The recent loss of Richard Pryor and Sen. Eugene McCarthy, two men who helped fashion my early political philosophy, reminded me how lessons not learned are doomed to be repeated.
The carefree days of my childhood were coming to a close as more and more of my buddies were leaving for Vietnam. My best childhood buddy, Tommy, and I were not making make-believe bombs anymore; he headed to the war, and I was off to college.
Pryor and McCarthy came along at a time when America was torn between "guns and butter," a dilemma that sounds strikingly familiar in today's reality, as we struggle with the same issues all over again, with the revelation that deep poverty still exists -- especially among African-Americans, as Hurricane Katrina demonstrated.
Back then, the question was whether we could afford the staggering costs of a war in Vietnam and, at the same time, pay for President Johnson's War on Poverty, the centerpiece of his Great Society theme.
The Office of Economic Opportunity, an agency that was created specifically for the anti-poverty initiative and that reported directly to the president, was responsible for nearly all the War on Poverty's best-known and most controversial programs: Head Start, Job Corps, Legal Services and the Community Action Program.
But the cost of waging a war thousands of miles away was staggering in terms of dollars and lives lost. The Vietnam War cost the United States 58,000 lives and 350,000 casualties. It also resulted in 1 million to 2 million Vietnamese deaths. It was the longest war in our history and the most unpopular American war of the 20th century.
I remember the bitter disputes that erupted across the country. Many of my Bishop Duffy classmates went off to war. Some never came back. Some came back changed forever, victims of the horrors of war. By the late '60s, the lines had been drawn. You were either a Dove or a Hawk. The country was locked in an ideological conflict that peaked at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago with the whole world watching as Mayor Daley's police rioted, beating the hell out of anti-war protesters as well as convention delegates.
Like hundreds of thousands, I was developing my political voice, and McCarthy and Pryor were saying exactly what I was feeling.
McCarthy said it all when he quipped, "There comes a time when an honorable man simply has to raise the flag." Pryor, with his in-your-face political satire, confronted police brutality, poverty, drugs and prostitution, as well his own personal demons, on stage. He greased the skids for a whole new line of black stand-up comedians like Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence and Chris Rock. Inspired by Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory, he pushed the door wide open.
In spite of efforts by some comedy club owners and television networks to censor him, Pryor sold more than 500,000 copies of his 1974 record, "That Nigger's Crazy," winning the Grammy Award for best comedy album. After a trip to Africa in 1979, he told audiences he would never use the N-word again as a performer. In 1975, he won another Grammy with "Is It Something I Said?"
Pryor made it OK to discuss otherwise sensitive subjects in public.
Today, the question is whether we can afford the staggering costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan and, at the same time, pay for President Bush's faith-based initiatives and his deep cuts in the traditional anti-poverty programs. Pryor and McCarthy were liberators, both of them. They made it possible for the rest of us to speak up, to be heard and to be counted.
As we face the new dilemma, who will take their places?
I miss them already.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 20 2005 |