Magazine Cover

My mom use to buy copies of Life Magazine at the supermarket all the time. Fifty three years ago at the age of twelve I remember reading this particular issue as it was the year I really gained political awareness. The Vietnam War was intensifying and late that spring I was in class and we had one Puerto Rican kid I forgot his name after all these years when his parents came in the middle of class and took him out and all of a sudden we heard him crying hysterically in the hallway as he just found out his brother died in Vietnam. A couple of minutes later we heard him crying outside the school at the top of his lungs as he was taken away in a car. Then in a epiphany it hit me as I realized my brother would be eligible to be drafted in less than three years. The next year I would go to my first demonstration and see police randomly arrest people. The year after that I would see police without provocation beat people bloody. The war and the political conflicts it spawned defined myself and many of my generation.

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