The 04.04. dream 44 years ago

I remember the date well. A couple of Pinoy salts stationed at the nearby NAS north of Dallas, Texas came by the university dorm at Hillcrest on Highland Park with a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch whiskey. I had bumped into them a week before at the upscale Northwest Highway shopping mall. Extending the customary invitation to stop by when they were near the campus, the guys took me up on my offer and came bearing gifts from their PX. It was not yet the weekend but I had to play host to the new kabayan who obviously were lonely in their new posting.

The bottle emptied fast and being the prudent one, and also working on the night shift at the university motel, I was not as sauced up as the other two, so I volunteered to drive them back to their base before it got dark. A big mistake, doubled when I turned over the steering wheel to one of the guys in the outskirt of town after he insisted that he could handle the drive.

No more than 10 minutes later, sitting at the edge of the back seat while the driver endlessly and carelessly gabbed, we got to the top of the hill and he took his eyes off the road long enough to miss a red light while we were heading downhill. “What a way to go,” stoically came out of my mouth.

When I came to, the smell of gasoline and blaring fire truck sirens got my adrenaline going and I crawled out of the back seat, walked to a public phone, and asked my roommate to come and pick me up. He did.

By the time we got back to the campus, I was stiff and immobile so we went directly to the infirmary where it was determined that I was in shock and needed to be checked in case some bones were broken.

I woke up to the care of a rotund jovial nurse who came in to turn on the late night news. She had venom on her lips. “They finally got the nigger!” she exclaimed as the broadcast reported the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a minute after 6pm in Memphis, Tennessee, just about the time I hit coma.

The John Birch Society Headquarters was a block away, and Dallas was not known to be gentle with its African-American population, more so if they were identified as red commies like MLK. Five years earlier, one of Dallas’ white boys fatally put a bullet on JFK’s brain. So I was not surprised by the toxic comment. Still her utterance stung my tender sensibilities but also left an indelible mark on my rebellious soul.

I spent my university first semester protesting a Laundromat that displayed a bold sign: “For Whites Only” near the Hilton by Central Express Way. A school professor and a number of students held a noon vigil at the school flagpole to protest the Vietnam War. We were a minority and I was a foreign student who was cautioned from participating in domestic politics so I joined the university paper and attended gatherings as a student reporter.

It was in that capacity that I joined an all-day drive to Washington, D.C. mid-February ‘68 to cover a march to the Arlington cemetery that united anti-war forces and civil rights activists in assailing the waste of lives and money on a senseless racist war in Asia against Vietnamese “gooks”; the budget for the War on Poverty suffered. MLK, just 39, along with an inter-faith group of leaders, led the march. His contextual speech at the New York Ave. Presbyterian Church on 13th St. three blocks from the White House, the Lincolns’ Sunday hangout a century before, would prove to be a decisive turning point in my vocation and career.

Impressed by the Atlanta preacher, and committed to a cause I was forbidden to join, I nevertheless returned to my Ivy League institution in the nation’s Southwest a determined warrior in the army of human justice and ethical sanity.

After the newscast, my girlfriend who would later mother two of my daughters called shortly before midnight from Greensboro, North Carolina, where she was attending college. A Welsh-Scot-German lass from Glen Ellyn outside of Chicago, she was at a church-related institution in the Piedmont where civil rights sit-ins got its start. She was in tears as she described the flames consuming parts of the city, my aching body barely able to stay on the phone, but my soul was seared that day, triggered by the callous remark of one of our university’s healing practitioners.

The material I pass out to my students in Oral English here in China has six speeches including Abe’s Gettysburg, JFK’s Ask Not and MLK Jr.’s I Have a Dream. The central image for the whole document of songs, speeches, and a couple of narratives is that of the “butterfly,” the mythological animal for dreaming—both practical and imaginal. The short bio-line of the authors states that all died from assassination, adding that “dreaming is a dangerous business.”

Skepticism, cynicism, and despair flavors our time. Indeed, the human mind seem inclined to indulge in illusory “what is not” and decry “what is.” Online news outlets are tabloids magnified. Cartoons and the comic page, even in the China daily, carries popular but mean-spirited humor.

I have not stopped dreaming since that fateful 4th day of the 4th month 44 years ago. We survived a couple of live bullets along the way, and our name is not on the endangered species’ list. We’ll keep on dreaming, nonetheless.