Dear Mom:
How are things in Miami Beach? The weather here has been balmy and pleasant. The news has been dark and destructive. But then, I guess you get the same news in Florida that we get here.
You know, it occurred to me the other day, Mom, that you have always been very groovy about my writing for the Free Press. Since my background—Midwest Ohio, middle class, et cetera—is the same as yours, I know you have got to have some trepidations about this column and where it appears, yet you’ve never said a word. I send you the paper each week and you sometimes mention it, but you never really venture an opinion. Perhaps it’s because we got it understood between us many years ago that I’d live my life my way and you’d live yours your way, and we don’t bug each other about what each of us does, but I sorta know that your finding my words every week, sandwiched in between ads to immortalize the penis and Mao Tse-tung posters for sale, has got to give you pause.
So I thought, this week, I’d just drop you a note to explain why it is that I write a television column for such an unsettling (from your position) newspaper.
First of all, I suggest you read all of last week’s Freep. Not just my words, but all of it. The Kent State slaughter, the Ohio State debacle, the draft board illegality item, all of it. You won’t find much of that stuff in your Miami Beach newspapers, Mom, and I know sure as hell you won’t find it in the Los Angeles Times. And where you get most of your information, from the 6:00 news, you’ll find only vibrations of what is going down. Uh…going down, Mom, means happening.
Vibrations that are as untrustworthy as the refracted pain just before a coronary. It tells you there is trouble in the system, but not precisely where, nor just how bad.
So let me hip you, Momma, that the trouble is bad. Very bad. Worse than the alienating aspects of the 6:00 news and its Spiro-inspired insistence on impartiality can possibly tell you. I watched the news clips from Kent State and I saw the kids fleeing in horror from the guns of kids no older than themselves. It was a terrible personification of the two sides of today’s American morality, Mom. Kids killing kids. But the ones who pulled the triggers—with what I suspect is the same emotional fracture to be found in the Jack Armstrongs who slaughtered at M? Lai—were puppet-mastered by fat old men who lived elsewhere. I saw an interview soon after the murder of those four students, with the brigadier general who had ramrodded the National Guard outfit that went into Kent. He was a liar, Mother. It didn’t take any particular political position to see that the man was a weak, frightened buck passer, petrified that he was going to be brought up on charges of incompetence and dereliction of duty. He lied, Mom; he sat there and his chin quivered and he evaded and he mumbled phrases to offscreen voices. “Snipers on the rooftops,” he mumbled. But the highway patrol reports that have been published since the tragedy—which have not been exploited on tv for some obscure reason—insist that the cops on the rooftops who had a full view of the scene saw no snipers. “My boys may have acted hastily” was the nearest thing to an admission of wrongdoing the good general mumbled, Ma. Then he went into a long mumble about how they were only boys, were scared, weren’t trained in combat tactics. He did go on, Mom. And no one seems to be horrified that they’re offering as an excuse for the murder of four innocent kids and the wounding of God knows how many others, that untrained, trigger-happy, inept kids were sent in to a college campus (not Cambodia, not Vietnam, not Laos, not West Berlin, a college campus that belongs, at least in large part, to the students who were butchered) with loaded weapons.
Even Spiro did a tv interview with David Frost, in which he excused it all with that rationale.
So if you wonder why I write for the Free Press, Mom, it is because I know that the tv you are watching every night allows these obfuscations to obtain some weight. It allows the clouding of horribly simple incidents, and it permits you and the other members of the Silent Majority to dodge the responsibilities of joining with youth to end this madness before the country kills itself.
You see, Mom, I write the column because the cop-out that is built into the apathetic life for you and all the other good, uncommitted folks out there is one that wears ever thinner by the day. The explanations grow less reasonable, the smiles grow more strained, the faces of Mitchell and Nixon and Spiro and that general tell us they are lying, even as you try to believe them. Because if you can believe them, Mom, it will mean you won’t have to face the fact that time has caught up with us. That America today is being intravenously fed on the blood of its own children. I write the column so your generation will just once simply ask the question: who is the enemy?
Because it seems inconceivable to me, knowing what a loving, reasonable person you are—as must be all those others out there—that you could come up with the answer: the children.
They’re killing our kids, Mom.
They’re slaughtering them at home and abroad. No longer can long hair or liberal lifestyle be offered up as reasons for this kind of charnel-house behavior. No longer can the fat old men in their eyries far away be permitted to send kids to kill kids, with moron alibis as shabby afterthoughts, and tv announcements that support of Nixon’s war policies are running two to one against.
Because you see, Mom, for all the wonder tv offers, it cannot catch the tenor of the times. For all the computer analyses of the way voting will go in an election, television cannot sniff out and predict the winds of change that sweep across our land.
Walter Cronkite and Howard K. Smith won’t tell you this, Mom, but the country is finally getting unified. It’s tragic that it took the deaths of those four kids to do it, but it’s happening.
So I’m writing this column every week to tell you that truth, Mother. To tell you that I received sixty letters last week from all over the country, saying the column helps, that lone people pretending to be scuttlefish are actually in accord with the hopes and dreams of the kids at Kent, that those people need to look somewhere for words of hope that will lift them out of their doomsday depressions.
Because you see, after the Kent State horror, and the four-hundred-some colleges that went on strike, and the complete victory that got that scumbag Fascist egg-sucker Reagan to shut down the schools in California (and even his cue card that said: Now weep, Ronnie didn’t fool any of us), people wandered around simply wanting to hide. Simply wanting to turn off. Simply wanting to throw in the towel. Simply wanting to cry and say fuck them, fuck them all, let them die, every last sonofabitch of them! And that’s so wrong, Mom, so terribly wrong, that I have to write to you and tell you that it’s finally happening…that the country is pulling together.
Not the way Nixon wanted it. Not the way Spiro keeps demanding it—behind our Leaders. But in the right way, the best way, the way born out of troubles so great and evils so omnipresent that room for political positions no longer exists.
In New York, Mom, people are standing on street corners and arguing, trying to reason it out. In Austin, the demonstrators are putting the girls three-deep in the front ranks, hoping the National Guard won’t willingly shoot down females. In Ohio, four thousand people turned out for the funeral of one of those Kent kids. And they’re massing in Washington today. With Senators and Congressmen beside the longhaired kids. And there will be more marches and more demonstrations, and more action.
Because Nixon went too far this time, Mom. He defied not just the “vocal minority,” but all the people. Drunk with his importance he said to hell with the whims of the people, and he acted like a petty tyrant. And the kids felt the tremors first, and they acted. And already frightened, the Establishment acted, and killed. And those four didn’t die in vain, Mom, because for each one of them that sank beneath a bullet, ten thousand uncommitted swelled the ranks of the people who speak for humanity, not property rights.
Had tv the guts, Mom…did it but acknowledge its obligation…it would tell you that. It would tell you that the time is now for all of you who have sat back and hoped the storm would pass to join us. To come with us into danger and possible death…to bring this country back to a position of sanity.
But tv won’t, so I do. I tell you of the letters and the phone calls, and the frustration of the people, and the need for unity. I tell you we can no longer call each other rotten names, and click our tongues with disapproval. We have to cling together, Mom, or Nixon and his death legions will kill us all, working from the left straight across.
That’s why I write this column, Mom.
So take care of yourself, and a happy Mother’s Day.
Your loving son,
Harlan.