1968

In the Summer of 1968 I know something happened to change me forever but I was unaware it happened or that I had changed either. I lived on until now inside that new, invisible cocoon where I was molded by loving hands to become one of these… 52 years later. While that was underway, I was aware only briefly from time to time that, “I am different somehow and I like it”.

This afternoon I looked hard into those years right up to that fateful summer. I noticed a few important happenings. In April and then June, Martin and Bobby had been assassinated. I was about to begin my third and final year of Law School. The political scene that Summer was an insane parade of wild, weird, incomprehensible freak shows. In Chicago, the Democrats led off with violent beatings and stomping and kicking and jailing of many kids my age also students who dared protest in the streets and parks. It was sickening to watch on television. People just like me being treated in such horrible ways by policemen who behave as if they hate them ferociously. That could be me. Should it have been me? The trials of those kids in Chicago who were the leaders of the protests were a complete mockery of anything resembling justice. By now, I knew it. I had learned enough to know better and had not yet stepped into a courtroom to try a case. 

And it was to be another 24 years until it was revealed to me, an honor graduate, that as early as 1830, when the nation was only about 30 itself, then President Andrew Jackson directly and without apology flaunted the United States Constitution by ordering the Trail of Tears forced march of all Indians across the Mississippi River to live on Reservations designated suitable by the white politicians in direct violation of the order of the Supreme Court which told him he could not do so legally because the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, forbids it. That is not taught in Law Schools in the United States. In my lifetime, I lived to listen to another President tell the world on television,”If the President does it, it cannot be illegal”. These guys with swollen egos never learn. In my law practice, I  saw many times the laws disregarded by courts, police, lawmakers and elected leaders. It is enough to make anybody sick. I even once wore a tiny device to record a public official tell me repeatedly, “forget the law, let them have what they want” (meaning the authorities.)

Okay, that which I turned out to be when I emerged from the cocoon?  It is a whooper swan! Have you met someone who knows who he is and is happy with it? Such a one can make peace with the world he lives in and experience that miracle while alive, regardless of what others do or do not.

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*Let me add that it was the darkness played an important role in that transformation, as important a role as the light within the cocoon. Both are with us.  Which will you feed the most? Think it over.