Letters to the Editor
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Of course the Sixties accomplished nothing - they killed our leaders
I graduated from Berkeley High School in 1968 - need I say more? :)
I'm afraid that much of the excess of the sixties was a revolt and a reaction against a culture that had allowed the killers of our beloved President John Kennedy get away unscathed. Lest we forget, there was a vast consensus building across the nation for economic and social justice and to end the war in Vietnam (closing supply lines of heroin from the golden triangle).
The powers that be were very nervous. Robert Kennedy would have been our next president. Dr. King could have easily beaten Obama to the Oval Office as the first black president by thirty years ... but they were killed and the same forces were behind their deaths ... and Richard Nixon, mob-friendly Darth Vader of 20th century American politics was promptly installed into the presidency.
The mafia? Wall street? Texas and Louisiana oilmen? Jimmy Hoffa? Sam Giancana? The military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned our country about? All of the above?
Do you think that karma doesn't apply to countries as well as people? That what is sown is what is reaped? You wonder why the dollar is worth 43 cents? That our country is so far in the crapper thanks to the policies of the thieves and moneymen and their republican power-fellators that we may never get out?
It's easy to slam the sixties. Of course we didn't accomplish anything. We were just kids.
I wrote a song about. You can buy it online soon, it is the title song of my cd, Pop Down The Years. I know, I love quoting myself. Here:
So they told the tale of the golden sun
And the shining girl who lived within
So pretty
I'll go now
I know now
Just where to find her
So the story goes we wore the clothes
To make it seem all possible
The hope it was
All gone now
So long now
But not forgottenChorus:
We tried so hard to make it come true
A perfect dream, sun bouncing, sky blue
Pop down the years, still shining on you
Translucent songs that made the world newThose summer days, your sweet perfume
Just filled the air with magic
A symphony
So bright now
All light now
They watched us dancing.
A slip of time, a ray of sun
A floating song from a perfect world
And endless love
How softly
How sadly
Young hearts were brokenWe tried so hard to make it come true
A perfect dream, sun bouncing, sky blue
Pop down the years, still shining on you
Translucent songs that made our love new******************
There was nothing wrong with our naive idealism. It just never stood a chance against the cold men and their money and their guns.
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Utter Nonsense!
Gary Kamiya’s article is proof of the pudding. So powerful were the undercurrents of the ‘60’s that the reactionary backlash still continues fifty years later.
“Make love, not war.” “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Let’s go.
“Make love, not war.” The Hippies were right. The Vietnam War was phony from the get-go. Then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, admitted (30 years after the fact), that, “We were mistaken.”
“Mistaken?” WTF?
The Gulf of Tonkin “incident” and “resolution” proved to be a concoction and a lie that led American sheep into the tragedy of Vietnam.
56,000 men and women gave their lives to that lie. They are to be honored, not blamed. Our then political leaders are to blame for trashing American lives for nothing but a monument in D.C. For what? So tourists can sip drinks on the terrace of the Hanoi Hilton five decades later?
That’s all. That’s what the war was all about. The Hippies were right all along. They never “spat” at returning soldiers. Not one documented case. MSM set about deconstructing the Hippies then, as they do now. More lies, to compound the original ugly, tragic lie.
The Vietnam war was bullshit. Sorry if you lost somebody there, as I did. Cloak it in whatever “patriotic” robes you like: It was and remains a sham waste of millions of human lives.
The Hippies were right about that war.
“Make love?” Hell, yes. The Hippies initiated the Sexual Revolution, ongoing today. They punctured the prevalent “Leave It To Beaver” religious hypocrisy of the times. The Hippies’ chink in the conservative religious armor reverberates still, in the worldwide declining church attendance and “faith” – ever-more-viciously fought by religious powers-that-be as the internet spreads the ugly truth about mythical religions for anybody who cares to Google.
“Love the one you’re with.” Oops! The Hippies were right again. Sex as a natural extension of love – same-sex or opposite sex. They never advocated sexual abuse or child abuse. Just loving interactions with consenting adults.
Big Deal to religionists to this day, who want to control individuals’ love and sex lives and reproductive choices. Not working out for the reactionaries.
That, too, was due to the Hippies. And all that’s ensued, from Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court striking down the Texas sodomy law.
The Hippies’ revolutionary and continuing influence on music, films and the arts? Politics? Fine. Ignore it and look like an idiot.
The Hippies’ ongoing influence fifty years on is frightening to people like Gary Kamiya.
Why? Because the Hippies told the truth. They protested lies and hypocrisy in massive groups. They gained national, cultural attention. They still tell the truth. They still gain national, international, cultural attention – as witness their offspring seizing the Olympic Torch in protest of China’s oppression of Tibet.
Again, the Hippies are right.
“Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Timothy Leary’s call for youth to do drugs (marijuana, peyote, mescaline and LSD – but not crack, meth, etc.) and “tune in” to alternate perspectives, new visions, new thinking, and “drop out” of hidebound religious dogma?
Again, the Hippies were right. The drugs Leary advocated were ALL drugs used in various religious cultures (as opposed to crack, meth, etc., which were unknown in his day.) His point was that they were methods to expedite breaking through centuries of religious brainwashing and see life anew.
He was right. (Ask Cary Grant, et al.)
A generation did just that. Dropped out of blind conformity. Whether through drugs, or knowing friends who dropped out through drugs. Whatever. The end result is the same: A generation dropped out of the “culture” and became the “counterculture.”
The reviled Hippie “counterculture” has only grown exponentially. Now we have the “culture wars.” Worldwide.
The Hippies are still right. They fought bigotry of all stripes, ignorance, theocracy, totalitarianism, passive conformity. They still do.
Globally, “culture” (which is to say the conservative death-worshipping traditionalists of whatever stripes) inexorably yields to “counterculture” (which is to say the progressive “Hippie” life-affirming evolutionaries).
Death and the Dead inevitably yield to Life and the Living.
The Hippies were, and always have been, right. Shoot the messenger. The messenger’s still right.
Gary Kamiya’s silly backlash article, which completely ignores the larger epochal facts, proves the point.