Letters to the Editor
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Let's Do The Math
Okay boys and girls let's get the facts straight.
The baby boom generation is officially from the years 1946 through 1964. I hate to break it to all you Gen Xers but Barack Obama is a member of the baby boom generation as he was born August 4th 1961.
Oh yes, Watergate happen as a result of the '72 Presidential election. And Electric Light Orchestra began as a 70s band.
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New Perspectives are Needed Here
When I was a young boomer (a little too young to be a hippie), I thought discussions and fascination about World War II was endless. In fact, our parents' obsession with WWII became our own: my husband loves nothing better than to play WWII first person shooters, and I love a good old fashioned war movie now and then. It makes sense that we find our own youth so interesting, just as our parents did theirs.
Yet, the author's own premise is self-refuting. We changed everything, yet we changed...well, much more than he is willing to credit. Sure, there was excess and irrational exuberance. But there was also a freeing of the constraints of social propriety that were threatening to choke our nation. There was a fascination with the potential of technology and the future. And,for the first time in a very long time, we learned to be skeptical about authority -- so much so that we were prepared to fight the false politics and wars we see today: we've been here before.
It might be useful to remember that our thinking immediately prior to the counterculture revolution -- as a nation -- was decidedly lockstep: racist, sexist and xenophobic: Just ask George Wallace or Sen. McCarthy. Many of that era had no opposing thought to help them analyze the falsehoods being foisted on the nation. We were starting to crumble in upon ourselves socially and politically.
Then the hippies introduced ideas we had literally been hungering to consider.
While we all gasped at the shocking and frankly silly behavior, we subconsciously attuned ourselves to a greater openness. Suddenly, it was alright to imagine that all we really did need was love. We could admire Gandhi more than Wayne; Einstein more than Elvis.
It felt like overnight that we simply agreed: blacks should have equal rights and women should enjoy greater status. Not everyone agreed, but even the most diehard conservatives morphed their most racist and sexist thinking. We became as diverse as our music, as open (as a nation) as we had ever been.
I read some years ago that women's rights could be documented historically like a staircase: A rapid rise, followed by a long period of stasis, followed by the next rise. Indeed, human rights likely follow the same path.
The 60s were one of those great risers. We've been in stasis since (and battling the forces that would have us retreat. We saw a backlash against diversity in the 80s, followed by a continuing backlash against the boomers who brought that idea with them.
Yet I see that our children give us great hope for more progress. I have never seen a more open, diverse minded group as our millennial progeny. They will form the next rise.
Go to a high school and watch the stereotypes fall: blacks hang with whites. Girls simply expect to be equal...and the boys agree. Jocks hug the geeks, and young people everywhere turn their backs on the failings of previous generations to fulfill our ideal. They just will be diverse, equal and free...there's no working at it; it just is.
How can anyone argue that we've achieved nothing, then? We've raised our kids as loving people with their priorities in the right place. They will change the world....again.
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bongs (not)
First of all, there were no bongs in the 60s. The consumerism and counterculture aspect of that decade were confined to a select few. Most of us didn’t have the time to indulge in any of it. We were too busy working our way through high school and college (Something you could still do in those days.) The wealth distribution was much less polarized then. Sure there were kids who could indulge in the excesses De Groot is criticizing, but a lot of us were the first or second generation in our family to attend college. We didn’t have cars, we didn’t have cell phones, we made do with a whole lot less, and had to earn most of it.
Besides, the stuff he’s focusing on (sex, drugs, and rock and roll), continued on well into the 70s. How does he explain that? I was in that era, and here’s what I remember:
Good: Civil rights, Medicare, great music, great literature, great films, women’s movement, a new awareness that we lived in a global culture.
Bad: The assassinations, Vietnam, 1968 (the whole year), urban violence and the death of hope.
Both of those legacies persist to this day. It’s up to the sixties generation and those beyond that era to make sure the good part and its potential are realized, and that the bad stays in the past.
De Groot is incapable of understanding any of this, at least from the evidence in his writing.
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Well over 30
As someone who grew up attached to the tail end of the "60s generation", I always found the entire thing with its philosophy, imagery, peace and bong politics, contempt for authority, quite natural. My parents were of course incomprehending fools, and the neighbor's son with the loud guitar was "far out". Pursuit of cool and hip was as transparent for me as the air I was breathing, until I became cognizant enough to start wondering, as a freshly minted teenager, that all those cool and hip dudes who were a good five, ten or fifteen year older than I, and professed the motto "Don't trust anyone over 30", will at some point become 30 and then what will they do?
This was perhaps a trivial conundrum for many but it was the first thing that truly bothered me about this entire 60s rebellion thing. I mean, if you stop just for a moment and examine your own statement, you have to realize that you are painting yourself into a corner here. So people who subscribed to that were either non-serious or sold their souls for a good sounding phrase to justify their rebelling.
So I grew into adulthood being suspicious about "the 60s thing" and concluded a long time ago that it was more about narcissistic posturing than about true substance. Now I am a rightwing hatemonger misogynist, having reached the natural end point of the development that had started way back at that time, posting on Salon just to "epater les liberals".
And yet, now myself well over 30 as well, I see that people who became adults before the 60s and those who became adults afterwards, are different in some basic ways. I think there have been less differences within the generations following the 60s than across the "60s divide" and again the generations before were more similar again. I don't know when another great divide will occur, maybe today's teenagers who are growing up with the instant mass connection to their peers via the social internet sites will have a mentality that ultimately will be different enough from ours so as not to trust anyone over 30.