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lydyI'm 40. No, really, that's relevant. What being 40 means is that I was 6 years old in 1968, thereby proving categorically that I am not a baby boomer, despite what marketing demographers might think.
Following a demographic bulge as large as the baby boomers is strange. All my life, "everyone" has been a bit more than a decade ahead of me. Just as I turn into a teenager, the rest of the world turns into adults. Just as I begin to find my own intense, political ideals, everyone is talking about disillusionment. I'm finally old enough for drugs, sex, rock and roll just as the rest of the world settles down to be responsible Reaganites and raise children. It's like being perpetually dressed in your big sister's hand-me-down spiritual clothing.
I was one of the ones in my age cohort that identified with the baby boomers. I sought out friends and lovers who were at least ten years older than I was. I related better to baby boomers than I did to people my own age. In 1982, I knew more about Nixon than I did about Reagan. I was fascinated by my friends experiences during the Sixties. I asked questions. I listened intently, wanting to understand. Remember how your mother would always say, "You'll understand when you're older"? Remember how infuriating that was? Well, imagine how infuriating it was to be told, over and over again, "If you weren't there, you ain't ever gonna know."
I didn't take it as a challenge. Honest. I believed them. I still do. I did, though, do the second best thing. I read. I dug out every primary source book that the Iowa City Public Library had about the Sixties. I stayed away from formal histories and the highly theoretical political work. I wasn't interested in that, I was interested in trying to understand the feel, the taste of the time. In one way, I was shockingly ignorant. I had been raised as a fundamentalist, so the exposure I'd had to the turmoil of the Sixties was the disapproval expressed from the pulpit about various current events that I would otherwise have never heard about at all. I had, at 18, a quite odd view of the Sixties, built of the background noise of pop culture that one gets exposed to, even in parochial schools, and the highly, ah, interpretive view of the events as portrayed by various ministers of my extremely conservative church.
So, I read. I read Timothy Leary's _She Comes in Colors_. I read Abbie Hoffman's _Steal This Book_. Jerry Rubin's _Do It!_. Jules Pfeiffer's excerpts of the trial of the Chicago Seven, including his illustrations. _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_, of course. I read _With the Weathermen_ by Susan Stern. I read several other books that fade into the mists of time, including a small, strange book by a Brit who had hung with Leary for a while and clearly thought that he was more important to the Movement than he had actually been. I think it was his book, though, that had the Story of the Suit. Someone was smuggling acid from the UK to the US. During the flight, the bottle of pure LSD busted open in his luggage and soaked his expensive suit. Well, there was nothing to be done for it. When he got to where he was going (I think it was Leary's weird scene), they hung the suit in the closet when they wanted to get high, they kinda gnawed on the suit and went up like a kite. There's a story that's stayed with me.
That's how I understand things. As stories. The "story" of The Sixties is incredibly complicated, more complicated than any one person can understand. There were so many people doing so many things, with odd cross-connections and endless synchronicities. I mean, seriously, what reasonable relationship is there between the terrorist group The Weathermen and the flower children? They were happening at the same time, and they melted into and out of each other, but it would be hard to find two groups with more antagonistic philosophies of life. Hippies and Hell's Angels? Who's nightmare alliance was that? Oh, right, Allen Ginsberg's, an old beat who turned into a guru for hippies. Greasers became freaks. Beats turned in their bongo drums and either started wearing beads or went straight. Through it all there's war and rock and roll, politics and hedonism, endless inventive rebellions co-opted, packaged, and resold. And it all moved so fast. From Woodstock to Altamont was nine months. A baby could have been conceived at Woodstock, the Beginning, and born at Altamont, the End. ?Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse? could have been the motto of the Sixties, had they known.
So, now I'm 40. Almost 41, actually. I work for the University of Minnesota, and I supervise five student workers. They're 17, 20, that age. When we went to war with Afghanistan, the most Republican and conservative of my students asked, "Is this like Vietnam?" I shook my head, baffled. "In what way? AJ, I'm only 40. I don't remember the war in Vietnam. The only thing I remember is being a little girl and flashing the peace sign out the window of the car to some soldiers riding in a truck, and their enthusiastic response. My Mom said that of course they wanted peace, soldiers wanted it more than anyone else." AJ was bored by this. Many days later, she asked me what we would call this war. Again, I was baffled. "We won't know for a while," I told her. "The Afghani War, maybe. I doubt it will be the War on Terror. I hope it isn?t World War III. Ask me again in 50 years." That answer didn't suit her, either. I wonder, what was I like when I was 20? What questions did I ask my friends that gave them the same sense of helplessness, realizing that there just wasn't any place to _start_. AJ and I share almost no context. The other kids are a little less blinkered, but we're still a hundred years apart. Context, dammit. Context.
