Glory days

Yeah, just sitting back
Trying to recapture a little of the glory of
Well, the time slips away
Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of

Glory days
Yeah, they'll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl's eye, glory days
Glory days

-Bruce Springsteen

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The people in this video are the kind of people I spent most of my adult life around. They were colleagues, friends, sometimes bosses. I was a liberal Democrat, and I believed what they believed until I didn’t.

Some observations:

1. The older ones are still living mentally in their "glory days" of the 1960s. Even in their 70s and 80s, my friends still thought of themselves as the young longhaired flower children fighting the man. But, as one acquaintance recently put it, they’re still trying to teach the world to sing in perfect, Communist harmony.

2. Many of my friends recounted the same tales repeatedly of having been young white people who went down South to help black people in the civil rights era. An entire hour of suppertime conversation could be taken up by a tale told with obvious nostalgia about being a young white couple from a Northeastern liberal arts college and how they packed up their VW to march with black people across southern bridges.

3. Some of them saw truly disturbing racism, and it imprinted on them. Yet it’s difficult to know how many of these tales to believe. Some of the stories were so like other stories told by other people they left me with the impression that they were performing a pastiche of memory and fantasy.

4. Many are unable to see or understand that the world of their exciting youth isn't the same anymore. Many people like this told me right at their own dinner tables that the South is still like it was in their youth.

And I do mean “exciting.” We don’t like to say this out loud, but we must if we’re honest: young people want to be part of something bigger. They want to feel part of a historic movement. Danger and oppression are, in fact, exciting when you believe you’re fighting for the angels.

On a more basic human level, below the level of conscious thought, danger is simply exhilarating. Compassion is not the only reason someone becomes a firefighter or a paramedic or a tactical cop. Doing it for the rush, the thrill, is also a motivator. I know this on a personal level but less dramatically; being a beat cops and crime reporter sent to the scenes of murders and public suicides was exciting. To me, to the cops, to the first responders, to the dive teams.

Some of my old friends like this seemed to genuinely believe that the world today is the same as it was in the 60s, but it’s impossible to know if they really believed this, or if they simply needed to believe it. Such people claimed that it was still dangerous for a black man to be seen in public with a white woman below the Mason-Dixon line. Or that black men in the South are routinely pulled over on dark country roads by racist sheriff's deputies and disappeared in the 21st century.

5. Were these people genuinely kind in any way? It's hard for me to say. They certainly thought they were, and I thought so, too.

But they could brook no political disagreement at all. Those who changed their minds and developed any opinions that would be coded "right wing" or just traditionally conservative, were pushed out and un-personed.

Looking back on some of them (apologies for how recursive this gets), I think many of them truly thought of themselves as kind. And certainly some of them were at least apparently motivated by wanting to give a hand up to someone they thought had come up in life without the advantages my friends had.

But the definition of “kindness” becomes blurrier when you notice that the kindness your friends profess towards blacks, gays, women, refugees, etc., is quickly withdrawn from you if your political or cultural views start to contain anything coded “right-wing.”

That is what has happened to millions of people who are now at odds with their friends, families, and church communities. It happened to me. People just exactly like those you see in the video above ex-communicated me from my career and social circle. Secret meetings were held about me by rooms full of people who look like this to figure out what to do with me. All correspondence and communication stopped abruptly.

I might have stayed as one of those people if my life had not taken a dramatic turn about eight years ago. As a teen and a young man, I loved seeing myself as part of the next wave of “gay liberation.” I was jealous of the apparent glamour of the 60s and 70s life my gay “fathers” had led when proposing equal rights for homosexuals was to push the boundaries of what was socially and politically acceptable. People like me wanted to be in the vanguard, too, so we created a mythology with roles for characters like ourselves.

Many people like that aren’t merely reminiscing about their glory days; they believe they’re still living them.

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