The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night.
Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.”
But it didn’t seem to be settling down. People were doing the kinds of things we had fantasies of doing: taking over universities and abolishing classes; making houses out of cardboard boxes and putting them in people’s way; sticking their tongues out at policemen.
We’d cheer them on, those little people on our TV screen, who shrank as their numbers increased until they were just a mass of dots taking over universities and sticking their tiny tongues out. We thought eventually they’d get around to “liberating” us too. “Right on!” we’d yell at them.
Fantasies don’t include repercussions. We were safe in our expensive, well-appointed hospital, locked up with our rages and rebellions. Easy for us to say “Right on!” The worst we got was an afternoon in seclusion. Usually all we got was a smile, a shake of the head, a note on our charts: “Identification with protest movement.” They got cracked skulls, black eyes, kicks to the kidneys—and then, they got locked up with their rages and rebellions.
So it went on, month after month of battles and riots and marches. These were easy times for the staff. We didn’t “act out”; it was all acted out for us.
We were not only calm, we were expectant. The world was about to flip, the meek were about to inherit the earth or, more precisely, wrest it from the strong, and we, the meekest and weakest, would be heirs to the vast estate of all that had been denied us.
But this didn’t happen—not for us and not for any of those other claimants to the estate.
It was when we saw Bobby Seale bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom that we realized the world wasn’t going to change. He was in chains like a slave.
Cynthia was particularly upset. “They do that to me!” she cried. It was true that they did tie you down and put something in your mouth when you had shock, to stop you from biting your tongue during the convulsion.
Lisa was angry too, but for another reason. “Don’t you see the difference?” she snarled at Cynthia. “They have to gag him, because they’re afraid people will believe what he says.”
We looked at him, a tiny dark man in chains on our TV screen with the one thing we would always lack: credibility.