Were Baby Boomers Really The Worst?
Many people are looking fondly back to 1950s and want to re-create them. I caution them against doing that. If you re-create 1950s, you will re-create the conditions that led to 1960s; which means that you will be met with something like 1960s down the road in one or another form.
It is said that the people who fail to learn from experience are doomed to repeat it. The people who see 1960s as an anomaly have not studied history. The Romantic Era that followed Enlightenment and the early 20th century that followed Victorianism both carried many of the themes that took place in 1960s. The 1960s do not have a monopoly on these themes. It wasn't the first time that they were tried, nor will they be the last.
I attended a private Anglican school on a full scholarship. I was a star student for some time, then I started acting like a 1960s teenager. This was highly disturbing to some in the administration. They thought that the baby boomers were a bad crop, and that only they behaved that way. They were wrong. Not many people in my generation took the route of the baby boomers. The young people these days, however, have a lot in common with the baby boomers of that time. They are passionate about big issues, they take a strong stance against corruption and oppression, and many of them are attracted to the same beliefs to which the baby boomers were attracted when they were younger.
I get tired of people attacking the people who had been a part of the 1960s. I've known a number of them, and I was impressed with what I found. I want these people to have a legacy that lasts after they are gone.
Many people want the World War II generation to have a strong legacy; and that is fine. There was much good about that generation; but let us not be under any illusion that they were all that gen-Xers think them to be. I've known any number of baby boomers whose World War II generation parents raped them or murdered their siblings. It was also the people in that generation that were attracted to ideologies such as Nazism. They were strong and hard-working; they were also brutal and authoritarian. These qualities win wars; they also start them.
Were baby boomers, as many gen-Xers claim, the worst generation? They include Steven Jobs, Colin Powell, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Woodward and any number of other admirable individuals. Some of them were bad parents; but some were excellent parents. I am good friends with a baby boomer who has raised three very healthy and highly successful children, one of whom started a multi-billion-dollar company. He has kept true to the 1960s ideals while becoming a successful entrepreneur; and in his retirement he has created, from his own resources, a huge political information website to inform the voters about the candidates that they will face.
He is not the only admirable baby boomer I know. I know a woman who has been a teacher, a journalist, an MD and an editor of a bestseller by a premier American scientist, and who is presently fighting corruption in the medical system while being a successful entrepreneur. I know another woman who was a headmistress of a private school for 30 years and turned it from a place where bullying and abuse was common to a much more humane, and highly respected, institution. I know eminent professors, brilliant psychologists, and first-rate artists who are baby boomers. Maybe the gen-Xers who hate baby boomers do not know these people; I however do.
So no, 1960s was not an anomaly, and baby boomers are not the scum of the earth that gen-Xers regard them to be. There is much that is right about both. If social conservatives try to re-create 1950s, they have not learned their lesson from history. They will be met with the same themes that took place in 1960s. And that hardly works in their best interests.
It is said that the people who fail to learn from experience are doomed to repeat it. The people who see 1960s as an anomaly have not studied history. The Romantic Era that followed Enlightenment and the early 20th century that followed Victorianism both carried many of the themes that took place in 1960s. The 1960s do not have a monopoly on these themes. It wasn't the first time that they were tried, nor will they be the last.
I attended a private Anglican school on a full scholarship. I was a star student for some time, then I started acting like a 1960s teenager. This was highly disturbing to some in the administration. They thought that the baby boomers were a bad crop, and that only they behaved that way. They were wrong. Not many people in my generation took the route of the baby boomers. The young people these days, however, have a lot in common with the baby boomers of that time. They are passionate about big issues, they take a strong stance against corruption and oppression, and many of them are attracted to the same beliefs to which the baby boomers were attracted when they were younger.
I get tired of people attacking the people who had been a part of the 1960s. I've known a number of them, and I was impressed with what I found. I want these people to have a legacy that lasts after they are gone.
Many people want the World War II generation to have a strong legacy; and that is fine. There was much good about that generation; but let us not be under any illusion that they were all that gen-Xers think them to be. I've known any number of baby boomers whose World War II generation parents raped them or murdered their siblings. It was also the people in that generation that were attracted to ideologies such as Nazism. They were strong and hard-working; they were also brutal and authoritarian. These qualities win wars; they also start them.
