… the day the music died—but it has haunted me for my entire life. For those of us who made the transit from childhood to adulthood in the Seventies that date was not in 1959. Until I met and fell in love with my husband, my hopes for my life also died— without my knowing it—sometime ’round about the Detroit riots in 1967, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and the 1968 DNC protests in Chicago while the Democratic National Convention obliviously ceded the election of 1968 to Richard Nixon, and … well, I know it was in the Seventies. And I believe it was during the week I was ‘awarded’—like a good behavior prize—my M.H.S.A. from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

What has haunted me is the belief — no, the knowledge — that I did not do enough during the next half century to realize the progress toward a more perfect union promised by the Fifties and the Sixties. Settling instead for a few anthems commodified by what are now Warner, Universal, and Sony and a retirement funded by arbitraging the promises of the Sixties.