University of Arizona - Desert Yearbook (Tucson, AZ)

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covering Elvis Presley, a bit late in his career, when the Beatles invaded to steal the hearts of all my girlfriends. They all look alike! I pro- tested. I can ' t tell them a- part! And what outrageous haircuts they wore. Who were they, these shaggy-haired moppets with the funny ac- cents? Were they the real start of it all, the harbingers of tomorrow that has become today? The four prophets, John, Paul, George, and Ringo. If my son ever comes home looking like that... threaten- ed oakie mothers everywhere. In ninth-grade civics class we were taught about Viet Nam; I pictured it vaguely as being somewhere in Africa. Taking a test, I couldn ' t re- member whether or not Sai- gon was in China. We don ' t burn our draft cards on Main Street, sang the Oakio, and suddenly it was happening. What was a draft card anyway, and why would anybody want to burn one? The word peace filtered into everyday voca- bulary, even as people I knew were being sent away to fight for some unknown cause in an unreal country. Today three Americans were reported killed in Viet Nam, said the newscaster, and 87 North Vietnamese are believe slain. A real triumph so many of them dead! Kill the Commies! The Love Generation. But oakies don ' t burn their draft

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AN ARKANSAN VIEWS IT ALL by Sally Cory Do you have a lot of them long-haired hippies out there? Folks back home think I ' ve gone off to a strange land, filled with the evils of a new world. I was transplanted into University of Arizona life, a culture that was to me ad- vanced and liberal. I came from Arkansas; I am a hillbilly fifty years behind the world I see here. And now people are telling me that Arizona is fifty years behind the rest of Amer- ica is that good or bad? And where does that put me? A hundred years archaic? I walk around, a dazed spectator in another era, liberated from my capsule, listening to today. Where did today come from? It is the result of every genera- tion that has existed, every society that has changed the world. Did youth always want to revolutionize the culture, always end up content to be a parent with the comforting thought that the next genera- tion would be able to do what theirs had not? Merle Haggard: I ' m just an Oakie from Muskogee. . . Who is the Oakie from Muskogee? Aren ' t there oakies, too, from, Los Angeles and New York City and Miami and Washington D.C. and Tucson? Certain- ly I grew up in an oakie atmos- phere. I remember a voice from a long time ago saying, It ' s about time somebody did something about those Ken- nedys. They were taking over the country. I ' m glad he got shot. There were swirls before my eyes of the golden Kennedy era, the great daz- zling balls revolving around beautiful Jacqueline, Caroline riding her pony with her hair flying, little John-John romp- ing with the puppies, the Presi- dent rocking silently in his straight-backed wooden chair. They were just people. A shot echoed from Dallas, and oakies the world over rejoiced. Marilyn Monroe couldn ' t face any more of the oakies, and she solved the problem her own way. I was at camp that August when somebody told me, Marilyn Monroe killed herself yesterday. I didn ' t believe it. Why should she have done a thing like that? She had everything beauty, fame, money, men. A regular Richard Cory. I ' d just got around to dis-

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cards; they plunge into the worthy battle with patriotic zeal. Rioting in Little Rock. . . rioting in Watts. . .rioting in Detroit... My God, what ' s all this Civil Rights business? Oakies were appalled that the black people should show such ungratefulness. Why, they ' re petted and protected now, they said. What do they want -to live with us? And they integrated my high school and I had to sit by a black girl in chorus. I would be polite to her, I thought, but of course I wouldn ' f want to get friendly with her. Then something happened; Cindy became my buddy. We shook hands one day and her skin felt just like mine! I was prob- ably the first white girl in my town to telephone a black girl. And so I learned and grew, and perhaps Cindy grew, too. In trickles and tiny leaps, in- tegration is changing things, even in the South, even in Oakie Homeland. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and James Meredith fell with the change, and each time voices could be heard rejoicing at the slaughter. Suddenly it was not only the black people and the Viet- namese people who were threatened, but everyone. Ecology now! I travelled to California and saw beaches clogged with oil and millions of disposable drink containers, I smelled the strange air the moment I stepped off the plane. California smells dif- ferent than Arkansas, I said wonderingly, and I was told, That ' s the smog. My eyes watered and I missed seeing the star s at night. I thought of Arkansas, still relatively un- polluted, uncrowded, and heard the voices of the oakies saying comfortably, There ' s nothing to worry about. We can still breathe the clean air here. And the smog seemed to move before my eyes; I saw it travelling eastward and covering the sparkling desert and the cool mountains and the green trees and falling into the white rivers with sewage and detergent suds. I heard the voices of a million people crowded into a tiny park in the town where I grew up, children crying and being forced into the river because there was no other place for them. As the cry Ecology was born, the famous Greenwich village beatniks evolved into hippies, and the hippies into free-culture freaks , peace queers that we see today. Haight Ashbury exploded into fame. The flower children cry for love and peace and free- dom, and many young people from affluent families re- nounced the society they saw as false and tried to go back to a simpler, more honest, natural way of life. Many were