A Pilgrim’s Anthem: Coming to Terms With Being An American
Half a century ago this year, three young colleagues and I journeyed across enemy lines to Hanoi at the apex of the American war with North Vietnam. Just five weeks earlier, President Johnson had announced a pause in the bombing of Hanoi to spur negotiations in the wake of the devastating Tet Offensive and a surging antiwar movement. While half a million U.S. soldiers had been sent to fight and die in South Vietnam, less than seventy Americans had been given permission to enter the north since the early Sixties. What I found there altered my perspective not so much on the Vietnamese but on my own people, in ways that confounded all my assumptions and echo down the decades to this very day.
When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated just a month before my departure, a hundred cities burned in rage and despair. So it was deeply surprising to leave a nation in turmoil and land in Hanoi, epicenter of a war sparking global outrage, to discover an island of startling tranquility. Emptied of all but essential personnel and free of motorized traffic, the old quarter radiated spaciousness and serenity. Young men peddled bicycles while girlfriends rode side-saddle reading them the morning paper. Foreign guests huddled in the bomb shelter of the Hotel Metropole but no bombs fell.
For several days we attended meetings of mind-numbing formality where our hosts recounted American war crimes while we nodded with indignation and shame. We examined U.S. cluster bombs and tried silently to distance ourselves from the carnage our country was inflicting while inwardly acknowledging our inescapable complicity.
Driving through Tai Binh City, until recently a town of 35,000, we found only crumbling walls and twisted rail lines shrouded by lush vines while water buffalo grazed beside unexploded ordnance.
As we drove back to Hanoi, scattering barefoot pedestrians along a one-lane dirt road, I struggled to reconcile conflicting emotions. Turning to my guide Tu, I asked him in French, our one common language, if I could stay longer. He turned to me, amused.
“What would you do here?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe I could teach English.”
He laughed. “I just hope we don’t have to learn it.”
“But why do you want to stay longer?”
“Because I’m so ashamed of what my people are doing to yours and I want in some small way to make amends for it.”
“Ah!” he responded, “there’s your first mistake. You can’t change your own people till you first learn to love them.”
I was astonished by his response. My revulsion at America’s devastation of Vietnam had deeply alienated me from my home country. I had fully expected my North Vietnamese hosts to hand me secret instructions for how to subvert American war plans. But instead my guide was telling me that I couldn’t change my people till I first embraced them exactly as they were.
I returned from Hanoi without the game plan to defeat the U.S. war on Vietnam I had anticipated receiving from my North Vietnamese hosts. In that sense I came home empty-handed. But in a deeper and more enduring sense I arrived with enough homework for a lifetime, since it has taken my entire life to grapple with the challenge posed by my guide Tu: to “learn to love my own people.” Just when I think I’ve finally succeeded my government does something that takes my breath away and leaves me gasping. This challenge has posed itself as something between a koan and a conundrum, an endlessly unresolvable riddle.
For many Americans their identification with their country is instinctive and unquestioned. Generations of ancestors have lived in the same county or hometown. Yet globalization has so thoroughly shuffled the deck that even for many in inward-facing regions of heartland America things have come to feel disconcertingly unfamiliar. For large numbers of traditionalists, recent trends — political, economic, cultural, technological and demographic — leave them feeling angry and resentful, “strangers in their own land.” Some of the most extreme forms of this sentiment have erupted in white supremacist rallies, where those fearing a future in which their race’s customary dominance is supplanted by a more mixed demographic respond with angry chants that “We will not be replaced.”
Our Eternal Internal Divisions
The divisions that opened up in American politics and culture during the Sixties have only deepened in the half century since. In fact, these fault lines were present from the very founding of this country, and indeed before. David Brion Davis, my professor of U.S. cultural and intellectual history in college, concluded many a lecture by defining one or another “fundamental dichotomy of the American mind,” a chasm so deep we students half feared the auditorium might just cleave wide open at any moment and swallow us up. Along with the Enlightenment principles embedded in Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence came a fierce debate over slavery reflecting a fundamental clash of values baked into our social contract. Jefferson himself kept slaves, much as he claimed to abhor the practice. The sordid compromises required to gain the required signatures on the founding documents resolved none of the core issues dividing North and South, which re-erupted a mere 85 years later in the bloodiest war in American history.
