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Editorial

Editorial image
Parent Issue
Month
January
Year
1990
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

I am a baby boomer. For most of my life I have known the comforts of the middle class of a very wealthy country. I have known new houses in shiny new suburbs, new schools built just for me, new cars, new shopping mails, new highways and new lifestyles.

Yet not everything has gotten better. My first memory of tension greater than what the average family generates is from the Cuban missile crisis in 1961. I was 5 years old and my dad was in the National Guard. His job was to guard an underground missile silo in Romulus. I remember walking down the street of our new suburb and looking for war planes in the sky.

I was in the second grade when President Kennedy was assassinated. I remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, civil defense drills, and the civil rights movement My childhood. My adolescence.

There are a lot of people out there like me. We have a shared experience. We have seen the effects of racism, poverty and violence over and over. We have watched with horror as our childhood experience with terror and injustice becomes our adult experience, as Central America (for example) turns into another Southeast Asia. We have also lived with the idea (wrongly) that as apowerful country we are entitled to whatever we wish at whatever cost. Money or blood is no object. (Usually it is our money and someone else's blood.)

George Bernard Shaw said that humans learn from history that humans never learn from history. To my fellow boomers I ask: How well is the "liberation" of Panama playing with you?

In a world made one by television, pundit Daniel Schorr says, we must compare this U.S. version of liberation with the thrilling scenarios broadcast daily from Eastern Europe. "Why is President Endara of Panama not out there on the balcony receiving the delirious cheers of the crowd like Vaclav Havel in Prague? Why are some Panamanians looting instead of marching down Balboa Avenue with banners hailing democracy like the Bulgarians in Sofia?"

The answer is obvious, but not to everyone. Ignorance is at the root of irresponsibility. In 1903 the U.S. wanted a canal built though the Central American isthmus in what was then Colombia. Colombia refused so the U .S . "created" an "independent" Panama and built the canal. If you don't know this or the fact that the U.S. has invaded and occupied Panama numerous times since then, you probably can't answer Schorr's question.

Us boomers marched in the '60s by the tens of thousands against going to war. Will we be silent as our children are sent to war in the '90s? What will our children's first memories of the greater-world-out-there be?

Maybe in 1999, inspiring scenes of liberation can come from our part of the world. Imagine the joy in the streets of Panama if the Canal truly becomes theirs by treaty as it is supposed to. Imagine the celebrations if the U.S. tears down the"Berlin Walls" we have built around Cuba and Nicaragua. Imagine the dancing in the streets of El Salvador and Guatemala if all the U.S. money and troops supporting the hated governments of Central and South America ' pear. Imagine the U.S. giving up power instead of consolidating it by force. Imagine U.S. troops withdrawing instead of invading. Imagine.

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