“To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go,
To right the unrightable wrong,
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star…”
These are the opening verses of the song “The Impossible Dream,” from the 1965 Broadway musical and 1972 movie “Man of LaMancha.” It’s a song that has been since then used at high school commencements, too many to count, to inspire young graduates going out into the world to make their marks. It was even the inspiration for the American League champion Boston Red Sox in 1967.
The musical was written about a fictional character named Don Quixote, a somewhat “touched,” old, Spanish gentleman known to tilt at windmills in his quest to vanquish imagined foes. One of the lessons to be gleaned from the play is that every man or woman worth his or her humanity must continually fight against seemingly impossible odds to attain that which is right and true and good in the world. Many from my generation know this song well, and it rarely fails to stir deep emotions, at least in me.
I mention this song and this play because surviving students of the Parkland, Fla., massacre have risen up, Quixote-like, with one voice to take on Washington and the NRA so that future, similar carnage will not occur in other American high schools. They have risen quickly against what some would say are ridiculous odds to take on some of the most powerful political forces in our nation. How “touched” would they have to be to attempt that?
I remember, all too well, when I was young, just a tad older than these students, that I was part of an uprising of voices against the Vietnam War. We were slower to mobilize, and were all over the board as to our modes of protest. (It ran the gamut from the Weather Underground to the SDS to just plain students striking on campuses in response to the Kent State killings.)
But we were not unlike Don Quixote, out tilting at an enemy we weren’t exactly clear about. We were wild-eyed and unsophisticated, cock-sure of our right-ness, and self-righteous as hell. We were so smart that we chanted “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!”
And when “Man of LaMancha” came on the scene, we saw ourselves as alienated idealists out to save the world. We were trying “to reach the unreachable star” and end an unjust war.
Similar tilting at windmills was being done by countless others involved in the Civil Rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s under the leadership of the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and his faithful. Their struggle was no less formidable, and against, perhaps, even more daunting odds.
Part of me is hesitant to put too much credence in the ability of these students to end school shootings. They are “just kids.” They are going up against huge money, and huge greed, and huge corruption. They are tilting against a status quo built on decades of lies, threats and fears foist upon the American public by charlatans and grifters.
What chance do they have? What life experience or formal education to draw upon? What “street smarts” to bring to the table of corrupt white men?
Then I look back on my generation. We were just kids, too. We were going up against a government hell bent on the preservation of the military/industrial complex of BF Goodrich, US Steel and big oil. A government so confused about what it wanted to preserve and prop up in other world regimes that it didn’t know its ass from its elbow. And, to protect the interests of corrupt white men, they were sending thousands and thousands of our young men and women to die in the jungles of southeast Asia. What chance did we have against the likes of that?
We know how that ended. The uprising of American youth contributed a great deal to the outrage against the Vietnam War, and it was brought to a terrible, embarrassing end. A “peace with honor” under Richard Nixon. But an end, finally, it was.
Today, students, not much younger than my generation was, are standing up and shouting “no more” to a war that rages, this time, within our country. A war on ourselves by ourselves in the name of big money, huge greed and huge corruption. A war argued for with lies, threats and fears foist upon the American public by charlatans and grifters.
These young people do, however, have better preparation for this battle than my generation. They have a louder free press with far more outlets (fighting a battle all its own), and communication better and faster than what we had at our fingertips. They are not constrained by “Leave It to Beaver” traditional mores of post-WWII America. They can stand on the shoulders of other groups dedicated to justice and civil rights who came before them. And they can piggy-back on #MeToo and #TimesUp, when having a social conscience is again becoming fashionable.
I have finally come out of my funk from the Parkland shootings. My anger is still raw, as it should be. But the sense of futility has morphed into a hope I haven’t known since the early ’70s, when I worked tirelessly for George McGovern (but Nixon won anyway, and Nixon’s own tragic flaws brought him down).
I am energized by these kids, marching on their state capitol, protesting in front of the White House and planning massive school walkouts. They are not the generation of self-absorbed, Tide-pod-eating, worthless egotists some would have us believe. They are our hopes. They are our dreams. They are especially the hopes and dreams of the parents who are burying their dead children this week.
It’s not going to be an easy battle for them. The giant they fight is big and terrible and has no conscience. The giant has way more money than they have with which to wage the war. But I believe they will emerge victorious, with a little help from us old-timers.
“And the world will be better for this,
That one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove, with his last ounce of courage,
To reach the unreachable star.”
“To Dream The Impossible Dream,” — music by Mitch Leigh, words by Joe Darion.