Nor did that war heal our fractured politics and culture. In some ways the Civil War turned a bitter political argument into a fratricidal blood feud whose catastrophic casualties would ensure that those grievances would never be forgotten. A hundred years later these volcanic emotions erupted yet again in the schisms of the Sixties, then again half a century later in today’s implacable partisanship. Nor has the conflict been as neatly divided as North vs. South. The dividing lines run not just between left and right or one region and another but through each human heart, each divided self.
So it’s proven difficult indeed to learn to love my own people, as my guide Tu had urged me to do. And yet I don’t seem able to stop trying. Perhaps it has something to do with my ancestry and upbringing. As a first generation American, son of an immigrant, my connection to this country has always been a little more tenuous than most. My father was the last of ten children, born in the easternmost reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now eastern Poland. When he was just two years old the First World War broke out and his family fled invading armies from the east in an oxcart. As they retreated down the rutted country lane they watched their farm being set ablaze while my father was swaddled in blankets, struggling for breath as he lay dying of diphtheria.
Reaching a provincial town in a state of chaos, his parents sought out a doctor and found only a medic who cut open my father’s throat, leaving a life-long scar but opening his thorax to breathe freely again. Buffeted by clashing armies they fled westward to Hungary, then to the newly declared democratic republic of Czechoslovakia before my grandfather sent them back to eastern Poland again after the war. It was a move for which my father never forgave him. While his older siblings headed for America and elsewhere in Western Europe, from ages 6–15 my father and his next youngest sister were left with distant relatives to fend off frequent stonings by local toughs shouting “Yids!” as they ran for their lives after school.
Finally his far distant family secured permission for them to emigrate, first to Toronto, then two years later to New York. My father landed in the Lower East Side just in time for the stock market crash in 1929. Radicalized by the inequities of Depression-era America, he worked in a print shop, then joined his older brothers selling sundries by day while he studied socialism at NYU by night. It was a double life he sustained in more muted form as he married, raised a family and acculturated to life in the all-American Midwestern test city of Columbus, Ohio. Our household was essentially an isolated island of European high culture in a sea of Fifties Middle America. Within its perimeter it was a sanctuary for Beethoven and Bach, Tolstoy and skeptical humanism. Step outside and you were cruising for burgers at Don’s Drive-In. “Your father is a contradiction in terms,” my cousin Norman used to say. “A communist capitalist.” By day he was a successful small businessman careful to conceal his liberal leanings in a conservative time and town. But at the dinner table he was a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy and by evening a faithful reader of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The Nation, The New Republic and The New York Times. Only to his closest friends did he reveal his progressive ideals and financial support of liberal causes.
Growing up in this split-screen environment I struggled to identify fully with the country and people in whose world I found myself. The school where I spent most of my childhood and adolescence was highly unconventional, an experimental laboratory for new pedagogical techniques inspired by the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Based at Ohio State, our teachers were all professors in the College of Education and we students were its guinea pigs, taught to be creative and think for ourselves. For an eighth grade term paper, I chose as my topic “Communism in Theory and Practice.” I fought my way through “The Theory of Surplus Value” and managed somehow to eke out 35 pages. Before writing the conclusion I took a long walk with my father to hear his perspective. He described how he had become disenchanted with the Soviet experiment and finally renounced any sympathy for its aims after hearing of Stalin’s purges in the mid-Thirties. Communism in practice, he told me, had failed to live up to its lofty promises because it had neglected to account for the self-interested nature of the human personality and our inability to act reliably on behalf of the common good.
College brought new reasons to doubt both communism and Americanism, at least as defined by would-be patriots on the right. Studying with revisionist historians like Walter LaFeber, I learned a version of American history characterized less by high ideals than by realpolitik and the imperatives of an expanding empire. Studying slavery and abolitionist movements I came to identify with those distinctly American dissident traditions and social movements that challenge prevailing orthodoxies to insist on a broader understanding and application of human rights. And from philosopher Hannah Arendt I learned that the attractions of tyranny are not limited to certain cultures and countries, that like Germans, under adverse conditions Americans too might well be susceptible to the appeal of authoritarianism.
The JFK assassination just two months into my freshman year shattered stability and certainty for a great many Americans of all stripes. In the process it triggered the meltdown of the frozen consensus that had held the country together through the Second World War and its conformist aftermath. The Sixties burst open that static world like a volcanic eruption of repressed spirits, though rumblings could already be detected in preceding years in beat poetry and offbeat jazz. I experienced both the epiphanies and agonies of the Sixties to maximum effect. My early adulthood seemed perfectly timed to be shaped by those epochal events. All the underpinnings that had anchored our world were suddenly unmoored and we were left to float free. Heretofore unimagined possibilities sprang up in the fissures between tectonic plates. We discovered the intellectual freedom to re-invent our lives, our identities, our economy, society and culture. At the peak of American affluence some of us felt free at last to challenge the consumerist values that had produced such a glut of things to buy that still somehow failed to satisfy.
