there's this picture i'd never seen until it showed up about thirty years later... you can tell from my expression that i clearly knew they took it when they took it, but i forgot it quickly... one of those thousand things that come and go every day, every hour... they just pass away... unless they don't... until they show up thirty years later to remind you... hey there you are... hey there i am

scanned from a feature in Marquette Magazine, winter 2000: 100 Years at Marquette... i'm photo five... my caption reads "With signs, songs and solidarity, student protests abound, ca. 1970." i'm wedged in between a much larger caption about "the bumblebee uniform" for mu basketball in 1970 and a caption about mudsliding "ca. 1978"... ah, those crazy seventies... those crazy kids... what will they think of next?

so there i am abounding for us all, Mr. Circa 1970... standing for a generation... a cartoon of myself and how many others... with really bad hair, blue workshirt, black armband, and (trust me) the jeans and the workboots... that's pretty much how i looked for my last three years in milwaukee... we were at war...

it was an ugly time... i was ugly... but i was enjoying myself... well, testing myself, i suppose, to see if that was who i was... the kind of thing most kids these days get out of their systems in high school or even junior high... must have given my parents a few sleepless nights... though they didn't have to look at me day in day out...

i dressed like that... looked like that... because i could... and because it said something about who i wanted to be... what i wanted to believe... i was clearly modelling the look of my spirit-guide at the time, mike cullen... irish... catholic pacifist... jailbird

(for a '68 draft board action... according to one source

On September 24, 1968 [the beginning of my freshman year... i was oblivious], fourteen men, including five priests and a protestant minister, removed approximately 10,000 1-A draft files from Milwaukee's Selective Service boards and burned them with home-made napalm in a near-by square dedicated to America's war dead.

according to another source

In this case, two of the raiders pleaded guilty to federal charges but eventually federal charges against all other defendants were dropped because it proved impossible to get an impartial jury.

i'm not sure how this fits with my understanding that mike had spent at least a year in jail when i met him in the fall of '70)

a founder of the casa maria catholic worker community in milwaukee, mike preached and practiced a line of christian nonviolence that was - to me - thoroughly compelling in the face of our national crisis of war, poverty, and racism... he was also a very charismatic guy

we were a pack of idealistic pups then... some of us... or we wanted to be... i wanted to think that something i did could matter... and i wanted to save my own butt... i regularly felt kind of phony because i doubted i'd ever have the guts or the conviction to risk... what? my comfort? my safety? so... i was yr classic walking talking screwed up protestor kid... trying very hard to be radically good... to be authentic... i was not a hippie...

from here, i may look ridiculous... this is embarassing... but turn the camera around... take a look at the rest of that world and time... madness and really bad couture everywhere... there i am... a fuzzywuzzy white middle class seminarian with next to no chance of being drafted... a pampered kid... if not a golden child, certainly lucky enough... and not brave... i read tim o'brien's "on the rainy river" and cry a little bit... because the whole thing was just too sad... and none of us had been equiped to deal with the immensity of the evil afoot... what kid ever is?

and then there's what the photo doesn't show...

before all of this i was a high school senior back in joliet... i had registered for the draft the summer after graduation because that's just what you did... everyone i knew said... that's just what you did... so i did... and it came to focus my attention marvelously... more on this soon...

now it's late halloween... friday... we've been celebrating the cat's 15th birthday since before dawn... that's pretty old for a cat, i'm told... spooky old cat...

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley

talk to me

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