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I was in my early 20s in the 1960s, and remember it all vividly. It was the most extraordinary series of human liberations that has ever occurred, in such a short space of time, and, really, who knows how/why that happened. I go back and forth, at times thinking that it was an intervention from the spirit world, that just suddenly awakened many people all at once, and at other times, that perhaps it was a function of human evolution creating what human beings needed for our survival--the ideas, talents and full creative energies of many different people, unimprisoned by bigotry and convention. There have been explosions of creativity and progress at other times in human history, and, of course, when we look back--through the written history and other means (art work, etc.)--we tend to telescope the time scale of changes, and think of them as sudden, when they were not really. A comparable age might be the Golden Age of Greece, which lasted only 50 years. But in the '60s, we're talking about a FIVE YEAR PERIOD, 1967 to 1972--or, at most, a 10 year period (1965 to 1975)--during which it SUDDENLY became UNTHINKABLE to be having "whites only" drinking fountains in the south, and denial of voting rights, and other horrors that, prior to mid-1960s, were quietly accepted as NORMAL, and during which a topic that, in my youth, did not even have a WORD that could be spoken in polite society (homosexuality)--"the love that dare not speak its name" (Oscar Wilde, if I recall correctly), emerged from the ruins of Greek and British civilization and was brought to the consciousness of society in general as just another way for humans to BE (or was well on its way to that status), and women...oh my...I can chronicle the changes for women in one year: 1963 to 1964. One year, I was in bra, girdle, nylon stockings with seams up the back that had to be kept straight, three inch high (or higher) pointed high heels, white gloves, starch-sprayed bouffant hairdo, lipstick, eye makeup and other beautifications that took hours of application and constant renewal, shaved legs and armpits, and on and on, and it's not that these things were good or bad, it's that you had NO CHOICE. You were not a person; you were a presentation--and the best thing you could imagine for your life was to be able to help your husband to do well in HIS career. 1963. And the next year: all was choice.
Maybe it was the JFK assassination (Nov. '63). Or the Beatles (shortly after that--April '64) I don't know. But SOMETHING happened. It took only a few years, then, for open minds to begin applying themselves to the unlimited possibilities of what it meant to be a human being.
How did this happen--so suddenly--to a whole generation? You tell me. Another precedent that comes to mind is the Roaring 20s--the "flapper" era, in which women rebelled against the very severe strictures of Victorian and Edwardian society (and fashions), and some progress was also made (or begun) on black human and civil rights, and labor rights. It was a short period, less than a decade. However, it was sandwiched between two horrendous wars--maybe related to them (massive blood sacrifice releasing human creative energies? I don't know, it's a thought)--and ended with the Great Depression. It was short-lived, while the huge advances of the 1960s have lasted for more than forty years, and reversal of them seems unimaginable. Not that the fascists aren't trying. But I think one of their problems is that they are not sincere. The greedbags and mass murderers and torturers of the Bush Junta are not "conservative." They are global corporate predators, who only mouth socially fascist ideas, and use "Christian values" or "family values," for purposes of looting everybody. Thus, what might be a rightwing social regression is short-circuited. The 1920s were in some ways precursor to the 1960s, but the changes in the 1960s were much, much bigger and more profound. These Bushite hypocrites cannot reverse them. I don't know what could, except maybe the total collapse of western civilization (--which the Bushites seem to be working hard to achieve, whether by bankruptcy or global warming, or both).
I haven't even mentioned Vietnam yet. This was another enormous leap of consciousness. There are certainly precedents for society's revulsion at a pointless war (a major cause of the fall of the Tsar in Russia), but I don't think there has ever been such a massive revolt by one generation against its elders, on this issue. To the previous generation, it was "unmanly" not to offer yourself up as cannon fodder, for whatever purpose your elders were agreed upon. When the rebellion began, it was like a civil war between fathers and sons, and young women were also involved, in this sudden revulsion at the idea that human beings should be forced to kill, or be put in harm's way, for an abstract notion like "anti-communism." What had the Vietnamese done to harm us? Nothing! It stung the political establishment hard, and terrified the "military-industrial" complex ("make love, not war!"--what if THAT were to catch on?! horrors!), and, if we had been a smarter, or wiser, generation, we would have taken the opportunity to dismantle the war machine, then and there.
That's what should have been done. But we were too young to realize it, or accomplish it, and the war industry had great reserves of power and entrenchment to protect itself with. The upshot of that failure, forty years later, is the hijacking of the U.S. military for a corporate resource war, and the bankrupting of the U.S. This was an appalling failure of my generation. And it was an appalling failure of the generation just before ours not to realize that the Vietnam War was not WW II. It was not a righteous war. It was a horrible genocide--in which two million Southeast Asians were slaughtered--for what? For wanting a better life! And 55,000 U.S. soldiers were killed--in a monstrous act of repression, both at home and in Southeast Asia. A military Draft, in the hands of war profiteers and global corporate predators, is SLAVERY of the worst kind. Slavery and tyranny! The conscription going on today, without a Draft, is yet worse, because it is disguised.
The Vietnam War was why, in February 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, 56% of the American people already knew it was wrong, and opposed it. (All polls show this.) 56%! The PEOPLE had "learned the lessons of Vietnam." But the war profiteers were bound and determined to have their looting expedition anyway, and have rigged the voting machines to keep it going. (They did it at the same time, actually--the Iraq War Resolution and the Rigged Voting Machines Act--aka the "Help America Vote Act." October 2002. It was the latter bill that WAS the fascist coup.)
1967. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. 1972. Watergate (although we didn't know it quite yet--Nixon resigned in 1973). Five years--in which American society, and western civilization, were changed forever, it is to be hoped. Never to return to "the closet," never to return to state-sponsored racial segregation and bigotry, never to return to the Barbie Doll concept of women that we were all forced to live "up" to. But war may be the hardest of all fascist prisons to break out of. It seems so. We might as well be the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, for all the power we have to stop this war machine. We pay for it. But it isn't ours. And we really shouldn't congratulate ourselves on any achievements of the 1960s, until we restore our democratic power over the U.S. military, our tax dollars and our politicians.
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