Boomers: did you live as if the revolution was coming?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In post 21 of this thread BrainGlutton opines that many leftists in the 60s and 70s believed that there would be a revolution in the near future. Did you?

I ask in part because I did. And yet I didn’t. I was in college from '71 to '75, and I certainly rationalized my sloppy study habits with the thought that “There’ll be a revolution that will make having a perfect transcript pointless” but if I was just being lazy or genuinely committing myself to a post-revolutionary world, I can’t judge. (Probably laziness.) I had to learn all the same stuff I sloughed off eventually, under harsher circumstances, but I wonder if I was really committed to overthrowing the government. I attended meetings, but they were pretty boring to me, and they were usually concerned with issues on a very local level, where to hold a protest, what to chant, etc., nothing national or global, and I caught a lot of heat for my lack of committment to revolutionary thought from my fellow students.

Was this your experience? Or did you glow in those days with the zeal of confidence in the looming revolution?

2

yeah, THIS won’t get picked up by the CIA’s machines, will it?

why a revolution then?
thomas jefferson said we should have one every ten years to rewrite rules and shake things up. maybe not ten years, but everything needs re-examining every once in a while, even if it’s going well.

3

I certainly didn’t. Nor any of my friends. It was all a “changing society from within” viewpoint. You and your friends form an urban commune, setup an alternative business, etc. None of them stocked up on guns or anything. Quite the opposite. (And BTW: It wasn’t all about drugs and sex. That’s a Big Lie.)

Then Reagan came along and everything went south.

I did once in a while meet a true radical Communist (not the same as liberal!) or some such type. Total losers more interested in using ideology to promote themselves. One mainly used his “status” to get girls. Hardly the basis of an effective revolution.

Fear of revolution was what the conservative control press used (and still uses) to control the naive.

4

I was pretty young - was born in 61, but no we never lived that way, nor did anyone I know.

5

Once the U.S. forces pulled out of Vietnam (1973), and Nixon resigned (1974), there wasn’t much left to fire up protesters. Then five years later, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken hostage by radicals, and that fired up protests all over again, with a different effect. Reagan was an effect, not a cause.

6

I was born in '59. I was in an atypical and very insular town (Los Alamos NM) in Junior High and High School and somehow got the notion that the wave of sea-change type social change that began in the 60s had continued to swell and permeate everywhere other than Los Alamos and a few other nooks and crannies.

Yes, I thought the revolution was in process. Not military-overthrow, the junta in red berets will be occupying the White House next year or anything like that. But that marriage was in rapid decline and that nearly everyone would be living in communes (intentional community-families of 8-20 people, not The Farm), semi-permanent clusters of loosely committed folks owning and sharing property in common (appliances like washer & dryer and lawnmower, maybe some cars, oftentimes all iving in a big old house from the big-family era).

I believed religion was gasping out its last, and that everyone was becoming their own philospher, with a universal “do as ye wish as long as it harms no one” / “anything between consenting adults is fine” / “peace love and no more coercion, live and let live” attitude becoming so widespread that the vew vestigial holdouts would not attain any social traction in trying to push downer agendas of forcing people to do things or not do things.

I thought the trend was towards people sharing things and caring about the plight of others to the point that there would be no more greed and gap between haves and havenots; that the money system itself was on its last legs and people would just share resources and pitch in to do work and we’d cease to try to track who owned what, who earned what, or who could buy what. Everyone would have signs up that said “prosecutors will be shoplifted” and “need one take one, got extras leave one” and bulletin boards for who seeks what and who has what for the asking.

I thought nations were winding down and would disappear as external threats disappeared and as collectives and communes and local-initiative responsibility took over the doing of necessary things formerly done by governments.

I assumed we’d never get into another war. War is obviously over. The human race has weapons too destructive to weild without destroying us all, and soon everyone will have them, so we have to outgrow that childish behavior. Besides, we aren’t confronted with a world of scarcity, we can feed everybody and share our other resources, there’s plenty to go around.

