to us but for us that day, as he poured everything he had into expressing for all of us what we were all thinking and feeling.
Our collective, massed frustration and rage over the mounting evils wrought by the vicious criminals who had wrecked the America we had all been taught we were going to inherit someday could no longer be kept at bay, we erupted en masse from that rally to occupy and shut down the University of Texas main campus as did our fellow students at campuses across the country, and a week of near-insurrection ensued across America that began the national turning of the tide.
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