Were baby boomers, as many gen-Xers claim, the worst generation? They include Steven Jobs, Colin Powell, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Woodward and any number of other admirable individuals. Some of them were bad parents; but some were excellent parents. I am good friends with a baby boomer who has raised three very healthy and highly successful children, one of whom started a multi-billion-dollar company. He has kept true to the 1960s ideals while becoming a successful entrepreneur; and in his retirement he has created, from his own resources, a huge political information website to inform the voters about the candidates that they will face.
He is not the only admirable baby boomer I know. I know a woman who has been a teacher, a journalist, an MD and an editor of a bestseller by a premier American scientist, and who is presently fighting corruption in the medical system while being a successful entrepreneur. I know another woman who was a headmistress of a private school for 30 years and turned it from a place where bullying and abuse was common to a much more humane, and highly respected, institution. I know eminent professors, brilliant psychologists, and first-rate artists who are baby boomers. Maybe the gen-Xers who hate baby boomers do not know these people; I however do.
So no, 1960s was not an anomaly, and baby boomers are not the scum of the earth that gen-Xers regard them to be. There is much that is right about both. If social conservatives try to re-create 1950s, they have not learned their lesson from history. They will be met with the same themes that took place in 1960s. And that hardly works in their best interests.
Comments (76)
That said, a key success of the sixties is that today's younger generations take the more open society created during that era for granted, and are largely unable to imagine society without the social changes the sixties unleashed.
I would give the hippy boomer folks (of which I am one) high marks for the more open society changes, but on larger more important issues such as the climate and nuclear weapons, we blew it.
But to be fair to we boomers, today's younger generation is repeating some of our mistakes. Not on climate so much, but for sure on nuclear weapons, the most significant threat to everything they hold dear.
Here's the proof. Watch the upcoming 2020 election through this lens. PRESIDENTIAL election. There will be round the clock blabber on every channel for over a year, and nuclear weapons will barely be mentioned. We boomers are on our way out, so such insanity can not be blamed entirely on us.
Donald Dump, or any president, can order a massive nuclear strike with a single phone call. He doesn't have to get the approval of Congress, he doesn't have to consult with the chain of command, or any other advisors. He can bring on the end of the world all by himself, and the generals and other big shots won't even know it's happening until they see the out going missiles on their radar screens.
And yet....
We are totally bored by this subject and can't be bothered to discuss it, even in a Presidential election where everybody is looking for some edge over somebody else.
Boomers didn't invent insanity, and younger generations have not transcended it.
Interesting how racism never made that list.
I am an oddball though. My parents had me at quite a late age, so I wasn't raised by boomers. My older brothers and sisters, with whom I did not grow up, were boomers. So I was a gen-Xer raised by silent generation parents. My parents were still clinging to 1950s values when I grew up. So my life in some ways was like that of a delayed boomer. I often felt like that, like I was the last of the boomers or something, and not really fitting in anywhere. So my perspective might be skewed.
My peers never had to resist such an old-fashioned, conformist father. My dad still hated rock music and long hair on men perhaps more than anything! Naturally, I was a headbanger! And if he didn't get The Beatles, he really didn't get Metallica! But he was old and tired by then and so at least didn't beat me over it all like he did my older brothers. He was pretty much retired to the recliner and TV. And seeing what happened with my elder siblings, I never let him find out about my drug experimentation. That might have gotten him out of the chair!
Which conditions are we talking about here?
Are we talking about the feverish anti-communism of the 1950s, or about the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg (waving genitals and manuscripts)? Ayn Rand or Jack Kerouac? Are we talking about William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (collectivist management) or The Cather In The Rye? Are we talking about The Bomb or the massive post-war housing program building the new suburbs? Are we talking Leave it to Beaver or the Mattachine Society and the beginnings of gay liberation?
Quoting Ilya B Shambat
Slicing the centuries into decades is natural but it doesn't work very well. The push from above for more control and the counter-push from below for more openness is a constant. The hippies of the 60s, the anti-war demonstrators, the beards and long hair, free love -- all that -- didn't characterize the larger population of even those between 16 and 24, all those on the coasts, and so on. If it seemed like everybody was a hippy, it was because the hippies were associating mostly with each other.