So, here we've rolled around to another war, the war in Iraq. Things are very different now than they were in the Sixties. There isn't a vibrant, frighteningly fast-moving, overwhelming bunch of kids who are coming of age, and sweeping the world along with them. There isn't a belief that the entire world can be changed, that there's something new and better that can be found. There isn't a revolution, spiritual, political, or economic in the air. Hell, we can't even get the Democrats to oppose a Republican president who stole the damn election. The Information Age didn't change anything, didn't set anyone free. No, it's not like the Sixties. But there is this damn war...
The war is supposed to be quick. The populace is supposed to be on our side. The enemy is supposed to be demoralized and badly armed. But the enemy isn't what we expected, he?s both more dedicated to his cause than we expected, and more ruthless than we're prepared to deal with. We?re being warned that this is going to take some time and that victory is our only option. The Iraqis have started using civilians as shields, and dressing as civilians to trap our boys. We've started killing civilians, which is the inevitable response to such behavior. It's beginning to look as if the war plan is being driven primarily by political concerns, not military ones. We'll be fighting in streets instead of jungles. That will be different. Our post-war plans appear to be far more corrupt than anything that Nixon or Kissinger ever dreamed. That will be different. Our traditional allies, with the exception of Britain, are bitterly opposed to this war. That's different, too. The opposition to the war started before the troops were even committed. That's different, though it doesn't appear to make a difference.
I found, to my surprise, a copy of _With the Weathermen_ by Susan Stern on eBay, for $35. Previously, I'd never seen a copy for less than $150. It's an odd, primary source work, a first person account of someone who was in and around the formation of the Weathermen, but wasn't one of the primary leaders. She did end up doing some jail time, but she wasn't one of the founders. In fact, she admits that she couldn't read the paper "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows" because it was too theoretical and technical. I haven't read this book in 20 years, but given current circumstances, my interest in the Sixties has been revived.
The more I learn about the Weathermen, the less I like them. They were rabid communists of the type that, had they been in Cambodia, would have been making pyramids of skulls rather than blowing up banks. Their idea of social change was rioting in the streets. They deliberately turned violent marches that were supposed to be peaceful, getting many people hurt besides themselves. They were revolutionaries. Based on reading anarchist history, as well as a smattering of just pre-WWI history and my reading on the Sixties I?ve come to dislike revolutionaries, although I remain an anarchist and generally approve of socialism. A Trotskyist of my acquaintance said that this proves that I'm bourgeois. Perhaps. However, it seems to me that "the revolution" serves the same purpose as does ?Step Two: and then a miracle occurs" in the classic cartoon of an equation written on a blackboard. The caption is, "I think that you need to be a bit more specific in step two." I'm an incrementalist. I believe in slow change. Violent change seems to simply let the most violent people grab control, and they're almost never the ones that are on my side, you know? If the revolution is for the people, then surely you have to go at a speed that the people can assimilate, don?t you?
Given my attitudes towards this kind of politics, and those kind of people, why is it that I find Susan Stern such a sympathetic character? What is it about this woman and "the Movement" that I find so attractive and compelling? It's not her fanatical belief. I grew up with fanatical beliefs, and I don't have much respect for them. A fanatical belief in something wrong is wrong, not noble. The inability to see the world around you because of your principles is a recipe for doing evil.
Ok, true confession time: I don't really know why I find her so appealing. I read this book once, 20 years ago, and it's been on my mind ever since. I'm reading it again, now, and finding that it's raising more questions than I knew I had. I'm getting a sort of double and triple vision. The Sixties overlaying the current day overlaying the Eighties, all of it resonating with the ideas I have about what all those times and events mean.
Just this evening, I managed to annoy someone by talking about reading With the Weathermen and my attempts to grasp the shape and texture of the Sixties. What was it like? "Dirty, tired, and on speed," he said. Then he accused me of romanticizing the era. Well, yes, of course I do, was my response. But that's not the point.
I wasn't there, and I ain't never gonna know, but if you were there, what you know is the part where you were. That personal experience overwhelms the rest of it. It's kaleidoscopic, huge, parti-colored, and brilliantly lit. It's tangled in with much of the rest off what was going on, and the stuff that you know, you know so much clearer than anyone who wasn't there can know. I dig it. But I still think that my perspective, following behind and taking your hand-me-downs, bobbing up and down in your wake trying to avoid being swamped, surveying the lay of the land from many different angles, experiencing it as story rather than real life, gives me an understanding of the events that isn't entirely valueless.
