Böcker av Gary Luhmann

The Lost Decade, 2010-2020Kurt Kallini, the face of 9/11 terrorism for The Brotherhood in the Middle East, got picked up by the CIA shortly after the Twin Towers fell. He was flown for extra-rendition to Egypt with the ageless pyramids in view till the day he died. Then for interrogation he was tortured in the hot sun and grueling conditions till his epilepsy returned and he spilled his guts. Crippled at Gitmo he lost his ability to walk at all. He lost his daughter Carma's teen years. Come home to a house on Haight Avenue a block over from where Carma attended Vassar College, he lost everything but his need for revenge upon the Bush-Cheney Republicans who blamed him for their 9/11 ignorance. During this Lost Decade for him and others following the Iraq War, Katrina, and the Great Recession, his half-sister asked him to teach the classics to her special Bennet School girls. Kady Bontecott already hired David Morpheys to teach American lit to her female group. Together Kurt and David taught Western literature till the special group of girls graduated in 2019. Kurt had his revenge on his Gitmo torturers, the Bush-Cheney Republicans, with his backing of Justin King, elected president in 2016 till the 2020 Covid year when death came to Kurt Kallini.

JFK's election in 1960 got America moving again. Time has come today. The Sixties Student Movement and its moral politics of SM, SNCC, and MLK led after JFK's death to LBJ's political and democratic will to pass the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and his Great Society programs. Start the Sixties with JFK and his youthful flare and charisma. In the Middle Passage of the Sixties praise LBJ's political will and MLK's moral charisma to finally reconstruct a Great Society of black and white, of freedom north and south, or greater economic equality amidst prosperity. Praise LBJ's Great Society but blame him for the Rolling Thunder over Vietnam and an unwinnable war from Danang till TET, 1965-1968. The Student Movement ended in Chicago with Days of Rage and the Townhouse bombing when more radical groups like the Weathermen, Progressive Labor, and the Black Panthers took it over, much like Nixon elected ended the liberal movement of the Sixties with law and order. Nixon did nothing to end the Vietnam War as thirty thousand US soldiers died before him and thirty thousand died during his time in office. A cease-fire ended the war in 1974, when Nixon resigned his corrupt presidency with Watergate, after which America would not return to Vietnam. The unwinnable war ended in 1975 with North Vietnam winning. The Movement ended with Nixon's election. There was much protest of US soldiers fighting the Vietnam War from 1965 till its end in 1975, ten years of involvement America regretted over there and here at home. For the Movement people who grew up in SM and SNCC and liberal politics when Nixon won a landslide victory in 1972, it looked like an end of progress forward. With Watergate Nixon was ousted but not brought to justice. America moved on. Students in the Sixties Movement moved on with their lives. They crossed over to career and family. They grew up with the healing process of this time, 1969-1976, and coming back home they chose to make the personal living of a life more political.

Let LBJ continue the reform programs of JFK. With passage of Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we have high hopes for the Great Society, for social justice in America, and equality for one and all. Education is high on the list with Headstart, special ed, aid to secondary school, Jobcorps, Upward Bound, Title VII for women, Pell grants for college, Peace Corps, Alliance for progress, and Vista. Help the cities, the aged, and the poor with Model Cities, aid to depressed regions, community action, maximum feasible participation, housing, vehicle safety, crime control, consumer product safety, community action programs, medicare, medicaid, increases in minimum wage and social security, truth in labeling and packaging, pollution control, beautification for Nature's sake, Baker v. Car for one man, one vote, National Foundation for the Arts and PBS, a fair immigration act, conservation, and the space program. The Great Society is FDR's New Deal completed. But like a big city mayor there's something for everyone. Included for the loonies on the right, a War in Vietnam begins with the bombing campaign called Rolling Thunder. Great Society idealism will be lost in the war over there. Protest of the war will expand to majority proportions. Violence will be stirred up as the war comes home. There are ghetto uprisings to protest a Great Society which is not so great. Violence will be evident in Richard Speck's killing of 8 nurses, Charles Whitman's killing spree from the U Texas Tower, and Truman's Capote's In Cold Blood. No Satisfaction, Paint it Black, turn to drugs and psychedelia, revolution's in the streets, and in 1968 it all comes apart with TET and assassinations of MLK and RFK. Nothing to stop the War in Vietnam but Nixon peddles his law and order ideas for here and over there. The middle passage of the Sixties Movement, from 1964-1968, takes us from hope to despair in five years flat.

Time has come today. JFK speaks to a nation stuck in Fifties' conformity, let's get America moving again. JFK's charisma sparks a youth movement in the image of his personal flair. For Claire it's a deeply Southern, religious fervor, for Harlan it's a new union of youth, for Jody it's black with black in Mississippi, and for Joshua it's a call to cease nuclear tests. Come together in Ann Arbor and Madison, Atlanta and Nashville, Berkeley and San Fran to protest their parent's world for whom prosperity was enough. Sit-in Woolworth's to take a stand against a hundred years of racial separation. Come together on a freedom ride to test the law of the land. Come together north and south to create a new culture of black and white, male and female, youth and JFK to rock the boundaries of an older generation. Time has come today. Let youth have their say. Write the Student Manifesto, as statement of what youth wants and what's inimical to their dreams. Say it loudly to all the world listening, we can change the world. If not churches, unions, community, and committed citizenry, then a student movement which ties its expansion to solving problems in this world. Come together on sit-ins and freedom rides. Come together to protest racism in Albany, Georgia. Come together to force the entry of James Meridith into U of Mississippi. Come together to protest George Wallace who stands in the schoolhouse door. Call a stop to police dogs, fire hoses, and Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama. Adults see racism on TV and they now know what's going on, not east of the Iron Curtain but in our own southern cities. Be young and idealistic again. Come a more committed citizenry to march on Washington DC for civil rights and jobs for one and all. See the many, they are us. The answer blows in the wind. Hear the oratory of Dr. King as he tells us his dream of black and white, north and south, old and young, all together as God's children. Yet even as hope soars with late summer dreams, the

