Political Activism 2004: 1984 Revisited

Cultural and social commentator Lyz Bly speaks up about political trends, activism, pop culture and the cost of being a feminist in the eyes of the media and the public arena.

As I swept the floor of my family’s home gallery on the morning of July 24, following our “Lick Bush” film benefit for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, I ruminated on the previous night’s happenings, especially on the comments of many of our 55 guests. People in their 20s were wide-eyed as they departed; they smiled earnestly at us and said, “Thank you so much for doing this.” The few elders in the crowd – the die-hard baby boomers – glanced knowingly at my husband, Kristin and I as they said their good-byes. For them, the film benefit was a nostalgic occasion; my sister-in-law’s mother showed her approval by saying, “You and Kristin would’ve fit in with the group we hung out with in the 60s.” I hugged her affectionately and took her comment for what it was – a compliment – and sent her on her way.

But, as I thought more about our guests’ reactions to the evening, I started thinking about my own, as well as my generation’s, experiences with political activism. The actions – both political and nonpolitical – of those of us who were born in the 1960s and 70s were overshadowed by the activities and the political rebellion of the youths of the 1960s. Those of us “first wave Gen-Xers” (a phrase coined by historian and guru on generational trends, Neil Howe) who remember the 1970s and came of age in the 1980s, remember feeling lost; after all, how could we ever live up to the previous generation with their political power, revolutionary music, liberated fashions, and unrestrained experimentation with sex and drugs?

Aside from the reverberations of the 1960s, the only thing I have any real vivid memories of from the 70s is disco (but only through television and radio, as I was a mere pre-adolescent babe – too young to wear a bra, much less go to a discotheque). I also remember my older sister listening to WMMS, which replayed, and, ultimately, rehashed the music from the 60s – The Who, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, with an occasional early 70s Zepplin song mixed in for some “variety.” Ultimately, for us children of the 70s, it was a decade of wistfulness and longing for the freedom and revolution of the “flower power” 60s.

But by the early 1980s, things started to look up. MTV was born (and it was all music videos, none of this “Real World,” “Road Rules” crap), punk was fully entrenched (though not mainstreamed) in the American underground music scene, and New Wave was burgeoning and booming out of our pre-CD compatible stereo systems. And fashion was off the charts cool. My best friend Renée and I made jackets out of trash bags and safety pins, spiked or mussed our hair, and wore black or silver lip stick to school (go a head and laugh; we were the fashion goddesses of our high school). We danced in our basements and bedrooms to the B-52s, the Talking Heads, Blondie, and The Pretenders. Finally, we had a music and style that was our own.

While things were looking up culturally for our generation, politically the situation was deteriorating. My freshman year at Kent State University was 1984 – the same year Reagan and Bush 1 began their second term in office. Political apathy was just not allowed at KSU in the 1980s; by the end of my first year I had not only completed my freshman intro courses, I had also acquired a crash course in political activism.

In 1985 I joined the KSU branch of Amnesty International (AI). At the time, the U.S. was exercising its Imperial might in Central America, so we organized letter writing campaigns to help free political prisoners in Nicaragua and El Salvador. We held benefits for AI at one of Kent’s many infamous nightclubs. Augusto Pinochet was the tyrant dictator of Chile at the time; I wrote and delivered a speech outlining his human rights abuses on behalf of Amnesty International at the 1987 May 4, 1970 Memorial Ceremony, where we also collected signatures on a petition to help free a young student who was being held prisoner for protesting the lack of access to student financial aid in Chile.

But my political activism reached its pinnacle in 1988 when my friend Kate and I started the Kent Women’s Organization (KWO), a feminist group with the goal of educating students on women’s issues, and feminist theory and ideas. Kate and I held coat hanger drives in the student center (which were then shipped to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as a statement on abortion rights, which were vulnerable under the Reagan administration, just as they are now under the Bush regime).

I had my first encounter with the media in 1989 when members of the KWO and I protested and boycotted the News & Photo Shop for hosting a Playboy signing with KSU student Jennifer Jackson who was featured in the April 1989 issue. In typical form, both Channels 5 and 8 showed up ready to shoot video and interview members of our “radical” feminist group. The experience was my first hard lesson in watching what you say on camera; I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I do remember that the Channel 8 report made me sound like a complete idiot, and the camera man shot the interview using a horrific angle that made me look like hell (this, of course, underscored their take on the event – that, as feminists, we were boycotting the store because we were jealous of Jackson, or we were feminists to begin with because we were too ugly to attract men and get dates). I faired much better in the print media, though to this day, my close friend John and I laugh mockingly at one of my more naïve and dramatic comments to an Akron Beacon Journal reporter: “There are a lot of women fighting so that men don’t treat them as objects. Every day I fight that. It’s kind of amazing that one person can so quickly undo so much that has been done.” And it is humorous that I believed –or at least publicly stated – that a magazine signing by a Playboy model was the downfall of the fight against female objectification. Still, the interviews did cause a stir, as for several weeks I received phone calls from angry men who called me a “bitch,” “lesbo,” “jealous, ugly dyke,” etc. And many of my friends and co-conspirators lauded my courage for speaking my mind on camera and in print.

In the 1990s, my mind was occupied with graduate school and the birth of my son, so my activism died down significantly. And quite frankly, after Bill Clinton defeated George Bush senior there was much less to be worried about on the political front.

But with the 2004 election, in this post-9/11, Patriot Act era, there is so much at stake that I, like many other people, have felt compelled to get involved again, to fight like hell to get Bush out of office in November. My life is different now, my son is 12, I have a baby girl on the way, I have three part time jobs, I am working on my Ph.D., I have a husband, a house payment, cars, and credit card debt. These things make being an activist more difficult, but the task is not foreign to me. I don’t need to look back at the 60s for revolutionary inspiration, I need only think back to my nascent college years, when Reagan and conservative politics threatened the art community and creative expression, women’s right to reproductive freedom and choice, and when – like today – a veil of secrecy shrouded the White House (then it was the Iran Arms and Contra Controversy). For me, the “Lick Bush” Film Night Benefit evoked a lot of nostalgia for a time when many of us couldn’t keep quiet any longer. That time is here again. Just try to shut me up; I dare you.
from Cool Cleveland columnist Lyz Bly

1987 image of Lyz Bly presenting for Amnesty International at KSU (:divend:)