The ache for rain September 26, 1985

 


It drizzles here, something missing out of my life for a long time.

Back in LA, I used to sit on the front step of the Blackburn Hotel praying for rain that never came. LA is a desert in summer, one Dodgers baseball game rained out in 25 years.

Portland was different. It rained so much the other three seasons it took all summer to dry out, and even then, summer sometimes had squalls that dampened some days.

The last three summers here remind me of LA, hot, humid, but far from wet. Everything is dry from the ground to the flesh. In 72, when I got back from the west, it rained here three times week in spring and then again in fall, rained so much we used to sail out into the Pine Brook swamp on air freight container lids pretending to be Tom Sawyer.

Much has changed over the last decade, including the world.

1972 was a year when things came to a close. All the battles of the 1960s appeared to have been won. Those that remained like No Nukes and Women’s Rights seemed inevitable.

But looking back, I realize nothing is ever won or lost, even as neo conservatives rise to the top, Marxists conspire to take over the Democratic party and march towards their ultimate goal of a socialist state.

The world has become so fragile it threatens to break open like a cracked egg.

Even when people tell me the Sixties are dead, many of those radicals that blew up buildings such as banks and shot cops become the tenured professors in colleges where they influence future generations of radicals who will do the same when they come of age.

People claim the schools won’t forester rebellion the way they did when frightened college kids got scared, they might lose their deferments and be forced to serve in war. The opposite in true, colleges are turning into bastions of new rebellion, even when conservatives believe they rule the day.

We fluctuate. The right wing looking to find the cracks in the egg that will be the final demise of the left, while the left plants bombs in the brains of their kids, which will explode at some point in the future, doing far more damage than the Weather Underground did blowing up banks.

Politics, left and right, is like a bad horror movie, the monster on both sides finding new ways to get reborn – the socialists of the turn of the century turning into the labor movement of the 1930s, breeding red diaper babies that led to the New Left in the 1960s, and now, the seed of new perhaps more lethal rebellion is being planted for some future date when we least expect.

We in the baby boom generation holding say only as long as we survive, and I suspect, once we begin to fade from the picture, the worst of this harvest will emerge, despoiling everything, tearing down things that ought not to be, putting up things that should never exist.

The left always loses itself in its own self-righteousness, failing to see how it gets corrupted as it seeks to bring down those institutions it claims as corrupt, and so, we need a heavy spring rain to wash it all out again, need common sense people like those who finally settled into making families in the 1970s after the spoiled brats of the 1960s grew up.

I don’t like Reagan, but he is necessary to keep the other side honest, to make certain that the other side doesn’t go too far, and we do our best to disparage him, to turn him into some kind of fascist when his role in history will be to take out the trash.

We need the rain to wash out the dust the dry spells bring, to water the soil for seeds that are not designed to be corrupt in the first place.

I sit here, watching the heat waves, and ache for rain.

 

 1985 Menu


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