Me and my vote - ii

How ruby-red was the Siouxland world in which I was living back then? Red red, bloody red red. If any of my profs were Democrats, they certainly wouldn't have dared to say it aloud because Demos were known to be soft on communism. Dems wanted to turn America into a welfare state; they were determined to mute "liberty" with social programs that would take America down the road to Marxist communist. 

It might have been understood that our heading south to Florida that spring break would be to canvas for some mission project or, at best, witness for Jesus to all those sex-mad kids on Florida beaches. In fact, right there in the First Sioux Center bank, one of the guys, withdrawing cash for the trip, lied to the teller, told her, straight-faced, that's what we were going to do, pass out tracts on the beach. All the way to Sioux City we laughed about that.

We were going to be witnessing all right, but, in me at least, what we would be witnessing altered whatever was still there of my dad's old ways. One night, on Daytona Beach, when we were just a few faces in a mob of spring breakers, some guy interrupted the music and announced a news flash breaking right then. "LBJ is out," he screamed into the mike. "LBJ won't run." The place screamed with joy. I was in another world.

LBJ was a Democrat, thus Dad would have despised him. But, even though I never asked him about it, I'm sure that night he shook his head at the news because he would have been--for sure--absolutely and fundamentally, against this country's pulling out of Vietnam. We were fighting godless communism over there, not on a whim but instead because if we didn't fight in those rice paddies, soon enough the war would come New York, then Chicago, then Milwaukee, and then it would be right there on the lakeshore, coming up Superior Avenue to take the home Dad built after the war.

We left South Florida and followed the Gulf coast into the panhandle and then across into bayou country, on our way to New Orleans, hardly a place for Calvinist kids, which is why we went. We drove all night--a '63 Chev, black, with a good radio that blasted the news that night--big news. Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis, shot while he was speaking from the balcony floor of a motel. In bayou country,we went through towns where red lights screamed out trouble, all the while radio stations kept track of which inner cities were burning up.

We stopped, early, for some breakfast, and in a scene I wrote just a decade or so after, ate pancakes cooked up by a black cook we saw through a window behind the counter, while a half-dozen rednecks, lots of trouble, partied with their own whiskey and played songs with lyrics like none I'd ever heard before., virulently racist songs.

I can't speak for anyone of the other guys who went on that trip to sunny Florida, but when I came back Iowa, I was someone other than the someone I had been, even though I didn't know it yet.

I had been writing a bit for the college newspaper back then, sharing a column with another guy--I've forgotten the title. That column became an opportunity to be truthful about what was going on in me, what changes I'd witnessed in the larger world and to shape my own still-forming identity. When things I'd say in a column didn't sit well with the administrative powers-that-be, or the student body, I'd hear about it. The truth is, I grew to like blowback. What I learned in the college semesters that followed was not that the pen was mightier than the sword, but that the pen could well be formidable, and not just air rifle either. What I wrote got reactions, wasn't just blowin' in the wind. 

No one reason will ever explain how it is that Mom and Dad's boy, the baby of the family, became a writer--or a Democrat. But 1968 in my life, as well as the life of the nation, was without a doubt, a classroom, an institution really, all its own.