I think -- I think that there was something there. I think that Susan Stern was in pursuit of something real, elusive, and beautiful. I think that Leary tried to open the door to something profound and transformative. I think that Ken Kesey tried the same thing. I think that the peaceniks and the flower children and the Yippies were looking for something that was just over the horizon, just around the corner.
When you're twenty, and your friend calls up and says that he's been kicked out and can he come and sleep on your floor, you say yes. You just do. If there are 16 people at the house when it's dinner time, you fix food for all 16. You borrow each other's cars, beds, boyfriends, houses, money, time, food, and drugs. It's terribly intense and terribly fraught and filled with the potential for disaster. You go out to Perkins and drink coffee until dawn, complaining about how many freeloaders there are on your floor and what a bitch your boyfriend is sleeping with, but how you can't break up with him because you love him and you can't kick them out because they're your friends. It looks far more exciting from the outside than it does when you're in the middle of it. It's amazing how boring high drama can become. Under it all, though, is something that I don't have a name for. It's like a feeling of community, or a feeling of family, like belonging, and like being valuable to people you care about, but it isn't any of those things, either. My experience is that it almost always falls apart, too. You start out with the assumption that each person will contribute according to his abilities and each person will take according to his needs, but what you end up with is an exploitive situation where one or two responsible people keep everything going while the rest just take. Any attempt to fix that problem breaks the fragile web of relationships that was the only valuable thing about the situation, anyway.
Maybe you weren't like that when you were 20. But I was. And so was Susan Stern. So were a lot of the people that were in various bits of what came to be called the Counterculture. It's not behavior that's sustainable over a long period of time, except for a very few people who work very hard at it. Take a look at the evolution of the commune called "The Farm." They're online, and have a pretty good history of themselves on their website. When you're 30, or god help us 40, you don't have that kind of resilience, trust, or poverty. It's easier to share everything you have when you don't have very much.
It was the Summer of Love. The largest single demographic group were in their teens and twenties. They were crashing at each other's pads, borrowing each other's cars, sleeping with each other's boyfriends, smoking each other's dope. There were so many of them, and they felt united by this way of living which didn't keep track of who owed whom what. The tenuous sensation of being part of something larger, something unique, was enhanced by drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And there _was_ something there. With so many people feeling it and seeing it all at the same time, it was more real than it ever had been before, and maybe more real than it will ever be again. But it wasn't what people thought it was. It wasn't a political movement. It wasn't a drug effect. It wasn't a spiritual awakening.
I don't know what it was. I'm still working on that. I think that part of it, though, was simply the optimistic belief that it was possible to make real, substantive changes to people. Many of them believed that they could change human nature, that they were proof that they had changed human nature, and many others didn't believe in changing human beings, but espoused theories of living together that would require it. The perfectibility of man, I often hear it called. I think if they could have crashed out of their headspace where they though of people in terms of categories, that it might have been different. But I did say I didn't know, and I stand by that.
And so I loop back around to being 40, and watching American and British and Iraqi soldiers die in Iraq in a war that is unjust and unwise, and watching civilians die and hear their deaths discounted as "something that happens during war." I want to ask AJ's question, "Is this like Vietnam?" even though I know that it's not a question that has a useful answer. The peace movement seems to have learned some things. They don't vilify the soldiers anymore. They're better about keeping their marches peaceful and orderly. They're working hard to enlist the staid middle classes. The middle class Americans, though, are those damn baby boomers, again. They're easier to recruit, they have a certain nostalgia about the Sixties, even though a large majority of them had nothing to do with the Movement or the Peace Movement or the Counterculture, or anything else. Probably the most radical thing any of them ever did was smoke a joint. Still, my heart leaps a bit, to be out on the streets with them, trying to stop the war. And I wonder, am I still just following in the footsteps of the baby boomers? Are they still defining my fate? Have I not gotten over my case of hero worship yet? And what about...Naomi?
Um, hi. Pleased to meet you. I'm Lydy.
Following a demographic bulge as large as the baby boomers is strange. All my life, "everyone" has been a bit more than a decade ahead of me. Just as I turn into a teenager, the rest of the world turns into adults. Just as I begin to find my own intense, political ideals, everyone is talking about disillusionment. I'm finally old enough for drugs, sex, rock and roll just as the rest of the world settles down to be responsible Reaganites and raise children. It's like being perpetually dressed in your big sister's hand-me-down spiritual clothing.
I was one of the ones in my age cohort that identified with the baby boomers. I sought out friends and lovers who were at least ten years older than I was. I related better to baby boomers than I did to people my own age. In 1982, I knew more about Nixon than I did about Reagan. I was fascinated by my friends experiences during the Sixties. I asked questions. I listened intently, wanting to understand. Remember how your mother would always say, "You'll understand when you're older"? Remember how infuriating that was? Well, imagine how infuriating it was to be told, over and over again, "If you weren't there, you ain't ever gonna know."
