Interesting bit of historical revionism. Not as a total re-writing against known facts, but more as a simple shading of events as though it had been written by a Right wing parent the week after the Kent State shootings and left, unexamined and untainted by facts, in the ensuing 38 years.
(I am reminded about the KSU shootings because I recall the reported conversation of a student who had called home in shock and was told by her mother that if the student had been at the protests, the mother had hoped that the daughter had been shot. THAT is old fashioned civility at its finest.)
A lot of people (on both sides of the political divide) act as though “the boomers” were some sort of monolithic group that suddenly rose up en masse and overthrew civility and right thinking in a single sweeping four-year period. It just ain’t that way.
For example, while the Vietnam War was certainly a hot point issue for many boomer protests, polls taken throughout that period indicated that slightly more than half of people in the boomer age range continued to support U.S. involvement well past 1970. (I cannot currently find the link, but this was recently posted with citation on this board.) Well over half the names on the Vietnam War Memorial are of boomers. At the same time, we note that much of the counter-culture writings as well as the overwhelming majority of movies, TV shows, and novels (the primary sources of popular culture) written between 1968 and 1972 were produced by people too old to have been boomers. Popular music would have included far more boomers, but there was still a lot of it emanating from people far older.
You mentioned All in the Family, earlier. I note that it was written and produced by the parents of boomers, not boomers, with only two characters presented as boomers–and Reiner and Struthers were among the oldest boomers, born in '47 and '48–and with “Meathead” Mike Stivic presented as about as much of a jerk (in different ways) as Archie a lot of the time.
If all one remembers from the 1960s are anti-war protestors being rude, I would suggest that one must have made a serious effort to ignore the catcalls and disparaging remarks that passed older lips regarding such simple things as longer hair or floral print clothing. I can remember thugs beating up “hippies,” guys being fired from jobs for having their hair extend as far as their collars, and women being disciplined (or fired) for sdhowing up at work in slacks or low heels.
I tend to agree with the background point that there is a bit less civility in 2008 than in 1968, but that can hardly be attributed solely to the people who were subjected to such scorn for their appearances. It is also a matter of changing modes of expression. There were similar complaints in the '40s and '50s that people were too coarse.
Crime? It waxes and wanes based on the number of males in the age range 15 - 35 irrespective of what year it is. (Look at actual criminal histories from the earlier twentieth century or from periods in the nineteenth century. Blaming that on some sort of cultural change is not merely incorrect, it requires significant ignoring of facts.)
If anything, the 1950s were the unnatural departure from the way this country has typically lived. Having come out on top in WWII, with the only industrial base that had never been seriously damaged (or destroyed), and with actions such as the Marshall Plan to give ourselves a feeling of (sometimes smug) satisfaction in the ways that we perceived our righteousness, we spent a bit more than a decade acting as though we had achieved some sort of glorious stage of evolution such as Greece’s Golden Age. (Or, at least, as the popular histories portray Greece’s Golden Age; a thorough study of that period turns up some interesting conflicting phenomena.) As we entered the 1960s, the leisure of the 1950s had provided the luxury of time to ponder a number of facts: that we still held over ten percent of the population to be second class citizens and treated them shabbily; that much of our “anti-communist” rhetoric was being used to support dictatorships (to allegedly protect our freedom, them furriners be damned); that women were held to different standards than men and were denied far more opportunities; and that in an increasingly pluralistic society, many people were being forced to accept specific religious pronouncements that went against their own views. As the conclusions of those examinations began to be expressed more frequently in society, people among all ages and states of life began to respond. Since many of the problems that were perceived were linked directly to either government or other societal control, there was a general rebellion among a lot of people (not just boomers) that reacted against control of any form. When it became clear that Nixon had employed illegal activities to secure his position of power in the highest office in the land (and the most powerful office in the world), the last boundaries of “respecting” authority were breached.
Society, itself, was shaken and many of today’s societal or cultural problems (or perceived problems) are a direct result.
Cheer up, at least we avoided Europe’s sixteenth century response to similar disruption where they began murdering people as witches.
The notion that “the baby-boom generation was coming of age, and they decided all the old ways had to go and what was good about life in this country then got swept aside along with the bad” is really a pretty simplistic (and erroneous) view of the world that looks as though it had been writrten by a letter to the editor from some prim old lady, insulated from the real world, in 1970 and placed in a time capsule to be dragged up as some sort of Truth, today.
I have no problem with you as a poster, Starving Artist, but I really wish you had paid a bit more attention to the overall events framing the context of what you have perceived in the world.
