Charlie Pierce reflects on the Civil Rights Movement, whose most famous proponent’s day we celebrate on Monday. He begins:

I am a child of the civil-rights movement. I did not know I was one for a very long time, and I am not yet matured into a full adult of the civil-rights movement. Along with the Vietnam War, its dark and horrible doppelganger on the televisions of my youth, it was the central event of my life. But the country I grew up in, and the country I still love despite the horror and waste and ignorance of which it is capable, is a country transformed by the civil-rights movement. It is our common property as Americans of a certain age the way the Civil War belonged even to those who were too young to fight in it, because they were the ones who had to grow up and own the change wrought by that other national trauma, the one that was tightly connected to the civil-rights movement by what Lincoln called the “mystic chords of memory.”

and concludes:

We are all children of the civil-rights movement, whether we want to be or not, whether we are its direct descendants or whether we were adopted into it through the profound changes that movement wrought in the definition of what an American is. We are all children of the civil-rights movement, and this weekend is our national holiday. There is nothing mysterious about that. We make ourselves mysteries to each other because the cost of knowing our solution may be too ugly to bear.

Pierce is three years younger than I, so my memories of the tumultuous events of the movement in the 1960s may be a little brighter, not that it matters. In 1963 my parents participated in the March on Washington. I saw Bull Connor and his cops using fire hoses on demonstrators on television the day it happened in 1963. I watched network news the day in 1962 that James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi and saw white students riot because of it.

While I never thought this country would immediately turn over a new leaf once the Voting Rights Act had been passed and the concept of equal rights for every citizen had been enshrined in law, I certainly didn’t think that 40 years later one political party would still be using the language (albeit coded) of racism, and using it successfully. It’s damned discouraging.