There have been a lot of celebrity deaths this year. You have not heard much from me about any of them. I will admit that I was moved when Patrick Swayze died earlier this week. I love "Dirty Dancing" a lot, and I admire him as a person, for a movie star. But I didn't blog about him or mention him in my facebook status update.
Mary Travers, on the other hand, is the first celebrity to die this year, that actually evinced a strong personal reaction from me. In this article from the NYT, I discovered that we had something in common. We both grew up listening to the music of The Weavers. The difference being that I grew up listening to her too, without realizing they were from two different generations.
I met Peter Yarrow at my first (only?) march on Washington, the point of which, if I recall correctly, was nuclear disarmament. My parents took me out of school, and we drove overnight to get there. It was rainy, rainy, rainy, and I ruined a pair of shoes. Mary was either not there, or simply didn't wander through the part of the crowd where we somehow got introduced to Peter. (I think it was Peter; might have been Paul. Did you know his first name is actually Noel?)
I got to do a presentation at school about that trip when I got back. That surprises me a little, given the conservative nature of the county, but then again, it may have been the conditions of me getting out of school. My parents could be tricky like that. (To me and the school system.)
Anyway, I just wanted to register my appreciation for the life of Mary Travers. Death is not something I tend to take with sadness. At least not the death of people I don't know personally. This experience is more like profound appreciation for her and the movement she was part of. They will be part of my heart and soul as long as I love.
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6 comments:
Skipping school to protest nukes--that's impressive liberal street cred, even if you didn't have a choice in the matter.
It was Paul, not Peter. And the march was anti-contra support, not disarmament. We were with the WFP contingent, and Paul came by out of respect for the organization.
Good to know the fact checkers are on the job!
And I certainly didn't mean to imply that I didn't want to go. My sister didn't, so clearly there was some choice involved.
For anyone not in the know, WFP stands for Witness for Peace and the Contras were the US-funded guerillas fighting the (democratically-elected) Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
I didn't know about WFP. From its website: "1984-1989: WFP activists across the country organized events to resist Reagan's war on Central America. Such activism may have averted an all-out U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, and certainly contributed greatly to the effort to cut off U.S. military aid to the Contras."
Thank you, Lucky Fresh and Anonymous, for helping avert an even greater catastrophe.
I recently read about the 1986 case Nicaragua v. United States, in which the International Court of Justice ruled against the United States and ordered it to pay reparations to Nicaragua. The U.S. government flouted the ruling by first refusing to participate in the case, and then by blocking the U.N. Security Council from enforcing the judgment.
Flax, if you are interested in this history, a good resource is a book called Resisting Reagan, by Christian Smith.
Thanks for the recommendation! I will read it. Especially with a great title like that. I'll set it out where people can see it.
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