Events in the wider world penetrated the insularity of academia as well in the form of a military draft. They turned what might otherwise have been a four-year stress test of exams and papers of near-term urgency but long-term irrelevance into a high-stakes drama with historic implications. I joined many other radical students in protesting the war. Watching with increasing ambivalence as friends stood up in the lobby of the Cornell student union to burn their draft cards, I felt inwardly challenged to do the same.
In the spring of my senior year I faced a seemingly enviable choice between attending graduate school and joining the Peace Corps to serve in West Africa. I had worked hard to earn acceptances at Harvard and Berkeley, yet in the context of all that was happening in the country neither the prospect of graduate school nor serving as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy in a far distant place seemed equal to the compelling urgency of the moment. My parents and friends were aghast — and so, in a way, was I — when I turned down a solid career path in the academic stratosphere. I chose instead to head for a little-known radical think tank in the nation’s capital to join with those who were seeking to re-invent the way we think about and organize just about everything. Instead of studying American history in the stacks of Widener or Bancroft library, I chose to become a witness and participant in the making of that history by plunging directly into its onrushing currents.
I wasn’t wrong about witnessing history in the making. Arriving in the nation’s capital in the fall of 1967 to take up my sinecure as a student at the New Left’s premier think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies, I seemed timed, like a Forrest Gump of the left, to show up at most of the momentous events of the era whether or not I intended it. Joining tens of thousands of demonstrators in October 1967, we scaled the walls surrounding it and encamped in the Pentagon’s parking lot. We landed literally in the shadow of that colossus, closer than we’d ever imagined possible to the seat of American military power. Marching past poet Alan Ginsberg as he intoned chants in an antic effort to “levitate” the Pentagon, we stood before U.S. infantrymen with raised bayonets and sought, mostly in vain, to coax them into conversation or simple eye contact while a few souls gingerly threaded daffodils into their gun barrels. As night fell, placards and their wooden handles became kindling for campfires on the pavement. In the chill autumn air we gathered round and sang protest songs — “Down By The Riverside,” “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” As evening turned to late night we lapsed into the nostalgic campfire tunes of our youth as if we’d temporarily forgotten the gravity of our purpose and circumstances.
Returning to my communal home late that night, I stood among my housemates and pulled my draft card from my wallet. Carried away by the moment, I hoisted it on high and lit it aflame to raucous cheers. Of course for all intents and purposes it was a secret act since no official authority witnessed my act of defiance. Several months later my housemate Rick publicly announced his refusal to respond to a Selective Service induction notice. One early morning we were all awakened by a firm rap at the front door. Two FBI agents dressed in black suits had come for Rick. With preternatural calm and a carefully composed smile he gathered his essential belongings and followed them into custody. By the end of the day we’d secured him a top-tier attorney and he was out on bail.
The following April my colleagues and I at Liberation News Service, the AP of the underground press, watched from a third-story window of Thomas Circle’s “Liberated Zone” as the nation’s capital burned to the sounds of sirens in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Tanks rumbled down the city’s broad empty avenues in a surreal dystopian nightmare. D.C. was just one of a hundred cities aflame. It felt like the final extinguishing of the already faltering movements for social justice that had been launched amid so much hope and determination with the Montgomery bus boycott a decade earlier.
Soon after my return from Hanoi in late May 1968, a second assassination stunned the nation. Moments after winning the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. In the crazed aftermath of this succession of seismic events the optimism of early Sixties movements for social justice and peace began to curdle into fierce desperation and impotent rage. Plans for massive demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago continued apace. Yet it was less a strategic move intended to influence delegate votes than a chaotic expression of frustration and futility. Arriving in Chicago at the end of August, demonstrators divided into two groups. The more politically inclined headed downtown to Grant Park across from the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, where delegates were staying. Meanwhile, those “Yippies” more inclined towards antic anarchism and drawn to the comedic activism of Abbie Hoffman gathered at Lincoln Park on the Northside.
