The speaker looks back on the summer of 1968, when he and his college friends organized an anti-war rally. Even while becoming activists, they were anxious to seem respectable to their parents, so they invited a dentist to speak, held a car wash for funds, and he quoted businessmen in his articles. The gentle irony in that title detail sums up the poem's mood: rebellion that keeps glancing over its shoulder.
The tone shifts when his hair and stubble draw a cousin's cruel insult in a hospital waiting room, just before Grandpa dies. The speaker doesn't dwell on the pain, but the placement suggests how raw the moment was. Then his mother's line, "as long as you don't look like what you are," lands as the real sting. The speaker never says what she meant, and the closing admission that he still wonders leaves a quiet, unresolved ache. Humor and embarrassment give way to a lingering sense of being unseen, or perhaps seen too well.