Only the old people (you know, the folks like 50 or older) still think in all the old suspicious negative downer control-freak NO-minded ways, and as long as we can weather the remaining years of them being in “power” (ha) that will all pass away soon.

How cool is it to be fortunate enough to be coming of age at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius?

Hey, want some microdot? Third eye vision, man!

7

Nah, I was never that dumb. I used to laugh my ass off at the jackasses sitting around braying at each other during the “peace protests”. The revolution existed only in their fractured imaginations, and if you ever asked one of them a simple question like “Okay, suppose the revolution does happen and you get your free dope and your free sex - now what?”, you would get a look of total bewilderment.

8

Define “many” and “leftists.”

There were some who believed in revolution. There were many (including, by some definition, “leftists”) who did not.

I was in high school in the 60s and a Hubert Humphrey liberal (still am). I never expected any revolution, and my main goal was to have the government listen to the people, and to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. For those I knew, the goal was to work to make the government more responsive, not toss it out and end up with something worse.

9

Another no. Things were never that out of control in the 60s and early 70s, even if the footage you often see makes it look that way. It’s just the “historical” equivalent of showing fires and car wrecks on the nightly news.

The revolution talk was mostly just letting off a bit of steam. Like Jefferson Airplane singing “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” Yeah, right, now go collect your check from RCA Records.

A few deluded folks actually believed it. They make for some good footage, too. But no one in their right mind bought into that.

10

Well, dang, I guess they never say Wild In The Streets.

I have yet to figure out if that film was just riding the crest of the wave, so to speak, or was making a really, really satirical statement about the “revolution” BS.

11

I mean “they never SAW…”

Actually, I don’t think they did. I said the title many times during, and after that period, and all I got was a blank look usually.

I loved the hippie chicks, though!!! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

12

I never expected the Revolution because I never expected enough people to buy into it. Actually, I was predicting what became the Reagan Revolution (just the right-ward tilt, never really imagining Reagan as part of it) by 1967.

Gary Trudeau nailed one aspect of it the summer that Mark Slackmeyer got a job at a construction site and tried to get his “brother” workers to rise up, only to have them dump him in a trash can.

13

It’s possible that the look of bewilderment was the result of their wondering why you thought they had to wait for the revolution to get free drugs and free sex.

Be that as it may, no, I did not believe there would be a major revolution in a political sense. I knew two or three Communists and a three or four Socialists, but even they mostly joked about “the revolution.” I remember leaving a note on a Jag once that said, “I commandeer this vehicle in the name of the people.”

But I did think that people would continue to be more celebratory, sharing, open, communal, experimental, and natural. I expected that marijuana would be legalized by now and that people would not be trying to control each other’s lives so much. I expected women to be closer to equity and I expected young women to be more aware of the feminist moment of the 1970’s and what it was all about.

I think I expected to see more communities like the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. It was and is very, very productive.

I was born in 1943. The book Generations marks that as the first year of the Boomers.

14

If you compare social life from now and the 50’s, I would say there was a revolution. At minimum I was impressed when my mom–just in the last year or so–told me how when she had grown up the words were “Innie Minnie Miney Moe, catch a nigger by the toe.” Yet all those people took up a new version and kept the knowledge and hate to themselves when raising us.

Of course now when she argues against gay marriage…though I’m not terribly worried because I wasn’t raised with that fear either. So all it takes is another generation.

15

Yes.
I graduated from high school in '72.
I watched the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention live, I observed what the Weathermen did.
I grew up listening to The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, pre-parody.
But for me it was indeed more of a social change, and much more than just sex, drugs and rock 'n roll (though it was that as well).
Back then, I really did feel as though I were part of a movement.
My middle school was de-segregated in 1969. High school was educational socially as well as academically. There was indeed a lot of turmoil in public schools, but plenty of good came from it.
The feminist movement was for real; much that is taken for granted today came about from that time. Some of it was seemingly so small, yet mighty, such as the feeling I had the first day I went to school in jeans–not a skirt.
The first Earth Day. Watergate.
Interesting times, with or without arms.