For several days and nights I joined thousands of fellow demonstrators in the middle of Michigan Avenue facing a phalanx of blue-shirted, helmeted Chicago cops wielding billy clubs while we chanted antiwar slogans and sang movement hymns. Both sides seemed to be itching for a fight. As tensions rose, one evening those of us standing closest to the police sat down in the middle of the street, crossed our legs and linked arms, facing the cops at knee level. We began singing “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” while swaying from side to side. Unable to detect the movements of their upper bodies and thus read their moves, we were taken aback when with no verbal warning they moved in on us with billy clubs swinging. Sitting in the second row I heard more than saw, and what I heard was the unforgettable crunch of a club hitting the skull of the man sitting directly in front of me. In what seemed a millisecond the woven tapestry of linked arms and crossed legs unraveled. Each of us struggled to disentangle ourselves from one another and clamber to our feet beneath an avalanche of batons. Cries, screams, oaths and groans swirled in a maelstrom of terror and fury. My wire-rimmed glasses hung by one ear as I struggled to my feet and, utterly disoriented, fled helter-skelter with hundreds of others from the batons and back towards Grant Park. At the rear of the park, where our way was blocked by a stone wall, hands reached down from above as fellow demonstrators lifted us up and over to relative safety on the other side. For a long while we stood trembling in shock and disbelief. Had it really come to this?
Police assault in front of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, August 1968
The following afternoon I met up with a small group of radical journalist friends a decade my senior whom I esteemed as mentors. All were already prominent in their professions, writing for magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and abroad for The New Statesman and Le Nouvel Observateur. None had been caught up in the previous night’s sweep but all had witnessed enough of what the Kerner Commission eventually termed “police riots” to be sickened by what they’d seen. Standing in a huddle, they tossed around ideas for direct action. As journalists more than activists they were relatively unaccustomed to street combat. While their rhetoric was increasingly caught up in the revolutionary temper of the times, none to my knowledge had spent time yet behind bars for their convictions. Somehow, though, the moment had taken the restraints off their customary journalistic detachment, and one among them — I no longer recall which — raised a plan of unimaginable recklessness: to set fire to the Conrad Hilton Hotel. In the moment of silence that ensued, each of us thought our private thoughts about what this could possibly mean, both for ourselves as perpetrators of such a monstrous act and for those whose lives would be caught up in the conflagration — if indeed we succeeded in igniting a fire.
Yet when we began speaking again, no one raised any questions or doubts about the idea. This was a season when mere liberalism was being disdained by black power militants and white radicals alike as bourgeois white hypocrisy, the cowardly convictions of the privileged who would never summon the courage to act on their espoused beliefs. Somehow we needed to demonstrate that we were better and braver than liberals, that we were indeed revolutionaries in the self-styled mold of Che and Ho. Before anyone had time to question the wisdom and practicality of our plan, books of matches were being distributed to each of us. Furtively stuffing them into our pockets, we dropped our voices into conspiratorial whispers, glanced around to be sure no one had overheard us, and agreed to meet back at the same spot in an hour’s time.
We parted ways and found separate entrances into the hotel. The lobby was permeated with the fetid odor of vomit, as it had been for days since some guerrilla prankster had sprinkled a noxious chemical agent on the carpets. I made my way to a large open exhibition hall furnished with long folding tables and chairs behind which sat Democratic party volunteers offering free campaign literature. Staffed largely by grandmotherly women with silver hair neatly set in permanent waves, they looked to be the sort who in other circumstances would have organized bake sales and church suppers. As I approached one table with brochures and buttons neatly displayed I was greeted by a kindly older woman wearing glasses.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she said warmly, handing me a red, white and blue ribbon. “How are you today? Would you like one of our Hubert Humphrey buttons?”
My stomach turned as I struggled to reconcile her open-hearted greeting with my mission of destruction.
“Yes, please, thank you,” I answered confusedly, embarrassed and ashamed all at once.
“Isn’t this exciting?” she exclaimed. “I’m just so proud of our party — and our country. Where are you from?”
Glancing at her wholesome demeanor I guessed that my hometown would do better than the nation’s capital. “Ohio,” I replied. “Columbus, Ohio.”
“Oh, such a nice state. I’ve been there. I’m from Illinois, down near Springfield.”
I fingered the book of matches in my left front pocket and eyed the wastebasket on the floor a short distance from her feet. It was half filled with discarded paper and cardboard, prime tinder. How was I supposed to get the book of matches out of my pocket, strike a match, and drop it in the wastebasket without being noticed?
“What brings you here for the convention?” she asked. “Are you part of the Ohio delegation?”
“Uh, no,” I stammered, distracted. “Not really. Just curious. I’m here to be a part of history.”