Deviant groups (like hippies, homosexuals, high-church Anglicans, communists, KKK) tend to operate within a social membrane. What one sees, hears, experiences within the social membrane is quite different that what one will see, hear, and experience when one steps out of the membrane.
- "WHY are you leaving the lights on, Akanthinos?"
- "Why do you feel you have the right to even make a sound about environmental consciousness after a lifetime carreer in house construction?"
Gen Xers are also terrible, but like everyone after the Boomers, they can claim that this is caused by the trauma of being raised by such incompetent asswipes. Xillenials (79-86) are probably the best positionned not to become complete waste of skins. They grew up in a world where tech didnt prevale everywhere yet, so their childhood was still "normal", but it came about as they came into adolescence and early adulthood, so they arent left in the dust like most boomers.
Millenials and Zs are going to end the world. And they'll enjoy it. Half of the fucking movies targeted at that audience are about kids unapologetically murdering their classmates and posting it on instagram for views. It doesnt even have the veneer of comedy and absurdity that came with shit like Going Postal or Hobo with a Shotgun. Just fucking Suicide-girls lookalike (because you also need to be titillated as you watch brains get splattered) playing Mean Girls but with AR-15, with the tag line "why are you butthurt? Its just a movie, lol!".
And LIKE our parents who were born in the 1920s (to be old enough to serve in WWII) we were not actually in charge. The decision to go to war in 1917 (for the US, anyway) and 1941, to build the atomic bomb, to organize the massive armament program, to bring 16,000,000 men into the army (11% of the population), and so on was made at the top, of course. These decisions were not made by popular vote. I'm not criticizing the WWII 'greatest generation' in any way here. Just that they performed admirably where they were sent and put.
"The People" weren't in charge of major decisions in 1941, 1951, 1961, and at many other times.
Good question. Akanthinos, go to your room and stay there until we call you.
Spoken like someone who still thinks he wasnt all along part of the problem.
- "I was a great capitalist drone all my life, I reproduced my labour value and I accumulated wealth. How dare you imply I am not an excellent individual and that my lifestyle is inherently directed by the death drive of society?"
Unlike the essay written in 1995, I'm guessing you wrote this one in the early to mid-70s?
I want to make sure I understand what you mean when you say
"I was a great capitalist drone all my life, I reproduced my labour value and I accumulated wealth. How dare you imply I am not an excellent individual and that my lifestyle is inherently directed by the death drive of society?"
Looks like you mean for this to be a clever paraphrase of what I wrote. Ha! I like that. I think I'll do the same for you. How's this?
"I am a dick."
Did I get that right? I've been gone for a while. Are we still allowed to call people "dicks."
True, no one is innocent. The end result of all Boomer politics is the proliferation of gated communities guarded by AR-15 toting private police. The difference between reactionnary and woke Boomer politics is weither or not those communities will have all-inclusive bathrooms, will allow transgender and women in their private police, and weither or not recycling is popular.
Welcome to Hellworld!
Sorry things got too real for your geriatric ass... :kiss:
The gated community phenomenon you describe is a hell-world kind of thing, for sure. Just be aware that not all boomers (people between 1945 and 1965 give or take a year) engage in the same dreary politics. Some of us have been contrarians from the getgo and have found our fellow boomerang's preferences to be quite appalling.
Women and transsexuals can be on the gated community security force if they display the requisite knee jerk viciousness (and a healthy inclination to use force) needed to protect the residents of such places. As far as I am concerned, let's just say no to all inclusive bathrooms. As for recycling, do it or ELSE.
I really dont think you could have chosen a better piece to showcase your outdatedness. :up:
"I really dont think you could have chosen a better piece to showcase your outdatedness"
So - "outdated," "geriatric". Seems like you might be intimating that older people don't deserve the respect other people do.
Or have I misunderstood?
That’s a big statement, and also an incredible generalisation.
