The sixties (despite the excesses) had been such a hopeful time for me.

I was helping to implement the legacy of Kennedy’s Camelot and Johnson’s “Great Society.” Driven by the legislation of the period (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaid, Medicate, the Economic Opportunity Act, the Housing Act of 1968, etc.), America would wipe out its twin evils of racial discrimination and poverty, and I was doing my part.

After my two-year stint in the Peace Corps, I worked briefly for a Blackwell County War on Poverty project until it finally dawned on me that it was a bureaucratic make-work project for blacks that rivaled any northern city’s reputation for patronage, waste, and political intrigue. Damn, was I naive! After about a year of pushing paper I drifted into a social worker’s job for the county, investigating child abuse, and stayed there until Rosa finally prodded me into night law school.

And all the while, instead of becoming a model of peace, prosperity, and racial harmony, parts of Blackwell County, like much of the rest of the country, were becoming a battle zone for the gangs, drug dealers, and the underclass that seems to be growing daily.

As I angle south off 1-40 before reaching Forrest City, I wonder why it took so long for me to realize I was no longer a soldier in a war that couldn’t be won, not in my lifetime anyway. I didn’t really need to solve the world’s problems.

It has been more than I can do to raise Sarah and keep myself out of trouble. Sarah. The thought of her makes me smile. Such a wonderful kid but a moralist as only the young can be. At various times in the past three years she’s been a fundamentalist Christian, a dancer on the Razorbacks porn porn squad, a feminist. Now she’s a caregiver to AIDS victims.