From the time I was able to read and understand news to early adulthood, one word dominated. Vietnam.

The conflict hovered as a cloud that might descend at any moment, with life-altering consequences.

Would someone I know die there? Would I be drafted to fight or die there? I drew a high number the last year of the draft but enlisted in the Navy the year after, the conflict well on its way to ignoble end anyway.

It was personal for me and for a whole lot of others. The national division was hard to miss.

Hippies. Commies. Love it or leave it. Traitors! Ingrates. Bums. Get a job. Get a haircut. All directed at the youth who took to the streets to declare that a bloody war, sold on a bill of sordid goods, must end.

The magic of hindsight allows us to see that those demonstrations hastened the end of a grievous national error. The magic of memory loss must explain why much the same kind of brickbats are directed at Occupy San Antonio and Occupy Wall Street.

Scruffy bums. Whiners. Commies. Freeloaders. The ever-popular: Get a job.

Recently, the Vatican called for more fairness in the global economy. The pope, just another scruffy hippie, I guess.

If Vietnam was the hovering cloud of my era, economic uncertainty is the one hanging over youth today. And they recognize some of the same dynamics — institutions heavily invested in the status quo and invested also, in corrupt fashion, in a government begging to do their bidding. And everyone else is thrown a bone periodically. We call this “free” market capitalism.

A few weeks ago, I suggested that the Occupy San Antonio youth are “our sons and daughters.” Some of you were highly offended. Not our sons and daughters! And I could have been back in 1969. The characterizations might have been coming from those love-it-or-leave-it hardhats of Yippie yesteryear.

Get a job?

Some of the “occupiers” I talked to recently either have two, are underemployed in the one they have or have been searching in vain for a while.

Rosa Martinez, 25, studying to be a digital designer, is working as a cashier at a meat market after being laid off as an art teacher in an after-school program. She describes a “vicious cycle” in which one job loss cuts resources that permitted her to seek other work. Meanwhile, her fiancé suffered seizures and they were evicted from their home.

Tiffany Sherwood, 27, has a seasonal part-time job, paying insufficiently to make a dent in piled-high medical bills. After she and her partner paid the rent recently, they had $10 in mad money for the rest of the week. Whoo-hoo! Moving in with parents is not an option.

They want a government that represents them as ably as it represents corporations. They quaintly believe that how much money you have or give shouldn't determine how well you're represented. They object to predatory capitalism. They want fairness, not handouts.

Yes, the movement could easily veer in a direction that will erode support (though today, I'm thanking it for Bank of America dropping plans for debit card fees). But, as in 1969, today's protesters are representative both of those in a fix and those who could be — today at the drop of a pink slip rather than the arrival of a draft notice. And that pretty much describes our sons and daughters.

Elsewhere, police are cracking down on the 24/7 occupations. And just like back then, this may well spark more protest and swell ranks.

But those hippie-hating hardhats? Wrong then. Wrong today.

o.ricardo.pimentel@express-news.net