As most of you know I spend my summers at Deep Bay on BC’s Vancouver Island. It is a special place and one that attracts travellers from all over. One such visitor Peter is an American from Seattle, up with his wife Cathy. They are visiting their friends Terry and Suze, who are also from Seattle. Now for me any newcomers are welcome not the least of it because they are American. To be Canadian is to live in a close and vulnerable relationship with the most powerful country in the world. As the saying goes, ‘what happens in the US does not stay in the US’. I will always embrace any chance I have to ask Americans about their country.

As it happens the Democratic Convention is on this week in Chicago and I mentioned to my new American companions that I was watching it. Peter casually asked me if I remembered the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention?

“I was born in 1968.” he said.

“I was eighteen in 1968” I replied, “I remember it like it was yesterday.“

His question brought back shocking memories.

Mayor Daly, the Republican mayor of Chicago had warned anti – Vietnam war protesters that they would be treated harshly in Chicago. He was good for his word. I watched transfixed on our black and white TV as daily images of Chicago police beating protesters savagely with truncheons and attacking police dogs were unleashed. Police on horseback road into the crowds injuring many dozens of people. It all left a searing impression on me, one that stays with me to this day, one that has echoed through the decades since.

For as long as I can remember it has been a country riven with racial, religious, idealogical and populist turmoil. Political cycles are never ending. Congressional, Senate and Presidential elections never allow for any stillness, any collective downtime, time for mundane everyday life, time to reflect on the path they have come and the path ahead. It’s as though they live in a home where the mother and father fight everyday, sometimes violently, sometimes quietly but always fight.

It must be exhausting.

The 60’s had exploded into view, something few would have been able to anticipate. Forces were unleashed that would change everything. Baby Boomers, now a majority and coming of age, found their voice and reached out for their power. It would unnerve our parents and rattle all the trusted conventions of the time. Even as I was living through it I could feel that everything I knew, all that I trusted was shifting beneath me. I just didn’t know how and I didn’t know my place in all of it.

I was born conspicuously white. And I would always remain so. I’m not saying that to be churlish nor to raise hackles. I say it neither to be contrary nor controversial and certainly not to announce embedded racism, an awareness that would be essential in the decades ahead. It is not intended as a battle cry, nor as some declaration of my sovereignty, I am saying it because it matters. It is what I am, and acknowledging that at the very least gives me a starting point. I was about to be thrown into the boiling social cauldron of the 1960’s. Unstoppable forces of change were about to collide. Knowing what I am and where I came from has helped me find my way.

We all have primary filters through which our experiences pass; being a white English male was mine. For another it might be being born black, or female, or gay. Understanding and acknowledging what that primary filter is has been instructive for me as I have tried to understand my life’s journey. 

That awareness has allowed me to make sense of so much that was confusing. To me would flow power, authority, influence and wealth, such being the assumptive birthright of a bright, young upwardly mobile middle class white boy. But unbeknownst to me, that world was about to change and not at a manageable ‘plenty of time to adjust on the fly’ pace. No, so much of what was about to happen would be dramatic and urgent, giving little time for anyone to see it coming, certainly not me. Overnight, it seemed the battle was on. And for a young English immigrant boy that posed a problem.  By the early 60’s I was well on my way to becoming Canadian, although at the time I couldn’t possibly have had a clue what that meant. Looking back from my seventy-four year old perch, I have never known a time that I didn’t love being Canadian. By every measure I hold dear, I love this country and have always understood how fortunate I am to have lived my life in it.

I was as geeky as they get. By the age of twelve I could recite every world leader in every country and I was an insatiable follower of the evening news, something I was allowed to watch each night. That is when I first watched ‘The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite’.

“Good evening. Tonight the world’s two greatest military powers and sworn enemies are on the verge of a global conflict. Earlier today US President John F. Kennedy ordered Soviet President Nikita Kruschev to withdraw all missiles from Cuba within forty-eight hours. He has ordered the US fleet to confront Soviet warships headed toward Cuba. The Russian ships are loaded with nuclear missiles.” It was October 1962.

If there had been any doubt, the events that would shake the decade were now officially underway. Just months before a US backed invasion of Cuba at what became known as the Bay of Pigs had ended in disaster, revealing for all the world to see its true colours. The United States was an interventionist foreign power willing in their ideological fight against communism to overthrow sovereign nations, a truth that has continued to this day. I didn’t understand it of course, that would take me decades but it sure had my attention. 