‘Baby boomers’ is such a loose, inaccurate term. It refers to people born in a particular period, that’s all. But somehow it’s come to mean something about their behaviour and attitudes. It was a period of great diversity among people that age. Some of them got mortgages, some went university and got their degree and went on to work in the corporate sector, some dropped out and went and lived on communes and tried to develop a different way of living together, some committed themselves to resisting the government and big business, some entered politics, some became writers and recorded the times, some formed groups that sought to make change with bombings, some formed a united front against police harassment in the ghettoes, some went to prison, some went to Vietnam, some didn’t and went to Canada, some developed ideas about women in society, some about gays in society, some worked on the space program, some went to Africa to do volunteer work, some went to Cuba to join the revolution, some hoped there would be a revolution in America, some went to Salvador to help and were raped and murdered and left on the side of the road, some raised families, some hoped the next generation would be better. Get it!
Edit: But it’s quite clear where we did fail.
You know it was on the list. What sort of thing is that to say?
Because not all people didn't think racism was bad, especially during that time...
You know it was on the list. Of course not everyone thought it was a bad thing. That’s why so many made it an issue.
Jesus fucking christ, are you really going to claim that Boomers solved racism in America? Yeah, try and claim the Million Man march for the boomers, just to see how black folks react to that one... In the meantime you still left us a world in which hospitals increasingly adopt the practice of charging 39.95 for the service of allowing parents to hold their newborns.
Any self-respecting and self-aware boomer would admit firsthand that he and his generations failed the social revolution that HAD to happen after the 50s.
Is that a claim that I made?
Most of the WWII generation did not save the world from Nazism, most baby boomers did not protest racism, and most Gen Xers did not fight to save the planet. So, to the OP who poses the question of whether the baby boomers sucked, sure they did. They sat around and got high, screwed around like bunny rabbits, tuned in and dropped out, and made us forget what made us great. They also passed civil rights legislation that gave African American full rights as Americans. There is plenty of good and bad to be said of each generation. I, for example, am a stellar example of excellence in an age of mediocrity.
Nah, they realized that it (Great America) fully sucked, so they turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. This resulted in progress that half the nation doesn’t want, for some unfathomable reason.
What an odd idea. You think baby boomers were only white.
That’s Brett. Making us all uncomfortably aware of our own internal biases. :lol: :up:
Okay, that did make me laugh. We're fucked anyway, unless we all make [I]big[/I] changes, and make them [i]fast[/I]. So, whether you, Akanthinos, leave the lights on is trivial with the bigger picture in mind.
But the hippies of the sixties were great in my opinion. It was before my time: I was born in the late eighties. But I love the philosophy, the music, the fashion, the lifestyle, the icons. :victory:
And why not?
I get the distinct impression from some that ‘baby boomers’ really means ‘privileged white males’.
Was that meant to be a reply to me? If so, then I commend you for your efforts. Sometimes we need to hear these things so we can become aware of them. Only when we are aware of our biases can we address them.
Quoting Maw
No, it was aimed at Maw.
Yep. I’ve made up my mind. That’s the role I will give you. Now, into the world with you, lad! :grin:
How civilised you are.
I resent that, speaking as a white trash redneck. :blush:
I shouldn’t have to do this, but here goes:
The March on Washington. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.
On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery March to protest the killing of a black civil rights activist by a white police officer and encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.
The Black Panthers, also known as the Black Panther Party, was a political organisation founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
The Young Lords,Young Lords Organisation (YLO),Young Lords Party, and later again Young Lords, is a national civil and human rights movement. It was officially transformed from a Chicago turf gang under the leadership of Jose Cha Cha Jimenez on September 23, 1968,
The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s.
The National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers union, UFW).
During their medal ceremony in the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City in on October 16, 1968, African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist during the playing of the US national anthem, “The Star- Spangled Banner”.
Malcolm X. Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI) and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) to emphasise Pan-Africanism.
Nor were the events of the sixties and seventies specifically American. It happened all over the world.
For instance:
The Soweto uprising, a series of demonstrations and protests led by black school children in South Africa that began on the morning of 16 June 1976.
And on the other side, Jose Cha Cha Jimenez?
I wish I could be white.
