Trapped in a library somewhere in the United States, our correspondent's only means of communication is...
My Word's Worth
FLOWER CHILDREN
I don't know how much attention you in England bother to pay to the
blatherings of our Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. But if you've
listened to him at all, you will have gathered that the fall of western
civilization is entirely attributable to the 1960's, when baby boomers
rioted in the streets, burned bras and draft cards, did pot and LSD, and
discovered sex and The Pill simultaneously; it was also when Big Government
decided it could run people's lives better than they could.
And this man got a Ph.D. in history! (Of course, he himself talks about how
dramatically our educational standards have declined.)
You see, I was there at the time, just a tad ahead of the baby boomers, and
I don't recognize Newt's 1960's. For me, the '60's were a golden time. We
were young and full of energy and ideals and optimism and, yes, a kind of
revolting self-righteousness. As Janis Ian sang, "We were gonna make the
whole world honest."
The sixties started with the election of a young man. Granted, he was still
old enough to be our father. But a man with a young, beautiful, pregnant
wife--a president who was demonstrably Doing It in the Lincoln bedroom. (Of
course, at the time, we didn't know he was Doing It every place in the
western hemisphere.) It was a startling idea for us, a president who was
young and vigorous and still had all his hair.
Looking back, it seems like hair was a running symbol of the decade:
The President, and his brother, with that thick, long, shaggy hair.
Jackie Kennedy, with her bouffant hairdo.
My first civil rights protest, a demonstration outside a barber shop
that refused to cut the hair of blacks.
Girls growing their hair halfway down their backs, and, if it was
unfashionably curly, ironing it.
The musical, Hair
Guys growing their hair long, and growing seedy-looking beards to go
with it.
(Since many of our male friends were doing the long hair thing, I used to
cut their hair for them--I was the only one they could trust to cut it short
enough so their mothers knew they had made the effort, but leave it long
enough so that they didn't look like marines. There were barbers in those
days, not hairdressers.)
When Kennedy was assassinated, our generation never really recovered. We
saw plotters everywhere we looked. We saw Cubans and CIA agents and Mafia
dons and conservatives who all hated Kennedy, and our theories incorporated
all of them. We made conspiracy books best-sellers, and became instant
experts on the grassy knoll, and the amount of time between shots, and
angles of fire. Many of us looked at the world the way filmmaker Oliver
Stone still does.
But we didn't really distrust the federal government, because the federal
government was correcting the racial injustice of centuries. Not by choice,
not without enormous prodding, to be sure--governments would always rather
administer an unjust status quo than deal with the instability that justice
would bring.
Civil rights was our first great cause. Many of us white kids had never
much thought about the matter. It seemed to us the natural order of things,
that white kids hung out with white kids, black kids with black, that we
lived in nice houses and they lived in shabby tenements in ugly parts of
town we were ordered to stay away from.
When Martin Luther King started preaching those incredibly powerful words,
we began to understand that this was a manmade order, and an unjust one.
When the NAACP and other civil rights groups began their peaceful protests,
and white sheriffs responded with bulldogs and billyclubs, we were appalled.
We had believed in those American ideas--freedom, justice, opportunity--and
for the first time we realized how far short we fell of achieving them. The
Civil Rights act passed in 1964 because we, as a nation, recognized that the
federal government had to protect all citizens' rights--because the states
could not be trusted to.
The civil rights movement may have been our downfall. The cause was so
obviously just, and it was won with (what seemed to white kids, anyway) such
incredible swiftness, that it maybe set our expectations a little too high,
made us think that other causes could be won as quickly, could be just as
universally recognized as correct. But the problem is, we didn't all agree
on what those next causes should be.
For many of us, the next cause was Viet Nam. Would this have been such an
obviously wrongheaded war to us if so many of us were not eligible for the
draft? Probably not. We were human, and self-interest clearly affected our
perceptions. But the fact that we, or the men we loved, were vulnerable to
the draft made us look a lot harder at the government's reasons for the war,
and the military's behavior in prosecuting it, and the more we learned, the
more we hated the war, the more we distrusted our government.
