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Zonie63 -> RE: Generation Gap (4/15/2016 9:08:00 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Marini
I'm sorry we can agree to disagree here.
Compared to the 60s and 70s?? and how bad things are these days as we watch this country decline and get worse by the day?
These young people aren't doing a damn thing.
I talk to my dad who is near 80, and 50 times more militant than me, and he always asks me why my generation and those younger are not doing anything.
Hell the older generation would raise hell.
My dad went to Vietnam twice, go watch some 60s and early 70s protests.
Again, I clearly blame my generation and generation X, for the apathetic young people
we have these days.
Caveat-- I do think when things get much worse, many people will eventually rise up.
Sad it takes shit hitting the fan.
lol
Actually, I think we actually agree about the 60s and the first half of the 70s, but at some point during the 1970s, the protest movement jumped the shark. Everything took a strange turn at that point. The protests died down, and those who did protest during that era just sort of stopped. They did have some successes in the 60s and early 70s (including the end of the Vietnam War and the ousting of Richard Nixon), but then after that, they just sat back and rested on their laurels. They weren't all that activist by the 1980s.
Another aspect was that, by the late 70s and early 80s, a lot of what the hippies did was being criticized and discredited, such as spitting on returning Vietnam Vets and calling them "baby killers." I had a good friend who served in Vietnam and experienced that on his arrival home that it compelled him to go back on another tour of duty. Many former hippies were disavowing or reversing some of their positions. Some hippies tried to live on communes which became a brief fad that died out rather quickly. Many joined weird religious cults. Many more got haircuts, ditched the tie-dyed shirts and put on polyester suits to go out to the discos.
I was still in elementary school while this was happening, and as I entered junior high and my teenage years in 1976-77, there were no more protests. The only thing we really embraced as legacies of the 60s were the free love, drugs, and rock concerts, which became much bigger commercial affairs then they were in the 60s.
I'm not being entirely critical of the hippie generation, and as with anything, I think there's plenty of blame to go around. But I think it's a fair point that they had a great deal of momentum going towards positive change, but they themselves stopped and failed to keep the dream alive. Some more cynical types might say they "sold out."
My mother was very much against the Vietnam War and ardently supported the causes of the hippies and the movements of the 60s and early 70s. By the 1980s, she was a rabid Reagan supporter. It was ironic, as she used to have really loud arguments with her parents during the 60s (they were all Democrats) over the old guard Democratic Party and the anti-war elements who opposed LBJ and Humphrey. My grandparents were older era Democrats and they had no love for the hippies whatsoever - even if they were FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ supporters. They hated what the hippies were doing, and this led to big arguments in my family (and was indirectly related to my own parents' divorce). But by the 1980s, my mother was supporting Reagan, and my grandparents (longtime California Democrats who hated Reagan even more than they hated the hippies) were upset by that. I hated Reagan, too, and I made a joke about assassinating him, and my mom flew off the handle (she did that a lot). She supported the bombing of Libya, the invasion of Grenada, Operation Desert Storm, and I wondered, what the hell happened to her earlier anti-war views she used to have (even to the point of throwing a hissy fit when I wanted to join the Navy). She (and a lot of other former anti-war protesters who had suddenly become pro-war) said "That was different back then." No, it wasn't.
My father was always a diehard Republican, so his views never really wavered at all. He couldn't understand what all the protesting was all about; he thought the hippies were a bunch of communists. He supported Nixon and Reagan, but my relationship with my dad was so strong that our political differences never came between us. We could discuss politics in a calm and rational manner.
We never had anything like "occupy Wall Street" back in the 1980s. Trying to discuss politics with people my age back then was like talking to a brick wall. Most people just didn't care.
In the 1990s, I thought there might have been a movement towards more political activism after Ruby Ridge and Waco, but it was more of a right-wing caliber, while the left had already gone limp. There may have been a few radicals and anarchists still running around, but most of the left (including all those former hippies) were supporters of the establishment led by the Clintons, who were former hippies themselves. But they were just Republicans in sheep's clothing, thus putting the final nail in the coffin of the sellout generation. Today's Millennials were just little kids back then. Their parents looked back on the 60s like it was just some passing fad that many of them half-regretted.
Also, it should be noted that the nature of political activism and protesting became more compartmentalized and specialized by that time, and this even continues to today. Unlike the 60s, there was no universal cause to unite everyone to come together for a common purpose. Now, everyone is divided with their own individual pet causes. People are afraid of being seen as a radical or extremist - and they'll get skewered and lambasted if they are. Everyone has to be polite and respectful of everyone else's opinions. We no longer have the raw, outspoken verve that characterized the 60s. If the Millennials are turning out to be self-absorbed weenies, then it's likely due to the fact that everyone else was that way when they were growing up.
But this election year has been a bit feisty, more so than I've seen in recent elections, so maybe there is still hope for the future. We'll see.
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