by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
I came off the tour in 1986 and went home to Hollis. I remember walking around and noticing how desolate everything had become. I looked at the playground, and the bleachers were gone. All the signs were ripped off, and there were holes in the fence and glass and rubbish and garbage all through it. The place looked like a war zone.
I was walking around one afternoon when I heard a woman say, “Darryl!” I turned around and I couldn’t figure out who this person was. “It’s me,” she said. She said her name, and I realized she was my good friend’s sister. She may as well have pulled out a gun and shot me, I was so stunned. It was obvious she was using crack, but she was trying to hold a regular conversation as if nothing was wrong. How was I supposed to react when she looked like she weighed about ten pounds? She had lost all her teeth and her clothes were dirty. I had held her as a baby. But now to see her like that, it was really scary.
Everyone’s sister seemed to be getting addicted to crack. But when I started hearing about people’s mothers, I just couldn’t believe it. You’d look at the babies and wonder why they were like that. And it was because the parents were cracked out. I never knew that a drug could have such an impact on a community or a society. Every week something happened, whether it was somebody getting killed or arrested or dying. It was as if the whole neighborhood started disappearing. It became like a ghost town.
At the time everything in the neighborhood was falling apart, a lot of billboards saying Say No to Drugs were going up. I remember thinking how much money it cost to put up those signs each week. To me, they were spending money on the wrong thing. I knew perfectly well that people weren’t gonna look at a sign like that and say, “All right, I’m gonna just say no to drugs.” I found out that just telling people not to do drugs doesn’t work. Besides, that saying came a little bit too late. Don’t you think, Mr. Reagan?
As the gap between the haves and the have-nots got wider, America sometimes felt like a colder, crueler place. Beneath the glitzy surface ran a chilling current of fear. There was fear of crime, certainly, but also fear of failure, of not “making it” in the rush for riches. The nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union had intensified, bringing back fears of nuclear devastation. In 1986 an explosion destroyed the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in the Soviet Union. A radioactive cloud spread for miles, contaminating the region’s soil, crops, and livestock and renewing fears of a nuclear power plant accident in the United States.
But the most paralyzing event of the decade happened in Florida on January 28, 1986. The space shuttle Challenger was ready for launch, and it was carrying a very special passenger. Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was about to become the first private citizen in space. Her flight would mark the beginning of a new age of civilian space travel, in which space would be open to everyone. NASA planned to have McAuliffe teach two fifteen-minute classes from the space shuttle, which would be beamed by television to millions of students across America.
It was unusually cold at Cape Canaveral that morning, but not cold enough to cancel the flight. The liftoff seemed to go smoothly, but seventy-three seconds later Challenger erupted into a fiery red ball. The space shuttle had exploded, killing everyone on board. For the nation’s schoolchildren, it was the end of a dream.
Malcolm McConnell, born in 1939, was at Cape Canaveral to cover the Challenger launch for Reader’s Digest.
Before I witnessed my first shuttle launch, NASA officials escorted several other reporters and me down to the launchpad to see the shuttle up close. I felt like an ant walking around a stepladder. I felt awed and dwarfed by this huge machine. When you’re three miles away in the press grandstand and that huge assembly lights itself on fire and takes off, the feeling is overpowering. There is a bright flash from the solid rocket boosters, and then you see an almost volcanic burst of steam from the main engines. Immediately after the flash this huge vehicle begins to rise away, and it’s all silent. A second or two later you are literally assailed by the shock waves. The press grandstand has sort of a tin metal roof that begins to bounce up and down, and your chest is hit by this cacophonous pounding. The first time I saw it, I was virtually speechless. I felt proud that my country, my civilization, had put together this wonderful machine which was so powerful, so complex.
By the mid-1980s NASA had pretty well convinced most of the world not only that it could run the space shuttle economically, but that the shuttle could actually pay for itself on a commercial basis. NASA wanted to prove that the shuttle was so safe that even an ordinary person could ride into space. So Christa McAuliffe, a high-school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, was to encourage an interest in space for millions of schoolchildren.
The morning the Challenger was launched, very few of us who had covered the space shuttle program thought it was going to fly that day. It was bitterly cold. One reporter pointed up at one of the monitors and said, “Look at the ice.” The launch tower looked like a frozen waterfall. But we got our coffee and we sat around and waited. As it got light, the launch control people began saying, “Well, it’s looking better and better.” NASA had somehow pulled this thing off. And then the countdown reached five, four, three, two, one, and that glare lit up from the solid rocket boosters. I had a sense of great pleasure and satisfaction.
As the shuttle cleared the tower and the first shock waves of sound began to pound the press grandstand, I had my first sense of foreboding. Because the air was so cold and dense, the pounding sound was much louder than I’d ever experienced. I thought, “That does not sound right.” But I quickly shrugged it off as the shuttle rose. All of us on the grandstand were screaming our heads off, yelling, “Go! Go!” Any sense of professional composure was lost; we were all caught up in the euphoria of the moment.
