On Saturday, there was a massive rally in Florida protesting the shooting of Trayvon Martin. This follows several demonstrations that recently took place in cities around the country. Is it about race? Gun Control? A broken legal system?
Last autumn, Occupy Wall Street spread from the streets of lower Manhattan to hundreds of small towns and big cities alike throughout the United States. Was it about poverty? Political corruption? The soul of America?
Just over a year ago, protestors took to the streets of Madison, Wisconsin after the state legislature and Governor Scott Walker passed union-busting measures targeting teachers and other civil servants. Was it about organized labor? Civil Service? Education?
Whatever it has all been about, it has been happening.
I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan from 1985-92. During those years, the once infamous college town was running on the fumes of its radical past. Ann Arbor of the late 1960s and early 1970s had been a hotspot of left-leaning radicalism. End the war in Vietnam! Support civil rights! Legalize marijuana! Question authority! These had once all been popular rallying cries in the fabled college town. However, the go-go `80s weren’t the rebellious `60s.
Ann Arbor, Michigan in the late 1980s wasn’t actually all that radical. The shanty town set up to protest apartheid in South Africa was derided by many students and ignored by most. Various protests, whether against local university administrators or Ronald Reagan’s foreign policies, were usually anemic gatherings, a smattering of earnest but ineffective protestors dutifully holding signs and reciting tired, old chants like “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, someone or another has got to go.” Even the Hash Bash held every April 1st to promote the 
legalization of marijuana usually amounted to little more than several stoners lighting up on the quad, with many longtime locals unaware the event still existed.
In 1991, Ann Arbor mustered more sizable demonstrations against the first Gulf War. But even then, the town was riding the nation’s coattails; No blood for oil! was a rallying cry shouted just as loudly by a vocal minority in cities across America. Heck, by 1998 the hollow shell of Ann Arbor’s legendary political radicalism was even a punch line in The Onion.
Why did Ann Arbor change during the 1980s? Because America changed. Ronald Reagan’s America was a far more conservative place than Lyndon Johnson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Ann Arbor’s a college town, home to an elite, public university. You can expect it to be a bit left of mainstream. But not that much. So when America was violently wrenched by the stresses and turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, Ann Arbor was very radical. But as the nation reveled in a hopped up economy and periodically belligerent foreign policy during the last three decades, Ann Arbor for the most part was just another town.
I haven’t lived in Ann Arbor in twenty years. While I’ve still got a few old friends, the truth is, I don’t really know what’s going on there anymore. But I can guess. Dollars to doughnuts they have a strong Occupy movement. The town probably largely sympathized with their neighbors protesting in Wisconsin. And no doubt there is widespread umbrage over the Trayvon Martin shooting.
I don’t have to live in Ann Arbor to know this. It’s a given. Because if Ann Arbor harbored the fading remnants radicalism during the most conformist of times, it’s also bound to be one of the first places to rise up when it all comes back around. It’s a bit of a joke when you still get a whiff of radicalism in Ann Arbor while nothing’s going on elsewhere, but it’s time to sit up and take note when a place like A-squared hits its groove but doesn’t look much different from the rest of the country.
It’s not quite the 1960s yet. Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t Vietnam in terms of casualties or the impact of the draft. And there hasn’t been a social movement recently on the scale of or as important as civil rights. But the economy sucks, the society is fiercely divided, the political system is damn near broken, and millions of people on both the right and left are fed up or close to it.
Folks are marching in the streets again. There’s no one big issue, like Vietnam, gathering people by the hundreds of thousands in a single location. But at the same time, there seems to be no shortage of matches to light the spark. People are angry, one issue after another is setting them off, and protests are taking place all over the country.
Are the Trayvon Martin rallies about race? Gun control? The legal system? Of course they’re about all those things and more. But along with Wisconsin, Occupy, and even the Tea Party, they’re also about the state of the United States.
Things are fucked up and people are pissed.
Hey Hey. Ho Ho.