One school day, in November 1963 we were sent home early. Girls were crying, teachers seemed to be in shock. John F. Kennedy, the US President had been assassinated, beginning a decade of horrifying and frightening events, the overall impact of which would change me profoundly. Just recounting the most significant events reminds me of just how tumultuous it all was. And if it was unnerving for me just imagine how unsettling it must have been for our parents, a generation which had just fought and survived a world war, hoping no doubt for a return to the order they had known before it all happened. But a return to order was not in the cards. A return to disorder it would be.

1961 US invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs

1962 The Cuban Missile Crisis

1963 JFK assassinated

1964 The Vietnam War ramps up

1964 Kent State, four students killed by the National Guard

1965 The first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi

1965 Selma civil rights march in Alabama

1965 The largest draft since the Korean War began in the US

1965 Millions of anti Vietnam war protesters in the streets

1965 Race riots in all major US cities

1968 MLK assassinated

1968 RFK assassinated

1968 The US committed over 500,000 troops in Vietnam

1968 Riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago

It was a frightening decade.

Each night on TV images of race riots, widespread arson, cities in flames, police brutality against anti war protesters and civil rights protesters played out.  Walter Cronkite would begin the CBS Nightly News with a body count of young American boys who had died in Vietnam, sent over to fight communism. He would end that count at over 65,000 American dead in 1974, after the Vietcong had soundly defeated ‘the greatest military power in all of history’. The US left the decade defeated and divided. And the worst was yet to come. 

And it was personal. I remember three of my American classmates in the Grad Class of ‘67. Jim Wilkerson, John Middleton and Chance McKenzie, were all American boys who had been sent to private school in Canada. They had talked openly about the draft they were facing when they returned home but said they wanted to go to Vietnam. With the overstated bravado of young American boys they would announce to no one in particular that they wanted to go over there and show those Vietcong gooks just what US military power was all about. “Besides, if we don’t go, the Commies are going to take over the world.”. 

Within a few months of graduation, my three classmates had died in Vietnam. Just six months earlier I had celebrated winning the private school rugby championships with them. Once upon a time they had been teammates. Now they were dead. 

I was angry and it led to a bitter fight at the dinner table with my father,  “I won’t have any son of mine presume to tell me what the American government should or should not do in Vietnam. You’re sounding like a bloody communist!” But now I wouldn’t back down. I was seventeen and angry, now fuelled by the emotions that come with knowing real people who had died in Vietnam. For dad it was a matter of principle. For me it was as well.  Just different principles.

Through this lens, the 60’s it seems to me, had the greatest impact of any decade that came after. It was unsettling and at times frightening. I have only laterally come to understand how much the 60’s and the war in Vietnam radicalized me. The indiscriminate and intentional bombing of helpless civilian populations, immolating helpless villagers with napalm, all part of trying to break the spirit of the Vietcong, the communist enemy; counting hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Vietnamese civilians as simply the cost of stamping out communism.  It was an evil fallacy, a hollow justification then, as it remains today.

I am not speaking of my new found American friends. They are delightful everyday people, raising families, working hard and living their lives on a values based platform. It must be so troubling to live in a country that you love and yet have no control over, domestic forces relentlessly attacking from within, metastizing and unchecked.

My wife Mac has a different view of America. She reminds me all the time that she trusts America, she trusts that it is a country populated by hundreds of millions of good, decent people and she trusts that when this all washes out, they will have been heard. And she trusts that women are about to seize the moment.

I pray she is correct and if she is it will be when women have finally taken their full share of political power and authority. It has taken over a century. In 1963 Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, challenging the basic tenet of social structure, that a woman should be fulfilled as a housewife and mother, and that to be feminine was to have no need to work, get an education or have political opinions.  By the late 60’s Gloria Steinhem emerged as an activist leader of the women’s movement, famously writing, “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” striking a chord with millions of young women across North America, galvanizing the forces of structural and cultural resistance and change. Her book ‘After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’ terrified the establishment with the rhetoric of revolution. 

Many had come before and many after, and there will be more yet but as leaders emerge for each generation they serve to remind their followers that there is work yet to be done. There is always more to be done. Others have followed each generation demanding recognition, each generation falling short. Until perhaps now.

As I write America may be on the verge of the most impactful social, cultural and political change in a century. Vice President Kamala Harris may be elected as the 47th President. It is change long since past due. There will be pain and disruption of course, there is too much at stake for power to be handed over easily. It will be profound and historic change and with it an opportunity to refresh the American Dream, to finally deliver on the promise of its Founders, to create a country with real, visible equality, a country which will turn its extraordinary wealth to good purposes and its extraordinary opportunity to realize its unfulfilled promise.

I wish that for my American friends.