I excused myself, feeling faint and nauseous, and wandered out of the hall, through the reeking corridors and back into the welcome light of day. Making my way back to Grant Park I found my comrades already gathered in a huddle. The circle opened to include me. Eyes cast down, they were reporting back on their forays.
“What about you, Andy?” Jim asked.
“Nah, couldn’t find the right spot. Somebody was watching wherever I went that would have worked.”
“Ellie?” The lone woman among us men, Ellie had always struck me as a caring, nurturing type who’d had to conceal half of herself among her faux-tough colleagues in a still unrepentantly male-dominant New Left movement.
She shook her head, eyes averted. “Couldn’t do it,” she said half under her breath.
“Mark?”
“Me neither,” I said. “Didn’t seem right.”
“We make piss-poor revolutionaries, don’t we?” Andy chided us, and we all laughed sheepishly. Were we simply too cozy in our creature comforts? Maybe so. But then maybe too, we were too human to do something so inhumane to those who had nothing to do with the crimes being committed by our country. The perpetrators of such crimes make sure to be well-shielded from the wrath of their victims. It is the innocent who end up as random casualties of the resulting rage.
After several days and nights of confrontation I ran into Cathy Wilkerson one evening at an Old Town eatery. It was Cathy who had given me the secret invitation that enabled me to travel to Hanoi. Appearing absurdly out of her element huddled in a football helmet, she sidled up to me and whispered excitedly in my ear, “We’re starting an urban guerrilla movement. It’s called the Weather Underground. Wanna join us?”
I blinked in disbelief. Peering into the helmet that concealed her eyes in darkness, I strove to penetrate the veil of subterfuge that had suddenly come between us. It was just six months since we had shared a picnic lunch on the grass in Dupont Circle where she’d told me about the trip to Hanoi. How open she’d been then, and how closed she’d become in the few months since. What had changed in the movement in the interim, and in Cathy herself, to drive her to such an extreme? On the other hand, what had led me and my journalist mentors just the day before to consider setting fire to the Conrad Hilton Hotel? “An urban guerrilla movement?” I thought to myself. “Are you serious?” It felt all wrong, both the timing and the very concept. It seemed to me bound to fail, and in the process would inflict deep harm onboth those targeted and those doing the targeting.
Seeing Cathy shrouded in a football helmet was so comical that I could hardly take the proposition seriously. Yet I knew she was deadly serious. Out of affection for her I suppressed my first response of outright dismissiveness and instead mumbled something about needing to think about it. We parted ways and sat down at our separate tables. We never saw one another again. It was just a few years later under very different circumstances that I found out what had become of Cathy in the interval since that evening in Old Town.
On the final evening of demonstrations, as Hubert Humphrey’s name was being entered into nomination amid a clamor of dissonance in the convention hall, the mood on the streets was desperate but determined. Then suddenly our spirits were lifted when a young demonstrator climbed the traffic light in the center of Michigan Avenue and unfurled a giant banner on which was boldly written in red: “Prague/Chicago 1968!” A lusty cheer arose from the sea of demonstrators as police lines visibly tightened. Renewed energy surged through the crowd in an infectious enthusiasm wholly disconnected from the power dynamics of the moment.
Then, with no premeditated purpose, I found myself stepping aside from the faceoff at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. My feet carried me down the street from blazing lights into near darkness, where I took up a position on the median strip dividing the traffic flow on Michigan Avenue. It was just half a block from the climactic confrontation, yet it felt and even looked like watching a stage performance featuring floodlights, TV cameras, and crowds chanting “The whole world is watching.” Abruptly detached from the drama in which I had immersed myself for the previous four nights, I realized that we would never prevail in a direct confrontation with overwhelming armed force. It was suddenly clear that this was no way to settle our differences, if indeed they could be settled at all.
I realized in that moment that I needed to step back from the ceaseless political struggle and street warfare long and far enough to seek answers to three key questions: How much of the anger and grief that had consumed me and my fellow protesters was due to societal injustices that could be practically addressed. How much was due to a personal past that I was projecting on the outside world but that needed to be settled inside my own heart and mind? And how much was simply in the nature of human existence and thus not amenable to change? Though I scarcely realized it at the time, learning to discern those differences would inform my actions and shape the course of my life for decades to come.
