Author: knovak2

I believe this course has helped me alter my perspective or at least has made it possible for me to see things from another person’s perspective. One example would be the Black Panthers. I had never been taught much about them previously, but I know that I had learned that Malcolm X had a more violent plan for gaining civil rights than Dr.King, so I think this caused me and many others to just assume that the Black Panthers were bad and violent, evil even. It seemed to me that they were trying to undermine Dr.King’s idea of non-violent protest by being violent, and that was not good, so I associated with violence. One of the biggest reasons it seemed they were seen as violent were their guns they carried around. Seeing them walking around with big guns in their hands could understandably cause misconceptions about them and their ideals, but the issue is that no one thought to ask them why they were doing it. As we learned from Huey Newton’s memoir, the guns were basically just for show. They were trying to prove a point, and trying to protect themselves at the same time if a situation occurred and it got really bad, which they had plenty of reasons to believe was possible. It’s interesting to think how the Panthers would have gone down in history, or are really still going down in history as, because people focus on how they look, rather than what they’re saying.

This idea of how people look has been an issue since the very beginning of America, and that is a big problem that we still face today. I will say it myself, and I hope many in America today can make this claim as well, and it’s this- I don’t care what the color of your skin is, I don’t care if you look different from me or even think different from me. If you respect me and my ideas, I’ll respect you and your ideas. We should be able to disagree on issues here in this country without it turning into a screaming match or riots, but that is our rights as Americans to do that as well. We have been given the freedom of speech, and many of us need to speak up and use it otherwise it is going to be taken from us and it will be too late for us to do anything about it.

I have confidence in this country. I took another English course this semester that covered the years from when America was first founded to the Civil War, and there were numerous problems at the beginning of this country, but we survived. We can see from this course that there were many problems from 1968 that are eerily similar to the problems we are facing today, but, again, we survived 1968 and we will survive this year. America and Americans have a resilience that is nothing short of admirable. One of our biggest problems we are facing today is this idea of misconceptions and differing view points, and the problem is not that they are present, but rather that we refuse to acknowledge them. We like to pretend things are alright and cannot bother us if we just ignore them. We can’t ignore the problems in this country because they won’t just go away. They need to be acknowledged and fixed. If we were all just to listen a bit more to each other, these problems could be addressed and fixed, not without a lot of hard work. If we put the work in, this country can be as great as we all know it can be.

The experiences we have in our lives make us who we are. We saw with Father Berrigan that his early experiences, how he was raised and taught to believe as a child, greatly affected who he became as an adult and he believed and stood for later on. How would things have been different had some factors in his life been changed? If his mother was not been an immigrant, had he had 6 sisters instead of brothers, had his family not been poor, but middle-class or wealthy, would he have changed? I think the obvious answer is yes, but how drastically would it have changed him? When do we stop thinking as children and following our parents every belief, and begin thinking for ourselves? Do we ever really lose all of our beginning beliefs? Should we want those beliefs to change? How we are raised and what we go through in our early lives will shape how we grow and learn and interact with others when we are older. Isolated experiences as well can change our whole being in the blink of an eye. We saw with Stewart Parker that what he experienced here in America is what based the character of Peter in “Pentecost”. How would the play have changed had Parker not gone through what he did in America? He seemed to draw connections between the struggles in America and Ireland at the time, so it is evident that his experiences in America were important to his writing. The experiences one has can also veer them off onto a completely different path with no warning. Maybe a college student studying business gets into or witnesses a terrible car crash. Suddenly, they realize they don’t want to study business anymore, but instead want to be involved in the medical field. Experiences can change us that quickly, and this changes our whole lives in the process.

The idea of being directly connected to something can also affect how experiences change us as people. We can be part of a group, organization, job, whatever it is, and not be directly connected if we don’t get involved. Once we become involved though, and go through the experiences that these groups are going through, our minds, values, beliefs may change. When we see things happening in first-person, right in front of us, our perspective changes and we are seeing the issues from a different angle. It is more personal to us because we are right there. Take the college student from before. Instead of being there when the crash occurred, if they had instead read about it or seen it on the news, would it have affected them so strongly that they decided to change their major? The answer is probably not, but potentially. Everybody experiences things differently and are affected differently, so we can never know how someone will react or change when they experience something. They may even experience the same things as us, and have completely different reactions and thoughts about what happened. We need to remember this when having discussions and debates with people who have different beliefs than us. They may have had completely opposite experiences from our own, which made them who they are, and we need to respect that. Our experiences make us who are, and can change who we become. The question we must ask ourselves is how are these experiences going to change us? For better, or for worse?

One question that got me thinking in class today was whether there was anyone to blame for the violence that occurred in Derry, and what role did the different groups involved in it play? I think the conclusion was that no one definite could really be blamed because there were smaller events leading up to the big displays of violence, and all of the groups were involved in that so we couldn’t necessarily point the finger at one particular group. I found it interesting that Eamonn McCann, though, quite blatantly seemed to blame those who were in higher positions for the massacre of Bloody Sunday. The soldiers who got blamed and did the time for it claimed that they were just following orders that were given to them by people who were higher up, but I wonder how far these orders can be traced back? Will they be able to find who, in the end, was the one sole person to give the direct order? Was there one sole person, or was it a group decision? I find that it is growing more and more difficult to find exact people to blame in today’s movements and displays of violence, because no one is in charge. This can also go back to our talk about movements having a central leader, and whether that is important or not when making a movement. I myself am not entirely sure of a leader’s importance in a movement, but a leader is very important for the opposing side, mainly because then there is someone to blame, whether it is right or wrong to blame them.