I didn't take it as a challenge. Honest. I believed them. I still do. I did, though, do the second best thing. I read. I dug out every primary source book that the Iowa City Public Library had about the Sixties. I stayed away from formal histories and the highly theoretical political work. I wasn't interested in that, I was interested in trying to understand the feel, the taste of the time. In one way, I was shockingly ignorant. I had been raised as a fundamentalist, so the exposure I'd had to the turmoil of the Sixties was the disapproval expressed from the pulpit about various current events that I would otherwise have never heard about at all. I had, at 18, a quite odd view of the Sixties, built of the background noise of pop culture that one gets exposed to, even in parochial schools, and the highly, ah, interpretive view of the events as portrayed by various ministers of my extremely conservative church.
So, I read. I read Timothy Leary's _She Comes in Colors_. I read Abbie Hoffman's _Steal This Book_. Jerry Rubin's _Do It!_. Jules Pfeiffer's excerpts of the trial of the Chicago Seven, including his illustrations. _The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test_, of course. I read _With the Weathermen_ by Susan Stern. I read several other books that fade into the mists of time, including a small, strange book by a Brit who had hung with Leary for a while and clearly thought that he was more important to the Movement than he had actually been. I think it was his book, though, that had the Story of the Suit. Someone was smuggling acid from the UK to the US. During the flight, the bottle of pure LSD busted open in his luggage and soaked his expensive suit. Well, there was nothing to be done for it. When he got to where he was going (I think it was Leary's weird scene), they hung the suit in the closet when they wanted to get high, they kinda gnawed on the suit and went up like a kite. There's a story that's stayed with me.
That's how I understand things. As stories. The "story" of The Sixties is incredibly complicated, more complicated than any one person can understand. There were so many people doing so many things, with odd cross-connections and endless synchronicities. I mean, seriously, what reasonable relationship is there between the terrorist group The Weathermen and the flower children? They were happening at the same time, and they melted into and out of each other, but it would be hard to find two groups with more antagonistic philosophies of life. Hippies and Hell's Angels? Who's nightmare alliance was that? Oh, right, Allen Ginsberg's, an old beat who turned into a guru for hippies. Greasers became freaks. Beats turned in their bongo drums and either started wearing beads or went straight. Through it all there's war and rock and roll, politics and hedonism, endless inventive rebellions co-opted, packaged, and resold. And it all moved so fast. From Woodstock to Altamont was nine months. A baby could have been conceived at Woodstock, the Beginning, and born at Altamont, the End. ?Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse? could have been the motto of the Sixties, had they known.
So, now I'm 40. Almost 41, actually. I work for the University of Minnesota, and I supervise five student workers. They're 17, 20, that age. When we went to war with Afghanistan, the most Republican and conservative of my students asked, "Is this like Vietnam?" I shook my head, baffled. "In what way? AJ, I'm only 40. I don't remember the war in Vietnam. The only thing I remember is being a little girl and flashing the peace sign out the window of the car to some soldiers riding in a truck, and their enthusiastic response. My Mom said that of course they wanted peace, soldiers wanted it more than anyone else." AJ was bored by this. Many days later, she asked me what we would call this war. Again, I was baffled. "We won't know for a while," I told her. "The Afghani War, maybe. I doubt it will be the War on Terror. I hope it isn?t World War III. Ask me again in 50 years." That answer didn't suit her, either. I wonder, what was I like when I was 20? What questions did I ask my friends that gave them the same sense of helplessness, realizing that there just wasn't any place to _start_. AJ and I share almost no context. The other kids are a little less blinkered, but we're still a hundred years apart. Context, dammit. Context.
So, here we've rolled around to another war, the war in Iraq. Things are very different now than they were in the Sixties. There isn't a vibrant, frighteningly fast-moving, overwhelming bunch of kids who are coming of age, and sweeping the world along with them. There isn't a belief that the entire world can be changed, that there's something new and better that can be found. There isn't a revolution, spiritual, political, or economic in the air. Hell, we can't even get the Democrats to oppose a Republican president who stole the damn election. The Information Age didn't change anything, didn't set anyone free. No, it's not like the Sixties. But there is this damn war...
