Time It Was

My brother Michael and I have been talking about the old days. "Old when you gain as much pleasure from memory as from prospect," an old friend once told me. (He also said, "Old is when physicians become impotent.") I am not one who subscribes to Old in religion as an unquestioned virtue, as in "Gimme That Old Time Religion." But there is something to be said about having a firm grasp on the journey. Michael and I had a seminal conversation last Sunday evening as we remembered the year 1969. The first astronauts landed on the moon in July of that year. Woodstock happened. For me, a peraonsl event involved the March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands expressed themselves against the war in Vietnam. I shudder when I think back on those days, when one generation was willing to sacrifice the manhood of another, seemingly without question. It turns out that Michael and I we had both come to that march by different routes. We did not know the other was there. We marched.

I recall the trip from Northern Lower Michigan to Washington D.C. in Joe Sobel's battered Mercedes Benz. The car was a rolling wreck. Six of us packed on its bench seats. The car had no functioning brakes. As we motored east across the mountains, I can recall being terrified for the entire trip, so terrified that my digestive tract punished me for days to come. We made it there and back, by the grace of God. But the car became a metaphor for me of that moment in our national life. The nation careened ahead with no brakes. Vietnam did, in fact had crashed our armed services. The consequences of the crash still haunt us in the vaunted "all volunteer military."

Each age follows on the foundation of another. When the Greeks translated the Jesus stories, they did so in the familiar Greek. There, the word for time is rendered by two words, chronos and kairos. Chronos attends to marking the passage of time. It is the consciousness of the clock. Listening to the Naval Observatory's exact treatment of time in seconds, minutes, hours and days is the mesmerising sound of chronos. Each tick has its own sameness, but over the short wave it had a peculiar texture. Chronos is hypnotic. When Jesus spoke about time, "the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand," the word is kairos. This is a notion that time is like a vessel, as it fills up with events. This time is shaped by events. Old men talk about kairos. And by the time you reach my age, the impact of events on character becomes ever clearer. We were of a generation on a fools errand, a careening Mercedes, condemned to great suffering among the compliant and among the resistant. Some sacrificed their lives. Others watched as our brothers fell to their deaths. I am still amazed how this shared tragedy created an enmity within a generation. How could that have happened?

1969 was the year that imprinted a generation with conflict. We continue to live the tension between mistaken official world and the truth of our own consciences. The Bush administration's fantasy government is the direct heir to the Vietnam fantasy. When I see the sign, Support our Troops, my visceral response is suspicion. "Support Our Troops lacks context. It is meant only to line up sides in a bitter conflict. Support our troops in Abu Ghraib? Of course not. Support Our Troops is but an introductory phrase. It requires completion. Support our troops, bring them home. The machinery of death rolls on the wheels of Support Our Troops. The focus never seems to wander to those who bear the weight of responsibility.

Truth is that way. It is chronos. It must be talked about and requires stories. How might we learn the empathy that can help us to understand one another? How can we look at Vietnam in wasy that reflect what actually happened to us?

We are again writing the story of a nation at war. How badly we want it to have a happy ending. Yet we pay no attention to the way we have set out to create it. The world tells us that we are again officially misguided. But we are far from any awareness of that ourselves. This is no surprise to Vietnam era folks. But it seems slow to dawn on the body politic.

The time is fulfilled. I do not regret the marches and the Days of Rage. Many will trivialize the resistance born of official treachery. They will speak of hippies and free love and Haight Ashbury. But that will miss the point. The kairos that still shapes us must be understood if we are to avert future Iraq catastrophes. When will we understand that we are together in a car with no brakes. Decades ago over 50,000 of us paid with their lives. Again, a generation is being winnowed with maiming and death. And for what? That is why it is essential that old men talk.