Yes, it's bothering me so much that I had to get back online to
correct my blunder.
I would like Mr. Mandel, Sixties-L subscribers, and readers of the
innumerable websites to which our postings find their way to know a
bit more about my son, since I opened his life to criticism in an
earlier post. First, he's not a professional military man. He's a
reservist now, having left active duty about six years ago. He makes
his living as director of a non-profit community outreach program he
started at the (virtually) all-black high school he attended. The
program came into being from funding my son secured following the
close of the original program, part of Jimmy Carter's Atlanta Project
which created centers of community activism in high schools. After
leaving the army and in furtherance of his aspirations for political
life, my son took a master's in public policy and is now in law school
while working full time. And, no, he has not taken army money to pay
for his graduate work. Even beyond what his job commits him to do, he
spends much of his free time mentoring what we now call "at-risk"
black youngsters, establishing ties with them in an effort to be a
supportive adjuct in encouraging them to remain in school and set
productive goals for their current and future lives. As for why he's
still affiliated with the army, that's for him to say, not me, as I
learned from the post which made (in my view) this follow-up
necessary.
So what's the point? Simply that, as Ted Morgan has often said in his
posts, I would hope that in this new incarnation of Sixties-L we can
get beyond the categorical divisions and automatic assumptions that so
often characterized, for better or worse, our lives and our thinking
in the sixties. If I'm guilty of that very same categorizing in my
"war is a man thing" post, I apologize to the list and will be more
careful in future posts about what I say and how I say it.
At any rate, it's a new day and we need new alliances among ourselves
and with others to deal with it. But we will not be able to form those
alliances unless we get past our own festering wounds, many of which
(mine included) have erupted on the list in recent weeks. We also need
to be concerned with how our children are handling our legacy and we
need to be sensitive to the fact that they may choose to meet their
growing responsibilities differently than we chose to meet ours when
we were their age. The important thing is that they make some effort
grounded in integrity, is it not? We can either condemn them for
their choices and suffer the consequences of that decision or
continue, if they let us, to exercise our role as advisors and elders
in their lives.
Flowers
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