The war is supposed to be quick. The populace is supposed to be on our side. The enemy is supposed to be demoralized and badly armed. But the enemy isn't what we expected, he?s both more dedicated to his cause than we expected, and more ruthless than we're prepared to deal with. We?re being warned that this is going to take some time and that victory is our only option. The Iraqis have started using civilians as shields, and dressing as civilians to trap our boys. We've started killing civilians, which is the inevitable response to such behavior. It's beginning to look as if the war plan is being driven primarily by political concerns, not military ones. We'll be fighting in streets instead of jungles. That will be different. Our post-war plans appear to be far more corrupt than anything that Nixon or Kissinger ever dreamed. That will be different. Our traditional allies, with the exception of Britain, are bitterly opposed to this war. That's different, too. The opposition to the war started before the troops were even committed. That's different, though it doesn't appear to make a difference.
I found, to my surprise, a copy of _With the Weathermen_ by Susan Stern on eBay, for $35. Previously, I'd never seen a copy for less than $150. It's an odd, primary source work, a first person account of someone who was in and around the formation of the Weathermen, but wasn't one of the primary leaders. She did end up doing some jail time, but she wasn't one of the founders. In fact, she admits that she couldn't read the paper "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows" because it was too theoretical and technical. I haven't read this book in 20 years, but given current circumstances, my interest in the Sixties has been revived.
The more I learn about the Weathermen, the less I like them. They were rabid communists of the type that, had they been in Cambodia, would have been making pyramids of skulls rather than blowing up banks. Their idea of social change was rioting in the streets. They deliberately turned violent marches that were supposed to be peaceful, getting many people hurt besides themselves. They were revolutionaries. Based on reading anarchist history, as well as a smattering of just pre-WWI history and my reading on the Sixties I?ve come to dislike revolutionaries, although I remain an anarchist and generally approve of socialism. A Trotskyist of my acquaintance said that this proves that I'm bourgeois. Perhaps. However, it seems to me that "the revolution" serves the same purpose as does ?Step Two: and then a miracle occurs" in the classic cartoon of an equation written on a blackboard. The caption is, "I think that you need to be a bit more specific in step two." I'm an incrementalist. I believe in slow change. Violent change seems to simply let the most violent people grab control, and they're almost never the ones that are on my side, you know? If the revolution is for the people, then surely you have to go at a speed that the people can assimilate, don?t you?
Given my attitudes towards this kind of politics, and those kind of people, why is it that I find Susan Stern such a sympathetic character? What is it about this woman and "the Movement" that I find so attractive and compelling? It's not her fanatical belief. I grew up with fanatical beliefs, and I don't have much respect for them. A fanatical belief in something wrong is wrong, not noble. The inability to see the world around you because of your principles is a recipe for doing evil.
Ok, true confession time: I don't really know why I find her so appealing. I read this book once, 20 years ago, and it's been on my mind ever since. I'm reading it again, now, and finding that it's raising more questions than I knew I had. I'm getting a sort of double and triple vision. The Sixties overlaying the current day overlaying the Eighties, all of it resonating with the ideas I have about what all those times and events mean.
Just this evening, I managed to annoy someone by talking about reading With the Weathermen and my attempts to grasp the shape and texture of the Sixties. What was it like? "Dirty, tired, and on speed," he said. Then he accused me of romanticizing the era. Well, yes, of course I do, was my response. But that's not the point.
I wasn't there, and I ain't never gonna know, but if you were there, what you know is the part where you were. That personal experience overwhelms the rest of it. It's kaleidoscopic, huge, parti-colored, and brilliantly lit. It's tangled in with much of the rest off what was going on, and the stuff that you know, you know so much clearer than anyone who wasn't there can know. I dig it. But I still think that my perspective, following behind and taking your hand-me-downs, bobbing up and down in your wake trying to avoid being swamped, surveying the lay of the land from many different angles, experiencing it as story rather than real life, gives me an understanding of the events that isn't entirely valueless.
I think -- I think that there was something there. I think that Susan Stern was in pursuit of something real, elusive, and beautiful. I think that Leary tried to open the door to something profound and transformative. I think that Ken Kesey tried the same thing. I think that the peaceniks and the flower children and the Yippies were looking for something that was just over the horizon, just around the corner.
When you're twenty, and your friend calls up and says that he's been kicked out and can he come and sleep on your floor, you say yes. You just do. If there are 16 people at the house when it's dinner time, you fix food for all 16. You borrow each other's cars, beds, boyfriends, houses, money, time, food, and drugs. It's terribly intense and terribly fraught and filled with the potential for disaster. You go out to Perkins and drink coffee until dawn, complaining about how many freeloaders there are on your floor and what a bitch your boyfriend is sleeping with, but how you can't break up with him because you love him and you can't kick them out because they're your friends. It looks far more exciting from the outside than it does when you're in the middle of it. It's amazing how boring high drama can become. Under it all, though, is something that I don't have a name for. It's like a feeling of community, or a feeling of family, like belonging, and like being valuable to people you care about, but it isn't any of those things, either. My experience is that it almost always falls apart, too. You start out with the assumption that each person will contribute according to his abilities and each person will take according to his needs, but what you end up with is an exploitive situation where one or two responsible people keep everything going while the rest just take. Any attempt to fix that problem breaks the fragile web of relationships that was the only valuable thing about the situation, anyway.