The pillar of smoke with the little tiny shuttle had turned to the degree so we could no longer see the shuttle itself. We could just see the rippling cloud of white and orange smoke coming back toward us. From our vantage point, it still looked like a normal flight. Then there was silence. For a long time. I would say ten seconds, which is a long time during a launch. And we began looking around at each other. And then the voice came over the loudspeakers. In a very dry, almost emotionless voice, “Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink….” And then there was a pause. “The flight dynamics officer reports that the vehicle has exploded.” I felt this terrible cold drenching doom pouring over me. I could almost feel ice water pouring down over my head and chilling me deep into myself. Looking around me, I saw people who had been standing and cheering a moment before sink back down to their benches. Many people put their hands over their faces as if to blot out the sight. Other people put their hands to their throats, as if they themselves were being physically assaulted. One of my colleagues looked at me and asked, “What’s happened? Where are they?” I said, “They’re dead. We’ve lost them, God bless them.” And she got angry. She kind of pushed me and said, “Stop kidding. What happened? Where are they?” And I said, “They’re dead.
They’re dead.” And at that moment we looked up again, and the pieces of the Challenger began tumbling out of that pillar of smoke. That massive vehicle had been shredded into tiny little pieces that were falling like confetti out of the sky.
Fear was also stalking America in the form of a new and deadly disease. For years medical science had been scoring one success after another. Its achievements promised to make human life better than ever. Then came the AIDS epidemic. AIDS stands for “acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.” First detected in the early 1980s, it was believed to be a “gay disease.” Homosexual men were being struck down by a mysterious onslaught of unusual infections that their bodies could not fight off. Before long, AIDS was also diagnosed in intravenous drug users, prostitutes, hemophiliacs, and some immigrants from Haiti and Africa. Because there was no clear understanding of what this deadly disease was, how it spread, or how to treat it, fear and hysteria quickl
y swept much of the nation.
For more than a decade, activists had been struggling for gay rights, and they had made considerable progress. But the arrival of AIDS brought a backlash against the gay community. Some conservative critics went so far as to claim that AIDS was God’s revenge against “immoral” people. All the finger-pointing and name-calling often hid the sad fact that real people were dying, including babies who had gotten AIDS from their infected mothers. By the late 1980s the death toll was climbing toward a hundred thousand, and just about everyone in America knew someone whose life had been affected by the disease.
Bruce Woods Patterson, born in 1953, saw the devastating effect of AIDS on the gay community in New York City and pitched in to help.
GMHC [Gay Men’s Health Crisis] had hired me on full time to work with Jerry Johnson on the AIDS hot line. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had changed careers forever. We were all nonprofessionals back then, working by the seat of our pants and just trying to get GMHC’s name out there. [Johnson’s] instincts were what we call “client-centered” and “nondirective,” which means that you accept the caller where they are, and you support them where they are, and you do not judge them, whatever you do. And you don’t tell them what to do. You ask what they want to do and you ask them how they think they can do it, and in the end you help them figure out the options.
One of the great challenges of a hot line is that you get one chance to make a difference in the lives of the callers. In our case, we had to do that in under ten minutes, the prescribed time limit on most calls, and you have to maintain your anonymity, another requisite. It’s really the only way to stay emotionally distant from the caller, although there are calls I carry around with me to this day. People called who were bed-bound, crying and sad with no hope. They’d start talking about how they used to be young and beautiful and had a future and how they had lost their identity, independence, and pride. A lot of people called and said, “I’m not afraid of death. It’s getting there that scares me.” Being stripped of all your dignity and losing half your body weight and having friends turn away just because they’re in such pain they can’t stand to see you that way is just horrible.
The level of ignorance and homophobia from some of the callers was just amazing. And the indifference was overwhelming. When I first started, prank callers would just say, “All you faggots should die!” Click. Thank you for sharing. It was bad enough all these people were dying and there was nothing that we could do about it, and then you’ve got people hating you for being sick or for helping sick people. Of course, you wanted badly to be able to say, “Where’s your compassion? Who do you think you are? What’s wrong with loving someone?”
My friends and I often talk about the community of infected and affected people. I am HIV-negative but have been affected deeply. We’re all living with AIDS. I often wonder why I have been so lucky when so many of my friends and colleagues have died of AIDS. When I look back at the pictures of the early days at GMHC, it hits me every time that the majority of the people in them are no longer living. In the end, I have to be philosophical about it. I guess my job is to be there for everyone else. The best thing that I can do is just stay HIV-negative.
