45 years ago
Aug. 21, 2009 by hweidner
This week of August 22, I arrived in South Carolina to be an Oratorian seminarian. The year was 1964. In my experience that year was in between the Hungarian revolution in 1956…the first international event that I followed, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Berlin Wall crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, the JFK assassination, the killings of civil rights workers in the South, and Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech. 1964 was quickly followed by more crises after the assassination of Martin Luther King, riots, the death of Karl Barth and the death of Thomas Merton, the moon landing, Woodstock (honest, folks, it was just meant to be a party NOT a fashion statement so I am shocked, shocked to find the Woodstock look stuck), and my discoveries of John Updike (read while working in Dole pineapple cannery), Flannery O’Connor, Teilhard de Chardin (the Divine Milieu saved my sanity in the seminary), and D.H. Lawrence’s short stories. It was a time of boot camp as the seminary was in those days…a boot camp that lasted years and years, lots of silence, manual labor, incredible large academic burdens, isolation from much of the society around us, and summer jobs in the Service Corps in Connecticut (working in mental hospitals), migrant labor camps in South Carolina, and Dole in Honolulu. I remember seeing troops on their way from Hawaii to Vietnam…our state was the first to send national guard units back to full service to handle the losses in the regular army. I remember our school memorial service in 1966…usually a pro forma exercise remembering alumni killed in wars…so looooong past…and then…that year there NEW names…people I knew killed in Vietnam. I cannot remember anyone, even in that conservative school, who was supportive of the war. It last almost ten years more.
So in 2009…there is nostalgia after the death of Walter Cronkite who reported on all this and stood up to authority if necessary and was a model of journalistic ethics, the young hippie couple in a quilt at Woodstock have never separated and have children 12 years older than the incoming frosh, and we have a Hawaii born president from Punahou who has his own wars to deal with. The topic in 1964 for the national forum and debate contests was on health care!!! Some things have not changed. How is that?
