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what we did and what we learned. The '60s were a time of horror--of the slaughter of two million people in Southeast Asia by the land of the free, home of the brave; the assassination of three major peace-minded leaders in the space of five years, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, each of them at a moment of decision-making and power that could have stopped the Vietnam War; of the ascendancy of genocidal presidents, LBJ and Nixon; of the failure of our democracy and its full-scale takeover by war profiteers who were never demobilized after WW II and just grew into fatter and fatter leeches on our country.
And that is just to mention part of the emotional trauma that was the '60s. I was 16 when JFK ran for president. I worked in his campaign. By the end of the '60s, I had seen all of my political heroes shot and killed. And I think that this dreadful reality that lay beneath the '60s--the reality that no peace-minded leader with any power could remain alive--colored everything else that happened, good and bad. The '60s saw the sudden--and rather amazing--simultaneous rebellions of women, blacks, gays, Native Americans, young people and other groups who had been traditionally suppressed, and placed in strict cultural confines--whether it was girdles and bras and housekeeping for women, or the "a-political" universities that youth were supposed to attend, or the poll tax and segregation for black citizens.
And I think all of this--and much more--happened because of the underlying horror of the massive slaughter in Vietnam and the assassinations at home. 1963 was the "trigger year," so to speak. I was one person--a very confined, repressed schoolgirl--at the beginning of 1963, and, by the end of 1963, while I wasn't a hippie, EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED. All strictures on me were off, inside, in my own mind, in my own heart. (It was also my first year of college.) Two years later, I, a privileged white girl from California, would be traveling to Georgia and Alabama to join the civil rights movement. How that transition occurred is probably worth a novel or two, but I do know this: It had to do with DEATH, ending everything that went before. We were a generation without a past. Our parents' lives and politics and outlook--the comfortable lives of the '50s (comfortable for some--for white people)--had FAILED US. They could not keep a good leader alive--OUR leader, JFK, with whom young people greatly identified. And the patriotism of WW II turned into the horrendous genocide of Vietnam, which they also could not stop, and didn't seem to object to. They couldn't see the difference between the poor of Vietnam--and their poor people's desire for self-determination--and Hitler and Stalin. And so we rejected them, and rebelled, and EVERYTHING changed.
But, you know, it was wrenching and extremely traumatic, at every level. That is not the best way for change to happen. Change should occur more gently, as the result of democratic processes. Change in the '60s was sudden, like a ripping of the veil of illusion. I think it was hardest for boys, who were facing the Draft, and had to make life and death decisions that they were ill prepared for. But it was also hard for the non-Drafted and for girls--and also for the many adults around who sympathized with the young and opposed the war. American culture--and all of its political and economic assumptions--was ripped to shreds by this war and by the assassinations that accompanied it. As Charles Dickens said, of the French Revolution, "It was best of times. It was the worst of times." And maybe it's silly--or useless--to say that I wouldn't wish it on anybody, but I think people who are tempted to nostalgia need to understand this about the '60s. It was both the best and the worst, and the worst should not be underestimated.
People think of the Beatles and the hippies and "love, love, love" --the remarkable birth of an alternative culture and new ideas. And yes, those things were amazing and wonderful. Thank God humans are adaptable, and new generations are born to think new thoughts and move human evolution along. But 55,000 US soldiers were being sent to their deaths, and babies and innocents of every kind were being burned to death with napalm and blown to bits with bombs, by the hundreds of thousands. And American families were being torn asunder by the conflict--sons and daughters rejecting their parents and their roots, in bitter fights and estrangements. And none of us had any tools for these small and epic battles. "Conflict resolution" didn't exist as a phrase, or a psychological specialty. We had to find our own way, all of us, as if we'd been transplanted to Mars.
The country we were born to was not the country in which we reached maturity. That old country was gone, gone--with all of its false peacefulness and hypocrisy, and all of its good intentions. For there were good intentions--almost every parent of every family in the US in the '50s had the intention of a better life for their children than they had had. We were given luxuries and opportunities unprecedented in human history. But I think that we came to a sort of collective conclusion that if the price of those luxuries and opportunities was burnt babies in Vietnam, no thank you--we would find another way.
We never did find another way--and that is the tragedy of the '60s. The military aggression budgets stayed locked in place. The Corporate Rulers and War Profiteers took over. We failed as a generation who had faced the worst that our country could do, and who had turned on it with a fury, but also with the inexperience and inconsistency of youth. We couldn't pull it together into a real revolution.
Some parts of the social revolution succeeded. And the horror of Vietnam did influence foreign policy for a while. The antiwar movement, I'm pretty sure, prevented Nixon from nuking Vietnam, which is something. It also had some long term impacts for the good on Latin American policy, but only after multiple horrors were inflicted, some--like Guatemala--as nearly as bad as Vietnam. But the STRUCTURAL things that were wrong with the country--that made Vietnam possible, and that prompted the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, in my opinion--were never addressed. And these are, 1) the failure to demobilize our military economy after WW II--so that now the War Profiteers NEED war and manufacture wars for profit; and 2) the rise of the multinational corporations and their unaccountable power over all news and opinion, and all US policy.
We are now seeing the result of the failure of my generation to solve those two endemic problems--these two undemocratic forces controlling our government, which are now so entrenched that people can hardly see them any more. They think that trillions of dollars in military spending is normal, and that rightwing corporations "counting" all our votes with "trade secret," proprietary programming code cannot be rejected, because they drink corporate coffee, and eat corporate food, and hold corporate jobs, and see corporate logos everywhere, as if America = Corporate.
I will allow you nostalgia for the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas, and some of the other greats of the '60s. We did have the best popular music ever written--and it was music that was as stimulating to the mind as to the heart. It WAS "the news." And you can praise the hippies, if you want. They were right about everything--including "Make love, not war!" But please know that you are a new generation and that nothing can match what you are going to do now, which is to succeed where we failed. I believe that you will. And I hope you make great music, too, to accompany and inspire American Revolution II, the real revolution.
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