“Across the Universe” was last night’s movie choice; a movie filled with Beatles music, showcasing the late 60s and 70s, when I was entering adulthood, when the Vietnam war was the backdrop of our lives. There was a reason youth rebelled in those days: in the way we dressed, our music, and getting high to fight back, to block out the pain of that nightly news showing the numbers of our generation dying in a country far away, fighting for something no one here understood. There was a reason rebellion became part of our DNA. Riots and marches were our way of fighting back. “Hell no, we won’t go” – our battle cry. So many young lives were drafted for a thing some adult group of white men deemed necessary. They wanted their chance to fight a war, and instead of pulling out when it was apparent it couldn’t be won by us, those men had to save face. So their sons continued to fight for something they didn’t understand, killing people they thought must be our enemy, but no one knew why.

The movie was about the music written by the Beatles during those years. Now, I understand the lyrics to songs I’d thought had gone off into strange, erratic directions. I stopped listening to their music. This movie created an avenue to understand how it was a sign of the times. The fear and frenzy, the attempts to revolt, resist, and rage against being forced to comply with someone else’s war. Protesting any way we could, destroying the very fabric of our parents’ so-called union, the children of the 60s did not want to fight their wars. We turned our backs on their traditions of subservience to a government, a church, and even our parents. “No!” we screamed. No more blind obedience.

But we didn’t fight back the same way, and all music wasn’t trippy. That didn’t mean we weren’t fighting the establishment just as hard. Some of us did it without the drugs and avoided the tear-gased demonstrations. Rebellion comes in many shapes and sizes and comfort levels. Hair on boys grew longer. No more adherence to crew cuts, too military. Girls’ clothes changed from dresses modestly lengthed below the knee to short, sassy, ragged, and patchy. We found our way out of controlled homes with expected traditions and rituals. We started our own hippie journey.

For me, that meant college. That seems like a strange rebellion, but trust me, in a family steeped in a belief that education was some kind of devil worship, I was taking a bold step. Money became available because my dad had died. He unwittingly left his kids a chance to do something different with their lives. I took that chance and entered college, away from my mother’s controlling, watchful eyes.

I started to smoke. “You’ve come a long way, baby.” I left behind the bubble gum music of that little girl who longed only for a boyfriend and wrapped my world up in Proud Mary and I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar. While our brothers and boyfriends resisted the draft, women were resisting aprons, the kitchen, and motherhood, those things that tethered us to a life of servitude and the very things my own mother despised. It was like I was fighting back for her. Still, she tried to punish me into accepting her angry lot as my own.

And my music wasn’t the dark and psychedelic kind but instead grew into Peace and Love folk music. Still, those protests produced an end to the Vietnam War and the draft. My brothers, our sons, and grandsons would no longer be required to fight in some other man’s war. And I was quiet yet forceful, resisting “The Man” by becoming (or trying to become) his equal. Climbing ladders alongside my brothers and my husband. Sometimes surpassing them. Then, I carried that quiet rebellion on into and through my adulthood. Finding divorce was a battlecry when my freedom was again tested, when I felt my religion, my government, my husband, and my parents’ walls closing in again. I learned that no one was going to save me but me. Of course, I also had the Women’s Movement and Gloria Steinum fighting on my behalf.

And now, watching that movie last night and reliving my life through those images laced with Beatles music, I realize with a whole new clarity what’s happening today. This is a rebellion to take back something someone deems lost. They are turning their repressed anger over to the people who, they think, can get the job done: billionaires. White men who found success above and beyond the ladder. Our brothers, our boyfriends, our husbands have become that fighting group of draft resisters, of repressed housewives who had been stuck in a kitchen raising children they’d never wanted. These white men are now carrying torches, screaming out in revenge. They want what they believe is deserved as a white man in a country they believe was founded just for them. They plan to take it back. And now, I’m old, and I have no fight left in me, but I look at my daughters and grandchildren and say, “Get ready to fight. It’s your turn.”