You’re not living up to the charter I drafted for you. Remember? Besides, being white trash isn’t all that great.
Unless you’re really into NASCAR for instance.
The Boomers didnt invent the counterculture, they just jumped on the bandwagon. Musically, Boomers were more likely to have contributed to post-'60's trends like punk, disco and new wave.
"The young people these days, however, have a lot in common with the baby boomers of that time. They are passionate about big issues, they take a strong stance against corruption and oppression, and many of them are attracted to the same beliefs to which the baby boomers were attracted when they were younger."
To the extent that has any meaning beyond a broad generallzation, that would be precisely why the young people these days are exactly the opposite of the vanguard of the counterculture.
The measure of a movement's significance is bound up with how strongly it departs form the norms of the previous establishment. The norms handed down by the 60's counterculture(thinking outside the box, political activism, etc) have become the very definition of establishment thinking, which is =why so many millenialls and Z'ers still admire so much about the hippies. A social revolution as radicallizing as what took place 50 years ago would have to discover a new fork in the road that leaves behind the by-now stale , stifling 5 decade old rhetorical tropes that contemporary activists conform to.
Generational speach is not strictly 'generational', at least not just biopolitical. It refers also (and mostly) to the material conditions that came to be historically associated with those cohorts. That is why its relevant to distinguish between Gen Xers and Xillenials, and again between Xillenials and Millenials. While they are part of the same generational years, the material and formative conditions of their youth and early adulthood were significantly altered by their position in regards to the technological media revolution. I dont know why or how, but mass media's reach has become so great that it is now culturally relevant to distinguish between those who grew up in the golden years of the Simpsons and those who had to submit their brains to the filth of Family Guy's later seasons as a preteen.
So, no, 'blacks' werent specifically boomers. Or perhaps more accurately, black folks had conditions that were so specific to them that while they marked their times significantly, they didn't become a major engine of change as Boomers, or as part of the Boomer pathos, but rather as black folks. Boomers coopted (and continue to do so ever since) the language and history of the Black social mouvement because it conveniently fits their purpose and timeline.
As for hippies being cool, no, that is exactly my point. Hippies werent cool. Just about every single good impulse they had was actually fuelled by a barely conceiled libidinal forces. If they really wanted to set up viable alternatives to the capitalist lifestyle, their communes would at some point managed to set a working command economy with a functional yet fair distribution of labour, not the vectors for chlamydia infection that they pretty all ended up being. THAT is why the 'sexual revolution' basically consisted of lots of unsafe sex followed the acceptation of both the pharmaceutical corporate hold on sexuality, and this modern sexual lifestyle ethos which weirdly allows you to both have lots of uncommited sex AND yet doesnt constitute an obstacle to the capitalist need for productive and reproductive power. Because it was all about getting laid. "Yeah, ok, gays and lesbians can and probably should get laid too, so I guess we should fight for that too, but that'll come a bit after. Wait, what's a "in-ter-sex"...?". Once the social powers acknowledged that the sexual revolution had indeed happened and that they would divert their benevolent attention and open a market for it, hippies had no care in the world for pushing forward the sexual revolution agenda. That is also why its been left to the Zoomers to continue this agenda toward true sexual liberation. Sadly, Gen Xers and my generation were actually for the most part fooled into thinking the work had been done.
Obviously individuals are to be judged differently then mouvements. Kim Stanley Robinson, for example, is very often clearly guilty of being at the keyboard while horny. He's still a top tier hippie and a total bro.
What geo-media event was so significant that it would serve as a watershed between age groups in the last 40 years? Sorry, I don't buy the idea that the difference between The Simpsons (kneel and genuflect) and Family Guy (thumbs down) was of bio-political or geo-political significance.
Quoting Akanthinos
Gasp! Hippies weren't cool?
According to Signmund Freud (who was not a hippie, last time i checked) EVERYBODY'S impulses are driven by barely concealed libidinal forces. Makes sense to me.