16

And it will please you to know that these people still exist.

When I was in college (1998-2002, aprox) I had a classmate in some of my honors-type courses who would, in class and at parties, go off on random, shallow tirades about how Communism (and revolution) is the only answer, and, of course, when pressed, about details, he could just repeat the same cliched non-responses over and over. And somehow, he’d have some level of power and prestige once the revolution came, though I was never sure how he’d secure that.

He was popular with some of the ladies though. Very much so. Many thought him quite the intellectual. sigh

I’ve never heard that monkier before. What makes one a Hubert Humphrey liberal (aside from, assumedly, having supported Hubert Humphrey)?

17

Since Chuck isn’t responding, I think it means a liberal who got locked in early to civil rights, pro-labor, positions but who also became committed to resisting non-mainstream radical thought in a particularly rigid way. Hump got started early, elected to office in the late 1940s, with left-wing positions (I think he was espousing civil rights advances at the 1948 Democratic convention) but he was also fiercely anti-Communist. Later liberal democrats like Eugene McCarthy weren’t so locked into such strong anti-Communism, and were at least willing to consider less rigid, less traditional methods of deviating from the standard liberal ideology of the times.

It’s funny but for a while I would have defined myself as a non-Hubert Humphrey liberal, since Hubie seemed to embody all that was old, hidebound, craven, unimaginative and obsolete about liberal Democrats in the late 60s when I became politically aware. My position then pretty much started with “Anybody but Hubert is acceptable.” He needed to recognize that, by allying himself to Lyndon Johnson, he had wrecked his credibility forever, but sadly he didn’t and so spent the last ten years of his life pursuing the Presidency and getting the Democratic Party embroiled in old issues. One of the best quotes I heard about HHH (forget who said it) was “Hubert was 10 years ahead of his time–unfortunately his time was 1948.” This was said in the late 60’s with the implication that Hubert was by then about 10 years behind the times, which was about right.

18

I was right in the middle of it all…graduated from college in 1972.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I am amazed so many of my age group seem to have forgotten where they came from.

But expecting a real, grass roots, change the world, masses in the streets revolution? Nah…we assumed back then that once we were in the majority, we would do good things for the environment, work to protect human rights both domestic and worldwide, and make the world a better place. If I had had a crystal ball and could show them George W. Bush and Iraq and homeland security, etc etc, nobody would have believed me. I mean, who would have believed it could get worse than LBJ and Nixon?!

Somewhere along the line, my classmates decided SUV’s were more important than global warming. The fear of Gay marriage became more important than civil rights, liberal became a dirty word and voting was an inconvenience.

I am truly ashamed of my generation.

I can only imagine how much worse things are going to get with the current, politically apathetic generation that can watch kids their own age get slaughtered in Iraq and not give a damn.

19

It seems to have been largely forgotten, and quite quickly. I was born in 1958, so I wasn’t exactly an infant when the movie was made. But by the time of my high school and college years, I never once heard it mentioned. I had never heard of it until a couple of months ago when I happened to be looking at–get this–the 1969 edition of the World Book Year Book, that I happen to own. It contains a feature report on the state of cinema, mentioning many movies that are well known today, like The Graduate. WITS was mentioned in the same context, as if the authors thought we’d still be watching and talking about this movie now, but that obviously didn’t happen.

My guess is that such revolutionary fervor as there still was tended to sort itself along age-vertical lines rather than being strictly stratified by generation. The radical left had too many older members who had valuable insights to offer, and the artistic and social avant garde had too many older luminaries who who could not be written off as unworthy because they were 35, or 40, or even 50.

20

Nah.

The non-violent revolutionaries I knew were too naive (or too wasted) to create anything real. And the rest were too stupid to organize a bowling league. Too busy arguing Maoism vs. Marxism vs. anarcho-syndicalism vs. Castroism vs. whatever is Flavor of the Month in Mother Jones.

Regards,
Shodan