PS. Joan of a thousand days, call it over early October, 2020 after a vagrant email flash three years earlier. The Harvey Flood of Houston, Texas devastated her house and home. The Plague Year 2020 her own apartment refused refuge from the pandemic. This writer of a thousand letters sparked her curiosity. Perhaps there was empathy on the flood watch, or photos of Great Britain and his grandkids, or merely the outreach for shared tales of travel and life experience. Say we already met in 5th-6th grades at Netherwood or all high school at FDR. Say we shared the same birth date, same German grandma named Nana two blocks away, same ambitions to get out of Hudson Park and see the world of her Florida and Texas, his of Paris and San Diego, the same weddings and Lorraine's funeral after high school back home. Such was serendipity. Getting to know each other over a thousand days meant writing every day, talking every week, and traveling together to places we dreamed possible. Come the finally getting together, come the Fiftieth Reunion back home, come David to her Greater Houston. It lasted a thousand days. It lasted from our Sixties growing up through our sixties growing old. It was a good time, but all good things like a life worth living come to an end. Count a thousand days and come to that conclusion.

Face hard times, again. Face the fallen hope inherent in a mid-life crisis. Face the near death calamity. Not with one's youth in full flower, but with half a life depleted and the other half in doubt. The middle of life one awakens on a bridge over rushing waters more downriver than not. The true way is lost. Do you wish to be recalled to life? How does one face this summons? How does one renew a life worth living with half a life left?It's nuclear winter this time 1990 in the pulp and paper industry. Look over the Hudson Falls with its raging waters over the turbines and wish for the governor's task force and Kurt Kallini's private investment in Peter Pryne's mill. Two women work out a deal with the Economic Council. Darlene Laird proposes a task force to reinvent industry in Albany's Capital Region, and Tessie Freer pledges further restructuring and economy in the Pryne Mill she runs. At the table sit Union rep Tom Mahoney opposite from mill security officer and sheriff of Hudson Falls, Seamus Rose. They have interests as do management, ownership, and Governor Livingston's task force on the Economic Council. They decide to recall to life Pryne Paper the best they can in hard times, rather than sell off its forested lands, its electricity output, and its mill machinery.For the group of reunion friends meeting back in Hudson Park they too are on the move upriver toward Albany and its greater opportunity. David Morpheys and Laurel Grove meet over summer vacation. Leslie leaves Hudson Park end of this year to work with Darlene Laird's task force in Albany. Joey Gallo leaves his Gin Joint along Poughkeepsie's river when it burns down during a class reunion. Flash Gordon leaves Clearwater Supply of Georgia to help Darlene with Charley Brown in the Arbor Hills slums of Albany. They all move to the Albany Region come their mid-life crisis.David returns to see CC in the Corning Tower and resume their relations in Albany. Leslie moved there to take over Teacher Pensions. CC works the newspaper with her journalism. And Darlene's task force brings life to Tessie's mill, to the Arbor Hills ghetto which Charles Brown runs, prepares city and suburbs to combine in the county, and makes the entire Capital Region part of a growth economy.Kurt Kallini, who funded Captain Jack's run for governor, now plans to bring together the raw material industries into an AMPer's Co-op. Commoditize the raw material industries and turn the local operation like Pryne Paper into a global enterprise. But AMron of Texas grows big fast and comes for the Pryne Paper Mill too. Morpheys the Albany girls ask to check out how the sale AMron will go and he gets inside the mill to help Sal Pryne survive the takeover. All have their mid-life crisis together. What more are friends for?

The Tao is the way to do things right. The Tao is the way to live a life worth living, while the DOW is mere measurement of success. The DOW leads to wealth and afterward to wielding that wealth for the benefit of community which benefited oneself. Then there is also a Tao to Power. Be at no man's beck and call, be no man's puppet on a string, be master of one's fate and not forced to serve the powerful. There is as well the Tao of Nature because as human beings, we are part and parcel of the cycling seasons, one of a million species, however endowed with brains and intuitive powers to live a life worth living. There is the earth we all share, the family of one and all, and the social and natural community to which we belong. The Tao is the way.

David Morpheys and Lorraine Shanessey leave home for colleges north and south, one a grind college where David hopes to find glory in football, the other a warm weather school in Florida where Lorraine hopes to find the glamorous life of sorority parties. They find a missing person apart from one other. They miss their idyllic ten years growing up together in Hudson Park. They discover that distance is destiny. Over a month of holidays back home they face first a pregnancy and then a miscarriage of their shared fortunes. They leave home confirmed with their separation. The summer they convalesce together, tell of his March on Washington and her women''s group witnessing the murder of nursing friends by state authorities. They tell their separate lives to make easier a second year to be apart. Over the seven years, 1969-1976, they share stories and stay apart. David travels the voyage of discovery west and the journey east. Lorraine suffers an abusive relationship, faces a frat board, and works in DC during the Watergate time. When David and Lorraine are far apart as a California grad school and a Florida law school, Lorraine calls for David to come rescue her. A final time they return home for good.