Environmental activist Bill McKibben has just published a new book that’s engaging, provocative, and sure to strike a chord with many in Bedford who recall the era he is writing about.
McKibben calls it “in part [a] memoir” and titles it The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back on his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
That suburban boyhood happened in Lexington and the opening pages set the scene with McKibben’s memory of his family’s participation in the May 1971 protest against the Vietnam war that took place on the Battle Green. There are surely Bedford readers who either took part in that protest or recall it vividly. McKibben himself was only 10 at the time so after the curfew, he and his mother went home but his father stayed and was one of the 170 protesters who was rounded up and spent the night in the DPW shed waiting to be processed for disorderly conduct. As he notes, the McKibbens were not firebrands, indeed his father was a writer for Business Week magazine.
At the time of the anti-war protests, another movement was stirring in Lexington, as it was similarly in Bedford: fair housing. At issue was a small low-income housing complex that town meeting members had favored but when it came to the vote on a referendum, the proposal was turned down overwhelmingly, a decision that shaped the growth of Lexington for decades.
McKibben asks, “What was the actual place where I grew up? Was it the place where 170 townspeople joined those restive veterans to be arrested on the Green? Or was it the place 5,175 people turned out to make sure that no homes for poor people would be built in their lifetime?”
This book is more than a charming memoir of a personable young man who succeeded at Lexington High school (some of the teachers there were more demanding than his Harvard professors, he said), who won a job at The New Yorker immediately on graduation, and who has evolved into the leading climate activist of our time. It’s a story about America, where we have gone wrong over the past 40 years, and what might, just might, enable us to save ourselves if we act in time.
The Flag chapter deals with patriotism, which young McKibben had in good measure, evidenced by several summers spent as a tour guide, delivering the battle of Lexington spiel to tourists stepping off the big buses at the Minuteman statue (tips, please!) He writes that he came by his patriotism honestly which is why “it’s been hard over the last decade or two to absorb the new iterations of history that view our past in far deeper shadow….” This reviewer asks, how many of us are grappling with these new iterations, as exemplified by Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” and the many acknowledged wrongs toward Indigenous peoples?
The section on “The Cross” will speak to many people in Bedford as it’s focused in large measure around the Hancock Church which some here still attend, or perhaps attended at one time. Young Bill was a faithful congregant all through his school years. “The Cross” is his attempt to “come to grips with what happened to American Christianity….” As recent polls tell us, church attendance has declined drastically in mainline Protestant churches, in the Roman Catholic Church, and even in Evangelical churches (which at one time were growing at a furious pace.) But a reader doesn’t need to be a church member to pick up on this McKibben thought. He asks us to imagine what a “nimbler small-c church” might look like and suggests it could play a useful role as we face the big issues of today. He explores this role but says “if it’s of no interest you are welcome to skip to the next big discussion about prosperity” (i.e., the station wagon chapter.)
In the Station Wagon section, McKibben, although still building the text around his personal story, really nails the growing economic inequality we are experiencing today. There was no industry as such in Lexington in 1970 but McKibben contends that Lexington had an economy. “The American suburb is perhaps the greatest economic engine yet devised,” he writes. Much of America’s postwar economic might was devoted to building bigger houses farther apart from each other – houses that needed filling with “stuff” and required cars for driving the distances between home, job, school, and shopping. He mentioned that his family home in 1970 cost $30,000 but when it was sold decades later, the price had increased multi-fold. Sounds familiar, yes? Affluence and excess would not matter so much if everyone shared in them equally.
In the past 40 years, we have piled up what McKibben calls an almost unimaginable carbon debt. He sees some hope with the present administration’s commitment to renewable energy and on the local level, Lexington’s 2021 law requiring all new construction in town to come with clean electric heating systems. Bedford has equally strong and dedicated climate activists, all with the goal of trying to reverse the damage of the past.
Notes of special interest: in his acknowledgments, McKibben writes “Mike Rosenberg taught me a great deal about newspapering when I was in my high school years,” [writing for the Lexington Minuteman]. He also mentions a book by Bedford author Andrea Cleghorn and Alice Hinkle, Life in Lexington, 1946-1995, published by Lexington Savings Bank.
Despite all the enormous challenges presented in this book, there is a refreshing strain of optimism throughout. McKibben, as we know, has turned his concern over environmental catastrophe into a movement that all can be part of, and today, in his sixth decade, he has created a new project, Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change. His work with 350.org continues and now he is calling on retirees to use their cumulative wealth and knowledge to work for change.
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