I stood among the crowd of a couple thousand protestors in front of the Old Florida Capitol, a charming historic building with a gray-ish dome and striped awnings — the effect marred by the huge phallic structure right behind it. Looking around, I saw a lot of young women and men, but the majority of the people were my age or older. These boomers were perfectly at home, waving their “no kings” signs, smiling and singing or just stopping to chat with each other. They were in their element. Most had already done this more than a half a century ago. Now, here we are in 2025, and it’s time to take to the streets again – to stop and look what’s going down.

In 2023, when my coming-of-age novel Cinnamon Girl about a teenage girl in 1970 was released, I had no idea that in just two years the story would suddenly be more relevant than ever. In the book, the main character’s father is an anti-war activist and an FM radio disc jockey, who uses the airwaves to transmit information relevant to the countercultural: the location of protests and demonstrations, shelters for runaways, and even coded information for fugitives along with some amazing music. It was a lot like the constant stream on my Instagram feed — only the music was better.  

The decade of the 1960s saw political assassinations and the shooting of unarmed college students by the National Guard, peaceful protests and violent riots, bombings of Vietnamese children by the U.S. military and bombings of buildings by leftist radicals — steeped in a stew of hatred among ordinary citizens. In some ways the turmoil of the period reenacted the Civil War with those clinging to the status quo pitted against those demanding change. That turmoil was fueled by a senseless war against people “who don’t look like us” and who could therefore be dehumanized by the American war machine and its media handmaidens. 

The protests of the late 1960s and early 70s attracted so many young people because for us, the fight was existential. Old men in their comfortable offices were sending young men, boys even, off to fight a war for reasons that didn’t make sense. A little country on the other side of the world was somehow a threat? How? The domino theory of communism was as leaky as an overflowing diaper and just as full of crap. Young men were coming home in body bags, and those young men were the brothers, lovers and friends of young women.

Then as now, the protests were not monolithic. It wasn’t just about a monstrously stupid war. It was also about the wars right here — the wars against people of color and our indigenous population, against women, and against youth culture in general. 

In 1970, our military dropped napalm bombs on Vietnamese civilians and soldiers indiscriminately. They got away with it for a long time because those people didn’t look like “White America.” Today men in military gear, their faces hidden, attack another group of people who don’t look like “White America.” Only now they are doing it in our own country