Maybe you weren't like that when you were 20. But I was. And so was Susan Stern. So were a lot of the people that were in various bits of what came to be called the Counterculture. It's not behavior that's sustainable over a long period of time, except for a very few people who work very hard at it. Take a look at the evolution of the commune called "The Farm." They're online, and have a pretty good history of themselves on their website. When you're 30, or god help us 40, you don't have that kind of resilience, trust, or poverty. It's easier to share everything you have when you don't have very much.
It was the Summer of Love. The largest single demographic group were in their teens and twenties. They were crashing at each other's pads, borrowing each other's cars, sleeping with each other's boyfriends, smoking each other's dope. There were so many of them, and they felt united by this way of living which didn't keep track of who owed whom what. The tenuous sensation of being part of something larger, something unique, was enhanced by drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And there _was_ something there. With so many people feeling it and seeing it all at the same time, it was more real than it ever had been before, and maybe more real than it will ever be again. But it wasn't what people thought it was. It wasn't a political movement. It wasn't a drug effect. It wasn't a spiritual awakening.
I don't know what it was. I'm still working on that. I think that part of it, though, was simply the optimistic belief that it was possible to make real, substantive changes to people. Many of them believed that they could change human nature, that they were proof that they had changed human nature, and many others didn't believe in changing human beings, but espoused theories of living together that would require it. The perfectibility of man, I often hear it called. I think if they could have crashed out of their headspace where they though of people in terms of categories, that it might have been different. But I did say I didn't know, and I stand by that.
And so I loop back around to being 40, and watching American and British and Iraqi soldiers die in Iraq in a war that is unjust and unwise, and watching civilians die and hear their deaths discounted as "something that happens during war." I want to ask AJ's question, "Is this like Vietnam?" even though I know that it's not a question that has a useful answer. The peace movement seems to have learned some things. They don't vilify the soldiers anymore. They're better about keeping their marches peaceful and orderly. They're working hard to enlist the staid middle classes. The middle class Americans, though, are those damn baby boomers, again. They're easier to recruit, they have a certain nostalgia about the Sixties, even though a large majority of them had nothing to do with the Movement or the Peace Movement or the Counterculture, or anything else. Probably the most radical thing any of them ever did was smoke a joint. Still, my heart leaps a bit, to be out on the streets with them, trying to stop the war. And I wonder, am I still just following in the footsteps of the baby boomers? Are they still defining my fate? Have I not gotten over my case of hero worship yet? And what about...Naomi?
Um, hi. Pleased to meet you. I'm Lydy.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 12:51 am (UTC)So... pleased to meet you, too! *friendly wave*
no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 01:02 am (UTC)MKK
no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 05:26 am (UTC)I found you through
no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 07:33 am (UTC)I'm turning 40 this year. I went the other way than you; I turned toward the younger generation, which wasn't properly seen as a cohort until Doug Coupland spoke up with 13th Generation and Shampoo Planet. Finally! Books about youth that weren't about those damned boomers. Books about my friends, instead of about my babysitters.
It's funny how powerful that chasm feels when you're on the down side of it. I remember going to a friend's birthday party; ended up we had two boomers and two gen-x-ers partying together. And o! the frustration of trying to talk to one another across that divide.
At least, I know two of us were frustrated, 'cause we vented together later in the evening. I've always wondered what the interaction felt like from the other side; they mostly just looked confused.
The only point I can clearly recall at this distance was the "$3 cab ride" distance measurement, which started it all off. Lessee, I was talking about my life programme of monotonically increasing depravity. Noting that we had half an hour or so left in my 20's, we joked about running out to do something rilly *bad* before the clock ran out and I was already 30.
So one of them goes, "Hey, Tiffany's is close by; it's only a $3 cab ride." At which point the two x-ers collectively stare in disbelief and guffaw in astonishment at the expectation that such a measurement might translate into a comprehensible distance in our heads.
We spent the rest of the night trying to bridge that gulf (once, that is, we'd managed to point to it).
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Date: 2003-03-30 08:40 am (UTC)I'm pretty sure you don't actually think that being a "Reaganite" is the same thing as being "responsible," so I don't really understand why you say otherwise. The idea of Ronald Reagan as some epitome of normal family life is pretty risible.