I was still in Hanoi when, unbeknownst to me, I received at my parents’ address the dreaded “We want you” letter from the Selective Service — a 1A classification and a summons to a pre-induction physical. With a local draft board in conservative Central Ohio and without a religious background as a credential for my pacifism I stood little chance of winning conscientious objector status. Yet to my everlasting surprise and gratitude the local clerk persuaded the board’s somnolent World War II veterans to grant me one. Driving west to California the day after Nixon’s first inauguration I taught in alternative schools, then headed north into the deep woods, first in Northern California, then in Canada, in a quest for the roots and home I’d never found growing up in Ohio. At one point, spending a Walden-like winter on a remote coastal island in Southern British Columbia, I wrote to my father telling him I was thinking of renouncing my American citizenship to become a Canadian. His response was swift and firm.
“Don’t do it. You know that I disagree with much of what this country does at home and abroad, but you’ll never feel at home anywhere else. And if you want to change the direction we’re headed in, you need to be where the struggles are being waged and the decisions made.”
With considerable reluctance I packed my bags and returned to Northern California. Hiking through the high peaks of Manning Park I crossed the U.S. border into the North Cascades not at a highway customs checkpoint but in a meadow sparkling with wildflowers. Scarcely visible among them was a four-foot tall concrete column on one side of which was embedded a brass plaque reading “Dominion of Canada” and on the other “United States of America.” Would that every border were so paradisical and uncontested.
Back in California I met and partnered with a woman whose ancestral roots, unlike my own, extended deep into Midwestern soil. Her father and grandfather had run a truck farm under what is now a runway at Chicago’s O’Hare Field. We first settled in a seven-room log cabin on twelve acres a few miles from the Pacific coast south of San Francisco. There we taught ourselves the rudiments of rural homesteading. In search of ways to learn to love my own people, during the decade following my return from Hanoi I worked some 23 jobs, ranging from bicycle messenger, janitor, tobacco harvester and sauerkraut maker to teamster, baker, cook and cab driver. In each I sought to immerse myself in the everyday lives of ordinary Americans rather than the rarefied atmosphere of dissident intellectuals. By grounding myself in the gritty realities of the workaday world, to my surprise I found grace there too — often resilient spirits able to draw forth the sweet nectar at life’s bitter core in the face of so much that is manifestly unjust. I worked alongside undocumented flower workers, off-season farmers, and mentally challenged custodians. In so doing, I stepped outside the cosseted world of the elite educated for which I had prepared myself into a world where my credentials held no special value, where indeed I found it best to tuck them under my baseball cap and pick up an axe instead.
Still in search of a home, in the mid-seventies my wife and I took inspiration from Woody Guthrie and hopped freight trains, not just for a ten-minute lark but for 36 hours straight, barreling across the Great Plains from the high peaks of Glacier National Park all the way to Minneapolis. We rode the rails not just once but — as if being beaten and besooted black and blue hadn’t been enough — a second round the very next year, only this time equipped with ten-speeds and more ample padding.
Finally, we decided to take a break from the States altogether, thinking we might not return for five, ten years or more — maybe never. Packing our belongings in a friend’s garage, we headed south of the border to live among Mayan Indians in the highlands of Guatemala. We even briefly considered settling there. But warmly as we were embraced by our adopted indigena family, we felt a gravitational pull northward. We sensed the biological clock ticking and a certain urgency to sink deep roots in native soil before further adventures abroad. Following a circuitous lead, we turned north to a remote stretch of California coastline five hours north of the Bay Area. There, over two decades, we built and maintained a self-reliant homestead an hour’s hard drive from our own mailbox and seven miles of slip-sliding dirt roads from the nearest power and phone lines. We generated power from the first generation of commercially available solar panels and a micro-hydro system, grew most of our own food, raised goats for milk and cheese, bees for honey and ducks for eggs.
In so doing I was consciously trying to distance myself as much as possible from everything I didn’t like about mainstream American culture — its rampant materialism, its worshipful pursuit of power, fame and fortune over kindness, compassion and community. But in another sense, despite my best efforts I was simply following a most American mythic tradition — that of the pioneer lighting out for the territory and starting afresh, in that quintessential quest for an uncorrupted life. We took inspiration from Thoreau but raised the ante on ourselves, multiplying by ten his two years in the woods two miles from the nearest town. I dressed in overalls and for 27 years wore an Amish-style beard that, together with my lanky frame, made me appear to everyone from a Himalayan Sherpa to a New York radio host like a living reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.