Throughout the 1980s, President Reagan maintained an iron-hard posture toward Communism. And this posture led to yet another government scandal. Nicaragua, a country in Central America, was led by a Communist government. Reagan wanted to help the “contra” rebels, who were fighting a guerrilla war against the government, but Congress had passed a law banning military aid to the contras. In a bizarre scheme to sidestep the law, American ammunition, spare parts for tanks, jet fighters, and missiles were sold to Iran to make money to fund the contra rebels.
Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North ran the secret operation that eventually became known to the country as “Iran-contra.” A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, North was a patriot with an unshakable loyalty to the president. In testimony before Congress, North said that he believed he had acted “with authority from the president” in carrying out illegal operations in Central America and the Middle East. For America to be negotiating with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government was astonishing enough. But for illegal weapons sales to be linked to the White House was shocking. Just as they had during Watergate a decade earlier, Americans now asked, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” Iran-contra suggested one of two possibilities: Either the president himself was involved in an illegal international operation, or else he was a weak leader who did not know what was going on under his own nose. Neither possibility was flattering to the president who had promised a return to America’s glory days.
As Americans faced their problems at home and abroad, it was comforting to know that at least the economy was still booming. That changed dramatically on October 19, 1987, Black Monday, when the stock market crashed. In one day the market lost 508 points, or 22.6 percent of its value—approximately $500 billion, an amount equivalent to the gross national product of France. Black Monday reminded Americans of the stock market crash of 1929. But what really frightened them was the memory of what had followed—the miserable years of the Great Depression. For the next year, people watched and waited, but the depression never came. Slowly the market bounced back, and Americans breathed a sigh of relief.
In spite of—or perhaps because of—President Reagan’s hard-line policy toward the Soviet Union and the renewed nuclear arms race, Communism was beginning to crack. In the late 1980s the Soviet Union was going through its most dramatic change since the 1917 revolution. Under the leadership of fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, the Cold War began to thaw.
Even the crusty old members of the Politburo (the Soviet Congress) knew that their country had reached rock bottom. Industrial output was pitiful. Alcoholism was rampant. Workers were absent from their jobs much of the time. Housing shortages forced nearly a quarter of city residents to share bathrooms and kitchens. Food was scarce. Something drastic had to be done.
Gorbachev did not set out to bring an end to Communism in Russia. On the contrary, he saw himself as saving the Communist state. He started a three-part program to revitalize his ailing nation: glasnost (openness), perestroika (restructuring), and demokratizatsiya (democratization). And he presented this program not as a break with Soviet tradition, but as a way of reconnecting to the original principles of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state.
It wasn’t only in the Soviet Union that Communism was teetering. In Poland, a trade union called Solidarity had begun to challenge the Communist government in 1980. Although Solidarity had been shut down by the authorities in 1981, it still fought secretly for greater freedom in Poland. But in the late 1980s the world’s attention was riveted on Mikhail Gorbachev. Within the Soviet Union itself, the excitement was building. Newspaper articles revealed corruption and mismanagement. Elections—real elections—were held. People began to talk openly about the past and the terrible things that had happened during Stalin’s brutal regime. The truth about their own history had been forbidden to the Russian people. Gorbachev promised that there would be an end to secrecy and deception, the government’s strongest weapons against its own people.
Marina Goldovskaya, born in 1941, is a filmmaker who took part in the new openness of the Gorbachev years.
In the mid-eighties I was working at the central television station in Moscow, making television programs on politics, on literature, art, social life, public affairs. This took half of my year, and the other half of the year I was a filmmaker for Ekram, a special film studio within the television station. All media in the USSR was heavily censored, and television was probably the most censored of them all. Everything we did was controlled by our administration. Every year we had to submit several proposals for the films for the next year. All of the proposals and concepts had to go through what was known as the “council of editors.”
In early 1985 I submitted a proposal for a documentary film version
of a book called At My Mother’s, by Anatoly Streliany. He was a talented writer with independent ideas and a point of view that was not in line with the Communist Party. Because of his views he had a difficult time getting his works published. But this particular book was not overtly political. It described a visit he made to his mother’s home in the village he grew up in, and it gave a very interesting portrait of the village. We got this proposal through all the censors, and it was put into the plan for 1986.
Even before we started working on At My Mother’s, we got a sense that somehow things were changing. For a long time it had seemed as if something just had to change, because the whole country was stagnating. For so many years, the people who had ruled our country were old and outdated. We were so ashamed when we saw these old faces reading their speeches. They were not able to even read them properly, they were so old.
When Streliany and I started working on this film, I thought that we could take advantage of the changing atmosphere to do something more useful, more interesting. Something that could somehow help to push this process of change. So instead of making a documentary film based on his book, we decided to make a film about farmers and the struggle between the individual and the communal. We knew that our new idea would never be approved by the censors, but we decided to go ahead and make it anyway. We just acted as if we were still making a film based on our original approved proposal.