I also think that you've got a false dichotomy when you oppose "violent change" to "slow change." Nonviolent change can happen rapidly. Violent change can be surprisingly slow. The agenda served by characterizing all rapid or radical change as "violent" has a name. It's called conservatism. It's not always wrong, either; but since Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, conservatives have been imputing that behind every liberal project lurks a Jacobin with blood up to his elbows. One need not be entirely unsympathetic to conservative ideals to see that this is one of conservatism's bad habits.
You're on to something when you talk about the state of being young and loose and full of possibility and willing to stay up all night and fight lions if necessary. But I went through that in the late 1970s and early 1980s and it was just as meaningful. The problem with the 1960s is that those kids were the leading edge of the demographic bulge and carried all the media's attention with them. And they still do. Even though there are actually more people my age than there are people their age, they always get the attention. Believe me, I know how you feel about that. However, just as the kingdom of God is within us always, and the golden age of science fiction is twelve, the "sixties" is happening wherever young people are being flaky and intense and seeing how far idealism can take them. I frankly think Dhalgren (1975) has more to say about "the sixties" than all the tracts about the Weathermen ever written. And when I read (for instance) BoingBoing, I know that "the sixties", in the best sense, are roaring along still. Then again, they were in 1848, too.
Final comment. "Is this like Vietnam?" Well, yes, in one sense: as a reminder that history is a bitch, and can turn over the table at any time. Isolation behind two oceans has made Americans into a people who really, really believe in the invulnerability of their position. Fill in the blanks to form a commonly-recognized phrase or slogan: "_____ goeth before a ____."
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Date: 2003-03-30 08:51 am (UTC)and i miss it.
i mean, i miss that feeling. i know the one, and that's more words than i've ever been able to throw at it; thank you.
it's useful to me to hear your experience about it almost always falling apart, as well. i ended up running away from it, because it was the only option that i could think of that involved me not being suicidal any more. but sometimes i think that if i'd only hung in there, that it would have worked out all right, that i could still have that, if only i hadn't run.
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Date: 2003-03-30 11:02 am (UTC)I don't know what it was. I'm still working on that. I think that part of it, though, was simply the optimistic belief that it was possible to make real, substantive changes to people.
I followed a friend-of-a-friend link here and wanted to comment that, from my point of view (I was 18 in 1968, about to graduate from high school and spending most of my weekends hitch-hiking between the Sierra foothills town where I lived and San Francisco), you've nailed both the character of the era and the difficulty of parsing its place in history.
I think we Boomers may have been the last generation to believe, deep in our hearts, that we could change the world. We did, in many ways - practically none of them the ones we intended or hoped for. But the optimisim of that belief was powerful beyond words.
Would you object if I added a link to this entry to my own LJ?
no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 07:03 pm (UTC)I've had similar problems with my best friend Christopher. He's not a lot younger than I am, but it's enough. When it's just the two of us, we manage fine. However, when he's with his friends, I become frustrated. The conversation is antsy, jumpy, incoherent, weird. Christopher says, "Hey, we're the television generation. We talk like we've all got a tv remote and we're flipping channels." He also said that he very much likes that style and structure of conversation. The way particular ideas come back around, and layer over the things that have been spoken about in between can be a work of art. He says that there's a lot that can be implied by the timing and pacing -- timing and pacing I can't parse. Me, I tell stories, and I tell the whole story at once. Christopher's friends are short attention span theatre. They find me to be extremely boring.
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Date: 2003-03-30 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-30 07:16 pm (UTC)Kind of startling to look around and realize we (collective) did.
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Date: 2003-03-30 09:04 pm (UTC)From _Sexual Perversity in Chicago_:
Girl One: Men only want one thing!
Gril Two: Yeah! But it's never the same thing.
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Date: 2003-03-31 08:04 am (UTC)Hm.
K. [If I ever knew you are just two years younger than me, I had forgotten it. I've thought of you as quite a lot younger. Which seems so weird to me, because I have no particular hero worship for the Sixties, though I found plenty of drug culture left by the time I was old enough to notice. Perhaps those couple of years and my own running start at more adult behaviors combine to affect how old I think you are. The Sixties didn't end until 1973 anyway]
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Date: 2003-03-31 09:32 am (UTC)You're right on about the Reaganites. Of course I don't think of them as the epitome of normal family life -- euwww. On the other hand, I was trying to describe what things looked like in the middle of Iowa in 1982.
I also think that you've got a false dichotomy when you oppose "violent change" to "slow change."