For others, the cause was drugs. After all, the Pentagon Papers showed us
how routinely and automatically the government lied about the war, so why
should we believe what it told us about drugs? The government-sponsored,
bizarrely overacted films about how marijuana inevitably led one to hopeless
addiction, craziness and death became overnight camp classics.
Having been raised to be a good little girl, I never got into drugs. For
me, it had been too long and hard a struggle to become fully conscious and
aware, and I hated the idea of turning my brain over to unknown chemical
forces. The whole idea scared me silly.
But my friends were experimenting with the stuff. The drugs seemed to me
not that different in effect from perfectly legal alcohol. They could be
harmless social lubricants that helped shy uncertain people loosen up in
social situations, or they could bring out mean and hostile parts of
people's personalities. Drugs could bring you in touch with parts of your
mind and spirit you never knew were there, or they could keep you in a
continuous stupor so that you never had to face yourself or your problems.
To me, drugs were a social experiment that didn't work out all that well.
But they were also a significantly different kind of cause. When we fought
for civil rights, we were fighting for the rights of others, and for the
greater good of society. When we protested against Viet Nam, we fought to
make our government live up to its own ideals.
But when some of us made drugs into a cause, we were seen as fighting for
the right to self-indulgence. Coupled with the fact that the Pill had made
casual, undiscriminating sex safe and commonplace, it made us look not like
principled protesters but spoiled brats.
This probably had a lot to do with why our parents' generation really
started disliking us. They had suvived a depression, and fought an
unbelievably gory war to give us freedom and a chance for the good life.
They had denied theselves a lot of luxuries in order to buy safe homes in
the suburbs and save for our college educations. And in return for their
generosity, we told them that they were hypocrites, that their gods were
false, that traditional morality was too constricting, and that we were far
better, freer people than they were.
What a bunch of twits. Of course they hated us. Of course Rosemary's
Baby was a hit, both as book and movie--it told people that when normal
well-meaning parents produced monstrous children, it was NOT THEIR FAULT;
the devil did it.
But the sixties didn't ruin us. Far from it. The legacy of the sixties
includes the enactment of racial equality before the law--an unmixed social
good. It includes the notion of the full equality of women--a more mixed
sort of notion, because it upset so many more applecarts. It includes
Medicare, and a generally improved quality of life for our elderly. It
includes the full participation of handicapped citizens in public life. It
includes the idea that, if people are old enough to be sent to fight a war,
they are old enough to vote on whether there should be a war in the first place.
All of this is certainly part of what I loved about the time. But I was
also young and in love, just married, with a circle of friends who loved
me--enough so that, for the first time in my life, I began to believe that
maybe I was lovable. I was teaching, and discovering that I was really good
at it. My friends and I were working for various causes, and we felt that
what we did mattered. We felt important.
That's not a bad thing. I've gotten older, and a little morre realistic
about the size and depth of the problems I want to solve, a little more
understanding of the people I have to challenge along the way. But the
sixties taught me that big change mostly happens slowly. I learned to
celebrate the small victories along the way. And I learned to forgive
people for almost anything but meanness.
I was never a flower child. Bit I bloomed in the sixties. And I still love
the soil that I was planted in.
Please feel free to send any comments on this column to Marylaine Block
Previous Columns: Me and a Book, Never Middle Aged, Legal Speech, Stupid Speech, To Find or Not To Find, We Will Rock You, America in 9 Innings, Thank The Ludd, Target Market, Naming Names, Something Amyth , In Praise of Men, Small Truths , White Whine, Draft Dodger, Tar Baby, Sensible Lizards, Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map, Don't just stand there..., Remotely Funny, No Government Day, Advice For Desperate Men, Why Kids
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