In May of 1972 I was 11 years old. I was a fairly poor kid, living with my 2 siblings in a doublewide trailer house and we were tortured by two of the least adult people to have children that I know of. I’m sure there are folks who were worse, but they left dead bodies behind. Our parents seemed content with trying to murder our souls.
Richard Nixon was the president in 1972. The Vietnam war was raging along with protests, police with fire hoses, the national guard, and everything all at once that you could shake a stick at. The Kent State massacre was only about 2 years old. My big brother, at 13 was starting to think about being drafted. And all was underwritten by protest music that was the backdrop of our lives. We had already lived through the racist murders of Dr. Martin Luther King and my personal hero Malcolm X. Almost a decade out from the assassination of president John F. Kennedy and his little brother Robert there was plenty of unrest to deal with.
And there were our parents.
I was the rebellious child. Try that in a house where they hit you with 2X4’s. Strong or stupid, take your pick. I had a brother and sister and myself to stand up for. The rage that lived in me from every single thing in my life lead to the reply I gave for decades to the question, “how are you doin?” I’d quietly say, “Stick of dynamite lookin for a fuse.”
The soundtrack of my life was the protest songs. I loved many of them. From Bob Marley with Get Up Stand Up and Redemption Song, and James Brown with Say It Loud, to Sam Cooke with A Change is Gonna Come they helped me stay alive. Probably the most unlikely for a red neck trailer trash white boy from the Eastern Shore of Maryland was Helen Reddy with I Am Woman. That song was my introduction to the feelings of a group of people I hadn’t learned about yet. Women. This was eye opening, and I adapted the feelings to my own life, standing and roaring my own truth in a house no child should have been raised in.
That song has been a constant in the back of my head as I lived my way through the decades. I worked as a power lineman for around 42 years, through the U.S. Air Force, a contractor in Colorado and then 37 years with a utility. I got to help train some of the first women to do the job I did and it galled me to see the way they were treated. Luckily I was a union steward and got a chance to do what standing up I could for my sisters. I wasn’t always successful, I still have my regrets about that. The whole time, I kept hearing Helen Reddy in the back of my head.
I think the politics in our country, the U.S. of A. are a fertile ground for a resurgence of that theme song of my life and many others. I am not a woman, yet it is pretty easy to feel the oppression coming from on high. I am quite sure, as I watch republicans and their chosen judges rip the choice from women’s bodies and souls, that it’s time to bring back that revolutionary spirit of my youth. It has taken decades of slowly tearing down the underpinnings of a free society in order to move the money to the top, and remove hard fought victories from the bloody fingernails of my sisters.
There’s an election coming.
I’ll be there with my lone vote, and I’m hoping an army of my sisters are there as well. And Helen Reddy will still be playing in my head.