Talk about playing to your stereotype.
On the other hand, it is precisely that stereotype that could spark a reaction here far greater than anything based merely on JFK conspiracy theories. What Dallas really risks is planting its glass jaw deliciously in the path of a crushing generational left hook based on free-speech issues.
Jen Sorensen
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Free speech will be important on the 50th for the same reason it has been so urgently important to the Occupy movement all along: because young people in particular already think the nation's leaders are liars. They see those liars trying to hide the ball, as in the Obama administration's recent decision to move the upcoming G8 World Economic Summit away from the potential reach of protesters in Chicago to the militarily protected confines of Camp David.
But worse, they see those leaders as leading them by the snout to a dismal future of despair.
"The real impulse behind the Occupy movement," Lasn said, "and I think the real impulse behind anything that may happen in Dallas next year, is that hundreds of millions of young people around the world look into a future that does not compute.
"They're looking at a lifetime that is going to be completely different from the way their parents lived, a life of ecological crisis and political crisis and financial crisis, of not being able to pay off their loans and never having a decent job, and in the meantime having to live in a world that's getting hotter and hotter and lousier and lousier.
"Young people of the world are waking up to the fact that if they don't stand up and start fighting for a different kind of future, they're not going to have a future."
I also spoke last week with Stephen Benavides, who was one of the early organizers of Occupy Dallas. You'll remember him: Dallas cops tossed him in jail for attacking an officer, but later a citizen video proved that the attack had gone the other way around.
Benavides told me that if events here transpire in just the right away — if Dallas continues to go hard-case on access to Dealey Plaza for the 50th — he could see something really jumping off.
"It depends on what the city does," Benavides said, "and it depends on what everybody's doing a year and a half from now. If they want to pose a free-speech challenge by trying to cordon off the area based on appearance or the political content of your speech or any of those kinds of things, then, hell yeah. Then there is a definite ability to organize and make that into a confrontation."
In fact, Benavides said that if that's how the cards are dealt a year and a half from now, "We would have a responsibility to challenge the state."
If Lasn is right and young people look ahead to see only a path to the howling void, then civil action to change the direction of that path is the one thing that will lift them up out of despair and paralysis. And the rest of us will have a commensurate responsibility to support them.
In that sense, Dealey Plaza is a golden opportunity, capable of providing precisely the kind of flashpoint needed for real change to occur.
"The leaders of America are running scared," Lasn said. "In Dallas they're running scared. On Wall Street they're running scared. It's almost like that wonderful tipping point that could happen, when the young people of America rise up and start pushing the country to a different path."
We saw it just beginning to rise in Occupy. It might be a little geocentric of us to think Dealey Plaza is going to be any sort of culmination, but Dealey Plaza could be one of many places and points where the movement for change picks up steam, gains courage, learns some footwork and how to throw that mean left hook.
I don't want to be clandestine about my own hand here. I am talking to people about setting up a steering committee to prepare for a people's action at Dealey Plaza on the 50th. I tell them the first thing I will do, once such a thing is up and running, is resign from it.
Speech is speech. Everybody must be welcome, from the Birthers to the Birchers. Lasn pointed out that the Tea Party, while coming at the problem from the other end of things, has concerns about the future that are just as deep and sincere as anything Occupy has on its mind. So I guess they have to be there, too, if they so desire.
The main thing is this. For one shining moment on November 22, 2013, Dealey Plaza has a chance to be center-stage in the history of the nation. That is something worth helping along.
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