How are we supposed to assign blame to anybody in movements today or back in the movements, protests, revolutions of 1968 and beyond? I don’t think it is entirely possible in either case. If the Civil Rights movement under Dr. King had become incredibly violent against his wishes and many people had been hurt or killed, would he still have been to blame? He was the leader, so it seems that that is the obvious answer, but we all know it is not. The people who did the violent acts should have been blamed and punished, but is it the same for the Black Panthers, whose leader preached violence? Because they were violent in the name of Malcolm X, should he have been blamed and punished for every crime committed? How about the soldiers in Derry who were just following orders? Should the people they say ordered them to do it be blamed and punished? I think the idea of blame in this context can get a bit blurry. Should it still be that the people who committed the violent acts are the ones that get punished? Is there a sort of primary and secondary blame that should be observed? The soldiers were just doing what they were told, but could they have chosen not to pull the triggers, not to further the violence? It seems to me that the primary blame should be placed on those that give the orders for violence, but a secondary blame should still be placed on those that committed the acts, because we all have the free will to choose not to do something we know isn’t right, so there is still a conscious choice on our part to commit the violent act. Blame is a tricky thing to assign to people, but people always want to do it.

One thing that really struck me from class was this statement that was raised about George Wallace, and how he was a born-again Christian and basically flipped his whole belief system and believed that the Civil Rights movement was right. I think I remembered vaguely hearing about George Wallace in middle or high school, and I didn’t know that much about him, but the picture of him standing in the doorway of the school was something I remember seeing. It seems to be that that is how he will be remembered for all of history, right? As this jerk who went against the Civil Rights movement and didn’t want schools to be desegregated and, based off that information, hated blacks? I looked him up to see what would come up under images, and one of the first pictures that came up was the picture of him standing in the doorway, but in the next row down, we see a picture of Wallace, obviously an aged man, sitting next to a smiling African American man. When I clicked on that picture, I found out that that man was Rev. Jesse Jackson who was a “presidential hopeful”. The caption also stated that Wallace had “In the 1980’s renounced his segregationist views, and he won his last term as governor (1983-87) with support from black voters.” (CBS News). Obviously this is important information that those who do not know much about Wallace more than likely are unaware of, but it raises this question of how are we remembered?

Is it more easy to remember people who are on the wrong side of history, and is that the way you will always be remembered, even if your views change? What can be considered the “wrong” side of history? I found the answer to this first question to probably be an easy yes given Wallace’s story, but the second question makes both questions quite difficult to answer. For those who today still believe that blacks and whites should be segregated and the Civil Rights movement was bad for America (I fear there are more people out there who think like this than I would like to know), the Civil Rights movement must have been an awful thing for them, and the leaders like Dr.King and Malcolm X must be seen as horrible and bad people to them. So I wonder for people like this, how do they remember George Wallace? Do they see him as a hero as those who fought for the Civil Rights movement see Dr.King, or are they embarrassed by him because he was on the “right” side of history, but flipped to advocate for the “wrong” side of history? This was another idea that I had about people being considered “sell-outs”, and this word for me has always meant people who are cowardly and sell-out their own beliefs for something they think would be better for them and ultimately make them look better.

I believe the stronger someone’s beliefs are in something and the harder they advocate for those beliefs, the worse they are going to look if they betray those beliefs for the other side, and the more of a “sell-out” they are going to look like. In the book “1968”, I wonder if the people who protested and were strong advocates of the revolution who then went on to become involved in politics maybe even for the opposing side are ever called sell-outs. This idea also made me wonder what would have happened if Dr.King had suddenly flipped his views on the movement? Obviously this seems like an almost impossible thing for him to do, but I’m also sure many believed that of George Wallace, and he did it. Had Dr.King said that yes blacks and whites should be segregated and separate was equal, etc. how would people have reacted and viewed him? I think they would view him as a sell-out to his beliefs because of how hard he advocated for the movement, and this brings us back to the question of the “right” and “wrong” side of history. Are fewer people going to be sell-outs when they are on the “right” side, especially when they know they are going to win? The issue with this is that the people advocating for the “wrong” side will still believe they are on the “right” side at the time, but they may look back later on and realize they were wrong. So, objectively there must be a “right” side, but “right” and “wrong” may get mixed when one looks at history subjectively.

So far in the course it seems that there are many similarities with our situation in the world and America currently and with the long ’68. I am interested in viewing these similarities in closer detail and really seeing the parallels that can be drawn between these two eras in time. I am also curious to see if we can use the long ’68 to predict what may possibly happen in 2020 and beyond. It seems to have been noticed already that history does repeat itself, so how come we were unable to stop this long ’68 from occurring again? Were there indicators that told us this is where we were headed? Would we have been able to stop this from happening again? Obviously Coronavirus came seemingly out of nowhere for many of us, but would we maybe have been able to handle it differently and perhaps better had we changed history earlier on? Throughout the course of this class I really would like to see these parallels in closer detail, and maybe make it so when this inevitably happens again, we can be ready and possibly have the power to prevent it.