I’ve never lied about my age. I’m 52. Many people protesting in those days were children. All four people massacred at Kent State were minors by the law of the time. I didn’t march at Selma, but I did participate in a sit-in at a segregated restaurant in 1969. In 1970, I wrote and directed a play called “Peace Now”, which ran two nights at our school. For three years in high school, I dissented and resisted with everything from the clothes I wore to the stories and poems I wrote for our school publications and letters to our local newspaper. Although I was the one who was up for editorship of our school newspaper, it was given to someone else because I was “too radical”. Instead, I was assigned the task of features editor. In 1972, I received an honorable mention in the national O’Henry Short Story Contest for an anti-war story about a newspaper blowing through a neighborhood. In 1973, I was elected by the student body as “class poet”, which entitled me to speak at our final assembly. I delivered a scathing indictment of our education system and of our principal for his suppression of dissent. Also in 1973, I participated in a large televised protest at NC State University’s Bell Tower. Those are my creds. Maybe not the greatest of the time, but I didn’t (and don’t) apologize for any of it.
Who are these people?
Mia Michaels and Wade Robinson are dance choreographers. Nigel Lythgoe is the executive producer of “So You Think You Can Dance” and an executive producer of “American Idol”. Mia and Wade have both been nominated for Emmys. (See the link I provided above.)
I saw the link, but I have never seen the show. Did all this happen during one of the broadcasts?
Yes. Last night. Mia is even saying that she wasn’t protesting at all. It was just a “fashion statement”. :rolleyes:
Got it. Thanks.
O’Henry? I think it is O. Henry, at least if we are talking about the popular pseudonym used by the famous short story writer William Porter.
This sort of shows the problem a lot of people have with protest movements. They’re just noisy people who like to make trouble, they bitch and whine about everything but never really contribute constructively to any debate. Basically, they’re children. Most of the time they are literally children in addition to being emotionally and intellectually so.
:smack:
That’s the trouble with explaining things to people. They don’t actually read the explanations for comprehension. What part of writing stories, plays, letters, poems, and speeches do you consider to be non-contributory?
I kind of have to side with you on this. Many in that movement cared about the cause, but many, many more (especially the wanna-be’s that act like they were a part of the movement now, but had nothing to do with it at the time, like one of my neighbors) seem to have been mostly about the drugs, sex, and general sense of teenage rebellion than any cause.
Still, I love what I read in a recent fanfiction* where a character comments about your typical university protestors:
*“The Return” by Josh Temple (aka Sunshine, look it up on fanfiction.net)
I protested it when I was a teenager. A young teenager.
Mr. K and I were discussing the fact that protesting has certainly changed since the 60s and 70s. I’ve only seen one group of anti-war protestors around here, and it was a bunch of people who appeared to be old enough to have participated in the Vietnam war protests as adults. I think people protest electronically these days.
The whole dynamic has certainly changed. I remember the can’t-wait attitude from 16 years old about getting out of the parents’ house and getting on with the business of “discovering myself”. I think many people in my generation felt older than we were, almost the opposite of today. When I see a 26-year-old who still lives at home and talks about how young he is, there is almost a disconnect for me. But I suppose that’s the nature of the thing. Times change.
In the 1960s, the government was afraid of the people. Now it’s the other way around. Plus the “patriotically correct” era that began in 2001- 2003 hasn’t entirely left us. A lot of folks are afraid of being “Dixie-chicked”.
There’s virtually no chance I’m ever going to give the writings of a High School peacenik any sort of going over. I consider them non-contributory precisely because I’ve seen them all before, I went to High School at roughly the same time you did, so I am more than familiar with the kinds of “poems” and “plays” and et cetera we’re talking about. You can frame mindless bitching and whining in as many different forms as exist, that doesn’t change what it is. The entire tone of your post pretty much told me exactly all I needed to know in order to predict what these “works” were like.
Bitching out your principal at graduation is just further evidence that you were pretty much an irrelevant, whiny kid who really contributed nothing whatsoever to the greater issues of the time.
I also find it very common amongst people of my age group to believe they actually ended the war in Vietnam. This is ludicrous, by the end of 1967 a majority of Americans were opposed to Johnson’s handling of the war, by the time I graduated High School it was already a fait accompli that the war was going to end. Many of the people who protested the war and who have become prominent politicians try very hard to down play their protest activities.
Why? Because by and large the real reason the war ended is because the military and government handled various aspects of the war in an extremely poor manner, and they handled the protest movement in an extremely poor manner (contrast how the Bush Administration has handled the protest movement, by more or less ignoring it.) The people protesting were mostly just a bunch of degenerate scum who had no real refined political understanding whatsoever. A huge portion of them were self-professed communists making them basically akin to either retards or mass-murderers (as communists fall into one of those two categories invariably.) Furthermore, of course, it was realized the communists who were smoking weed and not doing anything productive weren’t a very important source of votes. Most of them were probably too stupid to even know how to register to vote in the first place. The war ended because the real citizens in America, the middle class moms and dads who were losing children didn’t want any part of it any more. Americans tend to not like going to war, but we’ll tend to support a war we’re winning, we never support a war we are losing (note that Lincoln’s political fortunes changed based on the performance of his armies in the field.) All the protest movement did was lead people who weren’t part of it to remark how disgusting and worthless the degenerate scum were, and history has shown that is pretty much precisely what they were, degenerate scum. You know you were part of a bad historical movement when John Kerry tries to downplay his involvement with you.
Beauty! I’m going to use this.
Say, Martin, don’t hold back. Tell us what you really think.
Bush did something better than other presidents? Surely you jest.
Can you define what “refined political understanding” is? Does it amount to blindly following the government?
I think “huge” is quite exaggerated. I don’t even think they would be a sizeable minority.
What drove LBJ from the race? Was it not knowing the huge anti-war vote that would go to Bobby Kennedy?
Now you’re just being silly.
How exactly have they been shown to be that?
And you are significant why? Your grandiose self-assessment notwithstanding, there were people who did indeed give them a going over.
Let me try to set you straight. It is your posts that are “mindless bitching and whining”. They are about nothing other than your petty jealousy and resentment of efforts that you believe to have no significance. Your tedious complaints about what you haven’t read by someone you don’t respect are the very definition of mindlessness.
Your sense of perspective is completely wack. Few single persons made the sort of impact you seem to be expecting from a young boy in a small town. Maybe Martin Luther King, Jr. Or maybe Malcolm X. Certainly not you.
You’re like the fat old English fop in 1777, sitting on his porch sipping tea, and complaining about the flies while a battle rages in a nearby field. You enable the tyrants who have made people fear their government with your fliappancy and cowardice. You’re the personification of Kennedyesque authoritarianism. Ask not what The State can do for you; ask what you can do for The State.
That is a very astute observation. And it has happened a step at a time while doubters have screamed “Slippery Slope!”. When a train is moving down a hill without any brakes, it is no fallacy to presume it will reach the bottom.
When I started reading this, I thought, “Golly, that’s some batshit crazy fascist stuff!” Then I looked up at the name and said, “Oh, it’s just Martin being Martin!” Carry on.