A Fountain of Hope from 1968
You can learn a lot from a play by fifth graders.
It’s been a difficult year, 2020. Of that, there is no doubt. The challenges we are facing have reminded me of another difficult year, 1968, the year I started the fifth grade. That year, my class put on a play about equality, about celebrating our differences. The play became an all-encompassing class project, a response to the political and societal turmoil we were experiencing.
As a recent immigrant to the U.S., I had picked up enough of the language to understand the tensions in my new neighborhood, especially among the teenage motorheads who anguished about going to Vietnam while working on their communal roadster they raced down 20th Avenue, the last strip before the massive ConEd plant in Astoria.
It was a turbulent era. Watching the nightly news, the country seemed to be going up in smoke. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the fight for civil rights, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were only some of the wounds to hit the country around that time. The articles I cut out from my father’s Daily News and glued onto my notebook for my weekly current-events assignments were usually about body counts, protests, and riots.
My family was acclimating well to our new country, but there were days in our cramped apartment when I wondered why my father had brought us here, away from our beloved Abuelita and the bucolic setting of her farm where the biggest problem each evening was finding the dartboard-sized tortoise who liked to wander? The response to that concern would arrive later.
Fortunately, there was good news coming from NASA and their astronauts, and also from the track and field events at the Mexico Olympics that October — the roots of my interest in running. The USA team soared at that meet, highlighted by Dick Fosbury’s flop, Bob Beamon’s leap, Jim Hines’s sprint, and Lee Evans’s lap. The latter three broke world records, of which Beamon’s and Evans’s would stand for more than two decades. But it was the controversial Black Power salute during the national anthem by Tommie Smith and John Carlos that became the enduring image of those magical Olympics. Their protest against racial inequality, which included mounting the podium shoeless in black socks, got them banned from the Games and became a resounding statement heard around the world.
My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Baraz, opened our ears to these voices. He taught us grammar, science, and math, but he also made us more aware of the world. We began to understand the folly of the war on the other side of the globe, the ongoing struggle for civil rights and racial equality, and environmental pollution. On top of that, he still found time to connect us to the music of the time, using his guitar to enthrall us with the Beatles, Hendrix, and bubblegum music.
Mr. Baraz let us know we were going to do a class play with Miss Rich, our beloved art teacher, a play that I’m pretty sure they wrote themselves. The class would work on the acting, stage decorations, and costumes. Mr. Baraz wore glasses and a thick beard, looking more handsome than John Lennon. Miss Rich was a flower child, with psychedelic posters by Peter Max in her art room and plenty of day-glo paint for our pointillism projects after Seurat. My parents said Mr. Baraz and Miss Rich were hippies, but, really, they were just young and hip.
Time has diluted my memory of the play, but not its overall message of love, peace, and equality. The play was set in the future when Earthlings land on another planet, encountering aliens that wear identical masks and gloves. Any display of their individuality is forbidden. This practice has prevented conflict and wars, but the sameness has made their world an unhappy place. They had peace, but no love or joy.
Our space travelers — the Earthlings — are aghast at the practice. In the last act, the astronauts, using anecdotes from our world, convince the masked aliens to accept and relish their differences, explaining that what makes us unique, makes the whole better. Many of us played the masked aliens, extras standing on the stage in front of a backdrop made to look like a science-fiction rocketship on an alien planet. We had made the masks from flimsy corrugated cardboard converted into cylinders that we slid over our heads. I have a memory that they were painted yellow, but I can’t be sure. With large eye-holes and a generic mouth, the masks looked like the bullet helmets worn by the Rocket Men from the 1950s TV series. At the play’s climax, the aliens unmask, appreciating each other, which must have been especially striking given we were a diverse group, with kids from all over the world.
Our astronauts embodied values of a refined Earth. In the future, we had become enlightened, having overcome our differences to create a better society. We had become better people, advanced enough for interstellar travel, even if in real life, we hadn’t yet made it to the Moon. The promise of a just world was the implicit lesson imparted by Mr. Baraz and Miss Rich.
There are so many parallels today to those years. The Vietnam War was an ongoing never-ending crisis with an enemy few understood, remote to most Americans except for those knee-deep in the muck. The pandemic is an ongoing never-ending crisis with an enemy few understand, except it has landed heavily on our shores, forcing us indoors, with no end in sight. In the sports world, Colin Kaepernick is today’s civil rights activist, in many ways taking the baton from Tommie Smith and John Carlos. All were initially sidelined and vilified, eventually landing on the right side of history. The killing of George Floyd, although, himself, not a public figure, his public death at the hands of the police has had as heavy an impact on the world as the assassination of MLK Jr.
There wasn’t a need for my father to respond to my concerns about why we came to America, eventually, the answer became self-evident. Our family found opportunities here like nowhere else. America’s flaws, part and parcel of the messiness of a democracy as it strives toward a more perfect union and a more just society — goals not always working in tandem — continue to fester. That America is still struggling with some of the same problems from 1968 is a cause for consternation, prompting my reflection on the play from fifth grade, so wonderfully innocent but timeless in its lessons of love and peace and of equality and individuality. The success of the play, and my teachers, was that, amidst the turmoil, it created a fountain of hope that continues to flow.
For my Essays on Medium.com, see: medium.com/@matiz/essays.
