Dear Vinny: A Message To My Fellow Cornhuskers

On October 13, my classmates from Yorktown High School (Class of ’68), will gather for their 50th reunion. I last joined my fellow “Cornhuskers” for our 30th reunion, which was a blast, but I had to send my regrets for this one.

Yet, I felt something more has to be said, however, given that one recent alumna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Class of ‘07), has suddenly come into the spotlight as the Democratic hopeful from New York’s 14th Congressional District. She may be the most famous graduate from our school, and shouldn’t that be recognized? So I wrote to Robert Vinson, known as Vinny, one of the event organizers along with Jim Cammann, and asked him to pass along my message:

Dear Vinny,

The 50th reunion of the Class of ’68 is at hand, and I’m excited to hear that the Dimensions and the Grubs—two of the greatest bands I’ve ever heard rock a school auditorium sock hop—will be re-uniting for a historic performance. Never mind the Who, the Stones, Dylan or any of the other classic rock geezers shuffling back onstage for one more go, I’ll be sorry to miss this amazing event, as well as catching up with so many folks I know from back then. We have lived through an extraordinary time.

For those classmates who have made it this far, I salute you. I’m hoping you all take a moment to remember those who haven’t. Between Vietnam, drugs, and other calamities of the 1960s, we lost quite a few. And I’m sure we all see that today we are again facing difficult times, falling short of many expectations that our generation set forth hopefully to pursue. Our very institutions seem to be under attack at the time of our lives when we need them most. The Affordable Care Act saved my life a few years ago, and now I’m thankful for the Medicare program that was established during our own era, when politicians set aside their differences to work together, benefitting the people they are elected to serve. I say this as someone who once marched in protest of The Establishment—maybe especially so.

Now we have a young graduate of Yorktown High—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who proposes thoughtful, purposeful leadership. Whatever your political leanings, we should all take note that this young woman’s immigrant family deliberately moved to Yorktown Heights, a relatively affluent suburb, sacrificing much in order to give their children the same education that our families desired for us—and the same excellent results are in evidence.

Within that fact is a lesson, and some kind of hope for the future. Upward mobility and meritocracy are still alive in this country. Women are taking their rightful places at all levels of our society. Success is still accessible to those who reach for it, if given half a chance. But there are those who would cut that half a chance in half, and then in half again. Their voices are loud and their ignorance of history and American ideals seem almost deliberate. If they’d grown up in Yorktown Heights, where in the 1950s and 60s, people from so many different backgrounds came to make a life for themselves and their families, they would know that America is stronger for its diversity. The pages of our yearbook are testimony—the names representing a multitude of ethnic groups, the young faces from all races—the epitome of the melting pot. Cornhuskers all!

So if there is one thing I’m urging you to do—besides having a ball and dancing your butts off to the Dimensions and the Grubs—it’s that you please vote in November, and continue the deeply caring, humanistic, social consciousness that we learned at Yorktown High, and for which history will surely remember our generation.

Well, maybe not so surely. But it’s not too late to take another crack at it.

Rex Weiner is a journalist and author based in Los Angeles.

Photo of The Evaders, another 1960s Yorktown band, courtesy Kernel Green