I used to live in better times.

I say that to convince myself.

I say that to help me get past the knowing that in so many ways it isn’t true.

I let my mind go back and forth from then to now.

I realize, of course I do, I haven’t stopped realizing and I’m realizing more and more, that when I was younger and the world was new, everything fresh and I wasn’t the only one naïve, the energy and excitement of youth, and I was from a generation I wasn’t really part of, but it was there, we were there, we all had things in common, oh, to be young again.

I know I may delude myself, because I keep finding out how bad things were. And I know I led a sheltered buffered life. I lived suburban almost middle class, somehow a controlled community. No neighbors, nobody at school, or on the streets was anything darker than white. My family didn’t get newspapers, had no television, so I didn’t know the larger world was any different than mine. It wasn’t in the books they gave us to read. It wasn’t apparent in the classrooms at school. It took years of growing more up, in getting out more, of finally getting a television to give me an eye on the world, though it took marriage to get that TV, my father-in-law owned and ran AltaPas TV Sales and Service.

I kind of knew that some people were worse off than I was. I knew that there were people who had darker skin, but since it was outside my experience, I didn’t know I was expected to have an attitude toward that fact.

I remember one time, sometime back in the 1940s, you can see how it sticks in my memory, we, that is my brother and I guess the rest of my family, my mother and father, we were at a picnic across town, the west side of Alhambra, and we went swimming at the public pool in the park. We got into our bathing suits in the changing room, then down a corridor to the narrow pass through under a shower and onto the deck around the pool. There was a little black boy kneeling at our feet as we passed through the shower. He would rub his finger over the back of our foot above the heel to determine if we had showered enough. He rubbed above my heel and said, “You have to go back to the shower and try again.” He had an official job to do and was doing it, but he didn’t seem puffed up with his authority, seemed almost a little scared that he should be rubbing our feet to test our justification, but his official position protected him and he did his job. I had almost never seen a black person. There were none around our neighborhood, none around the pool in the park. I was getting ready to go back and shower, this time acceptably to be clean enough, and I asked him because I was friendly and curious, “Aren’t you going in swimming?”

He looked up for the first time, looked at me and said, “No. Our day is Tuesday. Then they drain the pool. Then they refill it for Wednesday.” I knew I was face to face with something I had to learn, should have learned long ago. When I was in the pool swimming, I looked around. I think I told him when he told me the rules, “That isn’t fair. That isn’t right.” I don’t know how I knew that then, it just seemed obvious to me, and I wondered why, as more and more I always now do.

I went to high school, learned a lot but never enough. When I got to college at UCR, all the restraints were taken off, the world became open, and I jumped into the currents of my generation I was entering not too late. This was the early ‘60s. The whole country was waking up, and I never went to sleep again. I stayed awake to catch up. Riverside was over the hill into another more isolated valley, but everyone at UCR knew what was what and we took part. We marched, we protested, we saw how sit-ins can be successful.

I guess I’m mentioning it now because, though I learned a lot, it seems that not everybody in my country did. I’m not just one of those older people from the older generation and I see us, I like being able to say “us,” in stores or parks or any public where, and they nod and shake their heads and say “wasn’t like this in my day” and “these young folks now, this generation…”

And I measure my own life and find again how much I’ve replayed everything. I saw it, first hand, I was there, to see how the movements of the early ‘60s so scared the Establishment that they enforced Plan B, introduced the drugs, destroyed the threat and the whole generation. We saw it up close in the student housing, neighbors and friends down the street turning from promise to zoned out, they said tax dollars well-spent.

The couple just across the street and down one from us, the guy majoring in anthropology and doing well, his wife matching him, and then almost overnight their little baby running naked in the street, his diaper hanging full, and we took him in and cleaned him up and brought him back to his parents and tried to get them to take care of their child, and they invited us to the drugs and we declined and tried to decide what we could do, and looked around the houses and the streets and asked, “What’s happened to all of us?”

The second half of the ‘60s was a difficult time, the publicized assassinations increased as the last resort when every other method of control failed, and I started teaching and decided I had found a profession like a calling, and it took over my life.

Over and over we saw the rise and fall. We held on, kept trying. We saw a President who was guilty, and resigned to keep himself out of jail. We had a President who played with jelly beans as international gifts of state, fingering them as lives of real people, who dismantled UC, and I was UC, my whole family, that greatest network of higher education preeminent in the world, and he cut medical costs by clearing out the hospitals and dumping the patients in hospital gowns unprotected on the streets, we all saw it on television. I wrote a poem about it to one of the national journals and the editor wrote back that it was “too ad hominem.” Of course it was. That was the point.

And I could have tried harder, done more. So many lost opportunities. So many chances, so close. When Carter won, it only took a week for the Power to explain to him the way things work.

When Bernie Sanders ran, and would have won, the Power behind the closed doors where there is no right or left, just unified Privilege, he scared them so much they took him off the ballot.

We’re all victims of a tepid timid media which tells us without reporting beneath the surface, just the things they think we’ll watch. I find now on the Internet, which shares the blame, still lined up back to back those good programs of analytical insight and commentators who all hit the points but only have a few million who follow, enough maybe for impact, but not enough for change.

I keep trying to bolster my spirits. I look for hope anywhere. Each younger generation which I love. But I see them reduced and neutralized, the new electronic drugs. I see how Greta Thunberg is sidelined, no longer the darling of easy focus, as she grows a little older but won’t ever give up, how we’re encouraged to forget, but I want to invite her to dinner so we can talk. But how many of us have taken the time to find, for example, the amazing video of her famous mother, like Scandinavian royalty, who sings with real virtuoso voice the Flight of the Bumblebee, hilarious, a gift to the world, what a family!

Why should I write all this now? Some I’ve said before.

Because I won’t give up either. Things need saying. And I love the world and the people in it. I want to see it better because it can.

I want the better times be now.