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The author relaxing with his goats, 1982
For the full decade of the seventies we essentially seceded from modern America. I tuned out the media, read no newspapers and sought to shut down my internal anguish about the state of the world that had been a primary preoccupation of mine since childhood. Instead I tuned in to the seasons and rhythms of the deep woods, meditated in its stillness and storms, milked goats, and grew gardens and orchards with varying success. After the apocalyptic tumult of the Sixties, it was an immense relief to simply follow the cycles of the natural world and live with the assurance that whatever happened in human affairs nature endures. Presidents are impeached and resign, wars rage and destroy, scandals unfold, but the sun also rises each morning in the east and sets each evening in the west, unaffected by our vain human strivings.
At the same time, living in deep country I rubbed shoulders with both counterculture hippies and long-time locals in hardscrabble Humboldt County on the far northern “Lost Coast” of California. It’s a region with a perennially depressed economy and a resourceful people proud of their independent, idiosyncratic ways. In spirit it’s a bit of Maine, a bit of Kentucky, and sometimes Hawaii. Its latter-day marijuana gold rush is high-octane California moonshine, but for four decades was ever so much more profitable than both the 49’ers and the moonshiners. My wife and I chose not to partake in the feast and thus became the village idiots, growing potatoes instead of pot and driving a ’62 Ford pickup on the back roads while our neighbors sprang for late model Dodge RAM 4x4s. We scraped by financially but our chief harvest was elsewhere, in the richness of lives spent in quietly rewarding ways.
All the while Du’s admonition to “learn to love my own people” kept returning, whispering in my inner ear as both a question and a promise to myself that I was still trying to figure out how to fulfill. Living in the stillness of the deep woods I was finally free enough from the distractions of news cycles to realize how much peace I was capable of cultivating on my own. I came to recognize that even if the larger world didn’t change I could still find a certain measure of tranquility within it. And I could give back to the world from that more rooted foundation rather than from tossing unmoored in the tumult of the times, raging helplessly against the iniquities of human folly.
Once in awhile I read of friends and former fellow activists now living underground. Picking up mail at a local post office on my return from Canada, I spotted an FBI Most Wanted poster featuring mugshots of my old friend Cathy Wilkerson, signaling the hunted, haunted nature of her life post-Weather Underground. While she had gone on to become a bomb maker on behalf of a cause she imagined would support the North Vietnamese in their struggle against the Americans, her invitation had ended up connecting me with a North Vietnamese guide who had sent me back home to learn to embrace the very people and country from which we were then both so alienated.
We Is Stronger Than Me Alone
All the while, I committed my life’s work to social change, trying against all odds to improve a world that’s stubbornly resistant to change except on its own terms. This too, I’ve come to realize, is a typically American aspiration, a heady mix of hubris and naivete. We imagine it’s possible to “save” the world when at best it’s only possible to serve it. There’s still much I can’t relate to in mainstream American politics and culture — and I’m hardly alone in that — but I cherish certain qualities in our national character that are uniquely American even if they’re distinctly minority traditions. And I now understand the wisdom of Du’s admonition to learn to love my own people. It’s only been by embracing my identity as one of us that I’m able to speak with and be heard by my own people from an inner sense of belonging. “We” is so much stronger than me alone. As the Vietnamese I’ve met have so admirably demonstrated, letting go of grief and anger even when we can’t fully forgive enables us to meet each moment — and each other — with open hearts and fresh energy.
Over the decades that I’ve struggled with the challenge of Du’s conundrum. I’ve parsed his words in every possible way, sometimes hoping to penetrate to a deeper breakthrough. Other times I’ve tried to broaden their definitions so as to make them more palatable. So, for example, I’ve asked myself how I define “my own people.” Are they restricted to legally certified Americans — in the fraught definitions of our current politics, full-blooded citizens rather than undocumented immigrants — or are they people anywhere in the world with whom I identify? In a globalized culture do citizenship papers or common values better define what constitutes a people? Do I need to love a white supremacist who happens to have been born within these borders when we share so few convictions and differ so decisively? And must I excise from my people the many individuals I know in other parts of the world with whom I feel far deeper kinship? What does it mean to love all Americans, or “America” as a whole, ignoring the fact that every resident of North and South America can equally well justify calling themselves Americans?
Kurt Vonnegut had a word for the inflation of meaning for something that may have little or none: “granfalloon,” which he defines as “a proud and meaningless collection of human beings.” That’s pretty harsh, yet it does touch on the truth that as national boundaries are increasingly superseded by global economics and culture, our national identities are riven by implacable antagonisms, and local affinities are re-emerging as our most salient expressions of self-identification. I feel myself to be more Californian than American, and more Humboldt than Californian.
