"What's Happening, Man?"

In the process of finishing the book With One Hand Waving Free, the task I set for myself this year, I can report that I just finished Chapter 14 and thus am half way through the book. The part I’m working on, set in 1968, is intense for Line because she finds herself accidentally pregnant and is not at all sure her politically-active boyfriend Stephen wants to become an involved parent. Marty meets Erik, a student of architecture at the University of California, who will mystify her for years. And Paul moves further north, into a larger Minnesota college to finish his B.A.

Line, Marty and Paul do not know that it is “1968”. Their own awakening lives absorb them. Paul does not know that when he plays the guitar and sings “Take my hand, Precious Lord,” that it will be sung at Martin Luther King’s funeral in April. Line does not know when she sees Tom Hayden, his sad, charismatic face all broken out from living on peanut butter and coffee, sitting on a stairway in a hall where Democratic convention tactics are being discussed, that he is the poster child for the year. Marty does not know that watching Janis Joplin perform with a boozy passion, accompanied by her band Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Carousel ballroom above an auto showroom in San Francisco, is a historic event.

June 24, 1968 Washington, D.C.

1968 “rocked the world” according to those looking back. As a student in a Master’s program, I spent most of the year on the active University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. I marched in Washington, D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, traveling with a group studying non-violent action. In August I took a job in Chicago just as the Democratic convention was getting underway. The urgency behind me was more directed toward earning a living than working toward social justice, but I did what I could. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, having moved far from my origins, I was too sick to work and landed back in the bosom of my family. I was grateful they took me in and took care of me until my next foray into the great world.

The world is very large. In 1968 it was knit together by television, which provided nightly news almost raw, lifting events into a visibility upon which people could place their own value. At the time we did not know that the tide was turning, that there would never be another 1968. It was just what was happening. A question which we began to ask each other frequently! “What’s happening, man?” Because something surely was.