‘We Can Change the World: Tales From a Generation’s Quest for Peace and Justice’
‘We Can Change the World: Tales From a Generation’s Quest for Peace and Justice’
By Sasha Paulsen
NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — Not long ago, I was talking with a friend who was reflecting on the path his life had taken.
“When I arrived at Yale in 1968, we were all ready to march for changes, to save the world,” he said. “But by 1972, we were all applying to law school.”
The wistful note in his reminisces held his unasked question: “What happened?” The 1960s were a time of the collective loss of innocence for the United States, but they also inspired a generation to work for civil rights and women’s liberation, to end a war, to return to nature, to preserve our planet home.
Had they given up somewhere along the way?
No is the answer in a new book from Douglas Murray, that is not what happened for everyone. “We Can Change the World: Tales From a Generation’s Quest for Peace and Justice” is one man’s account, not just of his own journey that began in the 1950s in Napa Valley but of the astonishing and admirable people he met along the way, “everyday people,” in his words, who held fast to an idea that they could make a difference.
Murray, a former professor at Napa Valley College and now a professor emeritus of sociology at Colorado State University, recounted his childhood in “Over the Back Fence: Learning Nature in a Bygone Napa Valley,” an account of growing up in a world that, he writes, “was as good as it gets.”
In his new book Murray recalls Napa Valley as “a perfect place for a child, at least of a certain race and class, to grow to adulthood, swaddled in the reassuring security of televised cultural touchstones, like ‘Leave It to Beaver’ and Walt Disney.”
After growing up exploring the creeks and meadows in an idyllic valley, where does one go next?
“The same medium that celebrated 1950s Americana soon sowed the seeds of its demise,” Murray writes. “By the middle of the next decade, nightly images of lunch-counter sit-ins, violent mobs and snarling police dogs unleashed on peaceful demonstrators began to invade our small-town idyll.”
Assassinations and resistance to the war in Vietnam jarred a generation into “a countercultural wave that peaked in the 1967 Summer of Love,” Murray writes. “The rise of women’s liberation gave further impetus to a sense that radical, perhaps even revolutionary change, was afoot in the world.”
Murray’s own encounter with the Vietnam war got him as far as the draft bureau, where he was rejected as 4-F because of an adolescent ulcer. The first stories he tells in his new book, however, are of his childhood buddies who went to war and did not return or who did manage to come back but were changed beyond recognition by their experiences.
Murray joined the Mund Road Commune in Napa, an episode of idealism he recounts with often humorous realism. “It was an opportunity to ‘walk the talk’ of the progressive and countercultural movements. I learned as much from our mistakes as our successes. Both became part of who I am today and how I move through this ever-changing world.”
He was living at the commune when an invitation to visit Cuba jolted him out of Napa. It came from “the Brigade,” the Venceremos Brigade, which supported the Cuban revolution and organized an annual monthlong working trip to Cuba. Traveling with the group through Mexico, he embarked on “an exciting opportunity to see firsthand what most Americans had been denied access to for nearly two decades.”
By the 1970s, the Vietnam War had ended, but he writes “massive protests and opposition to the war had raised the specter of social revolution in the United States. While such a prospect soon subsided, it drew the attention of many progressive people to the potential of revolutions and liberation movements around the world as they sought to break free of an oppressive colonial history.”
Returning from Cuba, Murray embarked on a study exploring questions of social change at UC Santa Cruz, a “six-year hiatus” that was interrupted when he decided to go to Nicaragua “for a deeper dive into its nascent revolution.”
Murray’s “hemispheric sojourn” unfolds through the stories of people he met on his journeys:
A sugar planter’s daughter who married a worker-class man and lost him when he was murdered by the Contras, the anti-revolutionary forces supported by the Reagan administration; and
Ben, a young American engineer, who arrived in Nicaragua and decided he could not “just leave” but was also later ambushed and murdered by the Contras.
In a section titled, “Everyday People, Extraordinary Lives,” he continues with the story of a low-level Canadian foreign service man who sacrificed his own career to help publicize the plight of Chilean refugees from the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende. He meets, too, a Navy midshipman who became a Quaker and did his part to end the war in Vietnam. Another man talked of his experiences growing up in Greenville, Texas, which boasted a sign welcoming visitors to a town of “the whitest people,” which led to his work to end apartheid in South Africa. Some became his life-long friends, such as Terry, an academic researcher who decided to contradict the official U.S. account of the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador when 1,000 peasants, 533 under the age of 14, were killed by the military, and went onto to become an expert witness in human-rights trials.
“I called Terry as I was about to write this memoir,” Murray writes. “I asked if she was feeling discouraged … ‘We’re about the same age,’ I noted. ‘And I, for one, cannot deny I am feeling the weight of time.’”
But not entirely, it seems, for his small (160 pages) but mighty book is a powerful reminder that one person can discover unexpected reserves of courage, take part and make a difference.
“Our generation, or at least the minority of seekers who came to define it, were dreamers and experimenters,” Murray writes. “We embraced a vision that a peaceful and just world was within our reach. By living the vision, we believed we could make it a reality … The current reality is fundamentally different from what we had hoped.”
“As I write this memoir,” he concludes, “the horrors unfolding in Russia/Ukraine, in Gaza/Israel and other less well-known parts of Africa, Asia and beyond are heartbreaking reminders that until we put an end to the impunity with which perpetrators of crimes against humanity carry out their misdeeds, we will undoubtedly witness continued and even escalating human suffering. While justice appears as fleeting as it is difficult to achieve, it is hard to imagine that peace will ever come without it.”
And Murray’s book might just inspire a new generation to start dreaming impossible dreams, too.
“We Can Change the World” is published by Ideas Into Books, Westview, in Kingston Springs, Tennessee. It can be ordered from Napa Bookmine.
Sasha Paulsen is a Napa Valley-based novelist and journalist.
Great article and story for someone of my generation who is still an optimist. And one of the best peace symbol graphics I've ever seen.
Thanks for this, Sasha. I am so pleased that you are working with NVF. A great group!