If it’s impossible in good conscience to love those with whom you share so few common values yet with whom you still share the same national politics and culture, is love even necessary? Might it be enough simply to accept that for better or worse, maybe better and worse, we are family, and as siblings we must somehow find ways to coexist with one another? Either we learn to live together or we die at each other’s hands.
To say that I’ve learned to love my own people is not to say I love them more than others. My allegiance isn’t expressed in our national anthem or flag, Vonnegut’s granfalloons, but rather in the particular people and places I’ve learned to love with a fierce and tender affection. But in my heart and those of many other Americans, our love of our own kind in no way precludes a love equally deep for others we cherish in other places. Yes, we’re an exceptional people, no doubt about it. So is every other people, each in their own way.
In 1968 I distanced myself from my American identity in an attempt to renounce responsibility for actions taken by my government that I could not abide. I sought instead to insist on my country’s allegiance to a higher standard of conduct. Today many of us face a similar quandary — an excruciating sense of grief and outrage as we watch our country committing suicide — and because of its still massive influence in world affairs, committing omnicide against the future of humanity and the planet. Our patrimony is being hijacked not primarily by any foreign power or terrorist group but by a political and economic system of our own making that has no loyalty to its own people.
But I take heart from the fact that a substantial majority of Americans strongly oppose most of these policies and that rather than acquiesce to them we have summoned ourselves and one another to reassert our core values. The threats posed by a rogue American regime intent on destruction have reinvigorated long-dormant citizen’s movements and brought new, more diverse voices into the political arena. These vibrant assertions of a higher human purpose have reaffirmed a fundamental truth of our American experience: It has consistently been those outside the sanctioned political process, most often the marginalized and disenfranchised, who have injected the energy and ideas that have expanded the rights and liberties that define our highest aspirations. Only haltingly and reluctantly have our constituted leaders followed.
In moments of despair I wish I could somehow just shed my American identity like an insect or shellfish sloughing off a dead husk. Yet I try to remember and affirm those distinctively American qualities that I most appreciate — the resilience of so many, mostly marginalized Americans in the face of so much adversity and injustice; our pragmatism, ingenuity, and inextinguishable though often naive optimism; our receptivity to new experiences, ideas, and cultures; and the essential decency of so many Americans, including some whose politics I emphatically don’t share. I do my best to separate their beliefs and even their actions from their essential being, which like mine is prone to the full range of human frailties, including ignorance, fear and the fearsome behaviors it sometimes drives us to.
Love Anyway
As I’ve struggled to love — or more minimally, to accept — people whose beliefs and behavior I can’t abide, I find myself turning to the phrase, “Love anyway.” By this I mean not something lesser, for in some ways it requires greater effort and courage to summon the strength to surmount one’s revulsion at dimensions of one’s people — and oneself — that one simply wishes one didn’t need to coexist with than to love someone or something that’s easy to love. I choose to love that which I can’t abide because the alternative — renouncing and condemning parts of my people and myself that are inseparable from me — leaves me eternally divided against myself. The emotional physics of perpetually waging war against parts of one’s people or oneself that one wishes to disown is not only exhausting but ultimately fruitless. Accepting every part of ourselves and our identities — the good, the bad and the undeniably ugly — restores a certain wholeness to our broken hearts.
The paradox of unconditional acceptance is that viewed from afar, in prospect, it looks like surrender, like one is conceding one’s core convictions. But from the inside it’s actually liberation. We usually think that once, and only once people change their beliefs and behavior, then they’ll be deserving of our love and acceptance. But they’ll rarely if ever change just to accommodate our demands. In fact, the more we demand, the more they’ll resist. Instead, it’s the precise opposite: as Du advised, love first and change will follow. Accept others, ourselves and the world as we are, unconditionally, and all start to change of their own accord. The act of opening our eyes and abandoning our judgments transforms our vision and perception. We begin to see anew. We see traces of the same frailties in ourselves that we condemn in others — the same propensity towards fear and anger in the face of uncertainty, for example — and equally admirable qualities that our prejudgments had heretofore blinded us from noticing. As we begin to see with fresh eyes, others sense the difference in us and respond accordingly.
Now as we endure another uncivil war where all we seem to share is our antipathy towards one another, I find my North Vietnamese guide Du’s counsel more timely and compelling than ever. We keep imagining that we could accept one another if only the other would simply change. But in truth we need first to accept one another just as we are. Then, and only then, our perception of others and the world around us changes. It took crossing enemy lines intending to subvert my country’s war plans to receive the peace plan that brought me home again to an endlessly challenging embrace of my own people.
