University of Arizona - Desert Yearbook (Tucson, AZ)

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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

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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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in earnest; others only wanted to do hip things. The oakies shrank in horror at the strange goings-on. In Arkansas a wo- man observed that, judging from the people she saw on television, you couldn ' t tell the boys from the girls any more. There was something shameful about long hair on men, she thought, something effeminate. Above her tele- vision hung a painting of Christ with gentle eyes.f lowing shoul- der-length hair and a soft beard. With the flower-children came Free Love, the New Sex- uality. It was something Ar- kansas women read about in Reader ' s Digest and Ladies Home Journal and discussed in hushed tones over the coffee- table. Are the young people turning into animals? they asked. Preserve the Miss Amer- ica image, the Ail-American Football Player, long live the Arkansas Razorbacks, clean- cut young spirits, and praise be to God that our young peo- ple aren ' t like those wild young people you read about in the magazines and see in the movies. All morality is gone! A middle aged Tucson lady, beautiful in spirit, confided to me when I first came to Tucson that she thinks the morality of today is the same as it was when she was a girl, but today ' s youth is more open, less a- shamed than past generations. So, where did the openness begin? With Elvis Presley ' s gyrations, viewed with such shock by the staid public? With Ian Fleming ' s flaunted spy novels and the ensuing movies, one of which showed a gilded naked girl? Was it there all the time, waiting for the innovation of The Pill to re- move fear and give it libera- tion? Meditation, introspection, drugs. Drugs have infiltrated to every part of the culture now; even in Arkansas a drug culture is evolving. When my great Aunt Mildew heard about drugs; she told my mother to be sure to warn me of the evils of pot. Could the preoccupa- tion with hallucinogens be partly due to the growing in- fluence of Eastern religions which stress mental concen- tration? Everyone wants to get into the liberation scene; Women ' s Lib is the biggest movement of all. Liberate women from job discrimination, from bras, from subservience to man. They gave Rudi Gernreich credit for giving the topless bathing suit to womankind, which did not become a smash hit, but started the movement growing. Man is driving harder than ever to make himself immor- tal. It ' s like alchemy, an eter- nal fascination, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Heart transplants, kidney transplants who knows, maybe brain transplants will be next. Sci- entists search for a way to be- gin life in a test tube. Writer Ray Bradbury says that the age of space exploration is the final immortality of man, be- cause the human race will be able to spread to other planets,