Quoting Akanthinos
I was not aware that chlamydia infections were the #1 disease concern i the hippie communes. Seems unlikely. For one, there was no diagnostic test for Chlamydia at that time. For two, even after decades of the sexual revolution, chlamydia is not a dominant health concern (and in saying so, I'm not discounting the seriousness of chlamydial infection). It seems more likely that your average hippie would have been more affected by gonorrhea (clap, drip), which present more dramatically and quicker than chlamydia. For three, "safe sex" or "safer sex" was not a concept in the hippie era. That term became current in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, 1981-1991. Safe sex changed to safer sex changed to harm reduction changed to PREP or ... whatever they are calling it now.
Quoting Akanthinos
Well, yes -- they should get laid too. Maybe they were getting laid a bit too much. But gays getting laid was part and parcel of the first round of the sexual revolution in the 1960s-1970s. (The sexual revolution extended well into the 1970s.)
Quoting Akanthinos
Explain, please. This is a bit obscure.
Shared Material conditions are way too broad a metric to differentiate a multitude of world views within a generation, or even a family.
There’s no mention by you of specific ideologies embraced by hippie leaders , from zen to Marcuse to existentialism and Schopenhauer. This is the core of the diverse set of the ideas that did indeeed
represent a revolutionary break with precious social mores.
Since the music played a central role in spreading such ideas, it’s worth mentioning the amount of mutual borrowing and influence tha went back and forth between artists, black and white. Motown artists covered Dylan and the Beatles as much as the Stones covered Motown.
Huey Newton and the panthers incorporated yippie theater and subversive lsd inspired themes. James brown led to parliament funkadelic , and
Psychedleicized funk. Marvin Gaye embraces feeemlove and mysticism on ‘What’s going on’.
So there was much overlap in the direction of new ideas n put forth by black and white, despite the differences.
I wonder why people hate so much the 1950's. The 1950's was basically the decade that people would have lived in the 1940's if there would have been all that war and killing back then going on. I wonder how barbaric will people later think of us who were born in the late 20th Century when time goes on.
Yes, absolutely.
There was this very dismal generation in the 9th Century AD, but even they weren't as bad as the boomers. :death:
I seem to have lost the thread a bit here. What exactly are we saying was so bad, the worst, about the ‘boomers’?
For those of at least with some memory or knowledge of the 1950s, it wasn't a bad time. After all, what's not to like about a post-war boom? Houses being built, lots of guys going to college on VA benefits? The still-new Antibiotics? Millions of people getting married and starting families? Pretty much all good.
True, it was a bad time to have been a communist, or communist sympathizer in the 1930s or 1940s. The Army-McCarthy hearings on the infiltrations of communists and homosexuals into sensitive positions was definitely a chilling event. It wasn't a great time to be an out homosexual, either. We were, officially, sick--and fairly seriously sick, at that. On the other hand, all of the expulsions from the military of homosexuals at major ports (NYC, SF, LA) formed a critical mass of young gay men and women who as established adults by the late 1960s, would be the backbone of the gay community.
Was conformism any more of a dominant theme in American culture in 1955 than 1965 or 1975? Of course not. Group conformity and group deviance is pretty much a constant, always showing up in new costume.
What may have seemed like mass conformity to a person coming of age in 1990 and looking back, was the fact that the most of the parents of the Boomers (born before 1924, give or take a couple of years) were all relieved to be done with the depression and war, and were ready to rock and roll, even though rock and roll wasn't a thing yet.
The boomers weren't a very strong influence in the 1950s -- they couldn't be, since the oldest of them would only be 15 by 1960. It was the 1960s when the baby boom hit college and adulthood. Traditional values (whatever those are) probably were fairly firmly in place for the parents of the baby boom generation. The greater experimentation and deviation of the 1960s doesn't make the 1950s a period of conformity. Maybe it was just a period of "normality".
The 50s did have some stressors, for sure: There were concerns about fallout from nuclear tests; I grew up in the upper midwest and we were dusted a few times with (American) testing fallout. There were fears about a nuclear war and Soviet aggression in Europe; there was the Korean war; there was a mild hysteria about communism; there was the Suez crisis; there was a polio epidemic; there was a recession in the late 50s.
The other thing is a reasonably good memory. There are also the frequent consultations with Google and Wikipedia which you don't know about. I can't remember where I left my keys, but I do remember bits of stuff from documentaries, most of it is useless.