A very good point, and one I know but didn't express properly. In point of fact, I'm not even against all violent change -- sometimes it's probably necessary. What I opposed to is a small "vanguard" deciding that it's time to revolt. The types of changes that I'm thinking of, social justice, economic justice, freedom from all sorts of repression, are changes that come from the ground up, not the top down. There's a common and entirely true critique of revolutionaries at least since the 1880's that they don't really care about the common man, for all that they argue that they are acting on behalf of the common man. Alexander Berkman wouldn't have known a common man if one had come up and bit him, I swear. (Emma Goldman's long-time companion, and in my opinion a dangerous idiot.)
... the "sixties" is happening wherever young people are being flaky and intense and seeing how far idealism can take them.
I forget that, and I shouldn't. I know better. The next wave of idealism isn't likely to be centered in the US, is my guess. It'll be China, or more likely India, some place we don't expect it. I hope they set the world on fire -- again.
Final comment. "Is this like Vietnam?" Well, yes, in one sense: as a reminder that history is a bitch, and can turn over the table at any time.
I knew that, too, she says in a quiet little voice. It's not the question I wanted to ask, but I don't have words for the question I want to ask. Maybe, maybe I want to ask what's going to happen and that is even more unanswerable than "What was it like?"
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Date: 2003-03-31 10:32 am (UTC)I'm going to be 30 in just over a month. The big blip for me, as noticable generation gaps go, is the difference in attitudes in people three to five years younger than me. The absolute certainty that we were all going to die in the Cold War thermonuclear instantiation of World War III was never there for them, and the events of 1989 and immediately subsequent years, when we were unexpectedly graced with a future, just does not have the same meaning. I've always preferentially associated with people somewhat older than me, since I overcame shyness enough to associate with people at all, I think at least partly because of this.
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Date: 2003-03-31 12:33 pm (UTC)You were very much more an adult than I was. Part of why that was is probably the peculiar way I was raised. Sheltered isn't quite the word for it. Completely disconnected comes closer. At sixteen, I still didn't really understand how people fit together when they were having sex. I _never_ had that embarrassing conversation with my mother. When I was 12 or so, she gave me a small box with a tampon, a pad, a garter belt, and a little booklet about menstruation. A couple hours later she asked me if I had any questions. She told me she used tampons, I think that was the extent of the conversation -- and that was also the closest we came to discussing sex -- with one extremely weird exception, but leave that go, for now. We didn't take a paper, I almost never watched television, I didn't listen to the radio, and I went to parochial schools. Moreover, my family was crazy, and one of the things that crazy families do is turn inwards.
Until I went to college, I had never been outside my parent's house for longer than a week at a time, and those rare occasions were always church camp. True, I was in a cabin with age-mates, but my parents were over in the cabins for adults, so I'm not sure that counts. When I decided to go see "All That Jazz" as a part of my 18th birthday celebration, my parents had cows. We had an hour long argument (in front of my friends, mostly) about whether or not it was appropriate and Christian for me to go to an R-rated movie. It was the second R rated movie I had ever been to. Somehow, I managed to go see "The Deerhunter" when I was 15.
I don't know how to explain how innocent and how cynical I was when I finally escaped to the World. Wait, try this: the closest I'd ever gotten to the real world before I went to college was the SCA.
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Date: 2003-03-31 12:45 pm (UTC)K. [this explains much]
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Date: 2003-03-31 03:42 pm (UTC)MKK
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Date: 2003-03-31 03:48 pm (UTC)No, this isn't working, I just can't put it down in words on a screen. I need to wave my hands and interact more immediately. I'm arriving around 1:30pm on the Thursday before Minicon. Are you working or at the hotel that day? Perhaps we could have a late lunch, or failing that, dinner.
MKK
no subject
Date: 2003-03-31 07:59 pm (UTC)Oh my god! yes!
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Date: 2003-04-01 11:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-01 12:23 pm (UTC)With the weathermen
Date: 2003-11-23 06:42 pm (UTC)I like to read what you write, even though I have read so little. I found your page just after I finished With_the_Weathermen, a book i just picked up when my local library was throwing it away. After reading it i wanted to find out more about Susan Stern, and what she was doing these days - playing golf on a Wednesday? Baking cakes for church stalls? I was very disappointed when i found out she had died soon after. I really felt for her, and would spend long moments at staring at the pictures of her in the book, trying to understand (and I'm still puzzled by the journey she made). My partner read some of what you have written but for a different reason - she's bipolar and on Effexor (and hating it).
From reading the posts here, i think a lot of people care about you.
Tim
Susan Stern
Date: 2003-12-14 08:17 pm (UTC)All the issues she struggled with in her brief life almost 30 years ago are still with us.
William
Seattle
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Date: 2013-08-21 11:46 pm (UTC)Ah, good old "Love of Chair" !
Nicely written essay, by the way.
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Date: 2013-08-22 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-08-29 04:12 pm (UTC)I was miffed when the Spidey segment replaced LoC.