Indeed he is. :cool:
Some people have prophesized that the concept of "generations" will become irrelevant in a post-consumerist future or at least a consumerist society that faces no challenges of self-created negative externalities such as the internet is. The information age will face another rebirth and contraction, that could as well continue indefinitely as long as there are things to talk about.
Anyway, just another opinion that needed expressing.
I get that. Maybe, I’m confused because the animosity is so very vague and simplistic.
I did read once the idea that the 60s actually began in the 50s. Which is interesting and possibly quite true, and relates back to Joshs post about Dykan, Leary, etc.
Defining a generation is pretty difficult, I think. The 60s more so because it may have been the first generation to have been commodified, and also because it was so diverse. The radical students, for all their ideals, were a very chauvinistic bunch toward women, the Panthers were very gang orientated, the hippies were very apolitical.
That just means you’re human. You’re smart in some of the key areas that I value. However, I will add the caveat that the kind of smarts I value don’t necessarily translate into economic success. Some smart people are very rich, and some smart people are homeless.
This is the only post of yours I could find actually making a point. My last point was about how difficult it is to define a generation. So what point am I proving?
The first part of this may be true. But not only white baby boomers. A lot of people benefited, most people’s lives improved, maybe by different degrees.
But the second part sounds like someone lashing out at someone to blame. How did they fuck it up for younger generations? And do you mean all generations coming after?
I was born in 1959. I remember the years between 1965 and 1968 as being like the scene in the Wizard of OZ, when everything changed from black and white to vivid technicolor. IT was dramatic, disturbing and incredibly exciting. My brother and I felt like we and our peers were from a different planet from our parents. The older generation that we knew were so profoundly out of the loop in terms of their ability to relate to our language a, music, fashion, that it was like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons, who never really make an appearance. Watch a youtube video of a rock group performing on Ed Sullivan or Dean Martin in the mid 60's and you'll see a bizarre scene of musicians wearing outfits that one could still see today as retro-hip fashion on a teenager. But in the audience you'll see a sea of 50's uniforms, suits and ties on the men and formal outfits on the women that could have come from the 30's or 40's. A complete disconnect, except among the kids in the audience. That kind of abrupt schism in a society is a rarity. Its not that each generation doesnt move away fro the previous. Its the extraordinary rapidity of the change that was so unique in the 1960's.
And at the heart of it wasn't just the desire to party or the effects of television and prosperity. It was something deeper, involving a shift in philosophical worldview. That's what gave the social revolution its power. The twilight zone could frighten people in 1960 because the idea of alternative realities was terrifying to a culture raised on reality as objective truth. By the late 1960's being a freak was a badge of honor and a desirable goal for the counterculture.
A scene in the documentary Berkley in the 60's encapsulated the change in worldview. The campus activism began in Berkley by earnest students who had cut their teeth on the civil rights movement, and represented a kind of continuity with the leftist and communist movements of the 30's. But somewhere around 1966 a much deeper, more visionary shift took place in their thinking, as hippies and political activists began to cross-pollinate. Student began shifting from chanting 'we shall overcome' to 'We all live in a Yellow submarine'. They had become psychedelicized, seeing their opposition to the old ways not just in the traditional political terms of resistance, but as an entirely new worldview with implications for every aspect of life, for the sexual to the spiritual to the social.
Certainly the majority of those who grew their hair long, took drugs or participated in Woodstock didn't buy into the most radically life-altering thinking that the leaders of the cultural movement did, but they were a part of it in some way.
What I miss most about that period between 1962 and 1972 is the incredible momentum of movement of thinking, making movies from 1959 seem like a different century from those of 1969. It spoiled me. I assumed that this rate of social change would persist in to my adulthood. instead what I encountered was a retrenchment, increasing cautiousness and endless regurgitating of themes that emerged in that era. It's been 50 years since that era, and yet
the derivative Zizek , Butler and the anti-hegemomic tropes of #metoo and #blacklivesmatter are all we have to show for it.
I didn't say "only white baby boomers". I said they "greatly benefited".
Quoting Brett
I think this interview neatly answers that. Also check out Malcom Harris' book, Kids These Days.