Find yourself a hippie. Go on, look. I’m sure there is one around. Look for a middle aged man or woman, probobly with grown up kids mortified that their legal name is “Starshine”. Talk to them for a while. Ask them about the 60s. You’ll prolly be opening floodgates. You’ll hear all about how the people banded together to fight an unjust war. They will shamelessly co-opt the all too real civil rights struggle( while never admitting that the country club they belong to is only reluctently admitting black folks because they have no choice. Laws and all that.) They will wax euphoric about how they “made a difference”. Get invited to their home. They will play for you “Give Peace a Chance” and “Eve of Destruction”. Then they’ll offer you another drink. Rose colored glasses and revisionalist history aside, did they make a difference? Was the civil unrest of the 60s a massive social upheavel, or a self serving excuse to avoid serving in a pointless war? Let’s be honest. Vietnam was an extremely pointless war, and the way we fought it made it even more so. Young people didn’t want their lives thrown away when there was no compelling reason to fight, nor a plan in place to fight successfully. I certainly don’t blame them for this. The flag they carried into the streets was labled “unjust war”, but was it really their main concern? When the draft ended, so ( for the most part ) did the protests. Once they were safe, the plight of the Vietnamese natives suddenly wasn’t so serious. “Oh, we’re turning it over to the natives. Good. They can handle it.” The high minded ideals went right out the window. Any thoughts?
Well, no. When you add it all up, I don’t think the 60s really mattered as much as people like to think. 100 years from now it will be a small blip in a century that will be remembered for huge technological advances and global war.
You kind of had to experience at least some of the 50s to appreciate the 60s. If it weren’t for the 60s, some or all of the following might quite likely be true:[ul]
[li] You see two forums on Straight Dope: White and Colored[/li][li] Rock music was a forgotten fad[/li][li] You dress up to go buy groceries[/li][li] Universities enroll and process societal drones[/li][li] The Soviet Union is financing the Viet Cong[/li][li] News is mostly gossip, fluff, and state propoganda[/li][li] You dress up to go out and eat[/li][li] Gay means happy[/li][li] Homosexuality is “the love that dare not speak its name”[/li][li] There never was a War on Americans I Mean Drugs[/li][li] Birth control is strictly regulated[/li][li] Abortion is done very privately and quietly[/li][li] You dress up to go out and work in the yard[/li][li] A woman’s place is in the home[/li][li] Girls go to college to meet husbands[/li][li] Everybody knows what race is[/li][li] Negroes works as janitors and maids[/li][li] Nearly all rivers are clogged with sewage[/li][li] Lake Michigan has been burning for a decade[/li][li] Los Angeles is a ghost town in a black fog[/li][li] You dress up to go online[/li][li] Rosa Parks is long dead, having been lynched[/li][li] Allison Krause is alive and well[/li][/ul]
Without the 60s their would be no hippies and therefore no smart people going ‘groovy, lets play with my computer man’ because instead they would have got proper jobs as engineers / squares.
There would have been no mass IT revolution, no web.
Bill Gates would NOT have dropped out and would be working as a teacher or something.
Actually computers, generally speaking from the hippie frame of reference, were a forboding part of the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex.
From the musical Hair:
Finding a “current” hippie to talk to about the 60s is like finding a current Nazi to talk to about WWII. You will get a very peculiar viewpoint.
In addition to Libertarian’s comments, let me note that there were significant political reforms in the U.S. following the politics of '68 and '72 (which was still part of the 60s, really). The smoke-filled rooms and back-door politics of the 50s were replaced by the system of primaries that have evolved into the mess we have today.
The 60s were a time of turmoil and change, and Libertarian’s list is pretty exemplary. I’d add a few bits, like hairstyles: in the early 60s, you would be thrown out of school if your hair was too long.
Did the 60s make a difference? No doubt about it. Compare the 50s to the 70s, and tell me that there wasn’t change. Was the difference up there with 1860 or 1776 or 1914? Probably not. But the 60s certainly had more impact on history than the 80s.
First off, if you find a stock broker named Starshine, then that person’s parents were hippies, not the person you’re talking to. The number of legal name changes attributable to the “Age of Aquarius” are probably in the dozens or hundreds across the the entire country of (then) 196,000,000 people.
As to the rest, it was a complex time that is filtered by every individual’s experiences.
Some people did band together to fight the establishment. On the other hand, a lot of people the same age went out and joined it. Most of the names on the Vietnam Memorial wall are baby-boomers. While most of them were likely drafted, not all were and the ones who were drafted still served and died.
The members of the Peace movement did not co-opt the Civil Rights movement–the Peace movement was initially formed by people, many of whom were already in the Civil Rights movement.
Did the protests die down when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam? Sure. But the emphasis had always been on getting the U.S. to stop playing bully in another playground and let the other kids settle their own fights. (Debates on the merits of whether we should have been there or when we should have pulled out or fought to win deserve their own thread. However, it is hardly legitimate to complain that when the Peace movement saw its primary goal met, it quit.)
The argument that the Peace movement died down when “our boys” were “safe” has a small token of truth in it, but it is a shallow observation that misses many of the nuances and conflicting beliefs that permeated that time. What the proponents of the “they only protested to save their butts” theory miss (deliberately or through abysmal ignorance) is that the Peace movement did not orginate with draft card burners; it originated among people who watch Buddhist monks set themselves afire in downtown Saigon to protest the continuance of the civil war and the U.S. participation in it. TV viewers were given a very visceral look at people who were willing to die horribly to protest our presence. At that point, a lot of people (but still a tiny minority of the population) decided that it was rather foolish to fight where we were not wanted. Certainly, as the war ramped up (and as more and more people perceived that we would never win and that dying in such a war was pointless) the “save our butts” factor grew. However, to reduce all the war opposition to that is simply wrong.
All those “hippies” (of who I was never one) may have “sold out,” but the boomers from that era are still the demographic group that gives the most in time and money to charitable efforts (having finally outlived most of the Depression kids who used to lead those figures).
Are there lots of myths about the 60s? Sure. There are lots of myths about every time. Since the Baby Boom put so many people into the population, Boomers make a big target for all the snipers with bad aim (since even when you can’t shoot straight, the target is still big enough to take a small wound).
What did the 60s accomplish? Well, the backlash certainly never hurt Reagan or the Bushes.
Unless you find an actual ex-hippie claiming they changed the world (rather than a straw man), I would guess that most people would recognize that it was a momentous period that was shaped by many factors and that, in turn, has left a number of good and bad legacies.
The few that jump out at me as I wander off to work:
- Less blind obedience to our governmental leaders
- Less willingness to cut our governmental leaders some slack to do their jobs
- Less repressive social constraints
- Less public courtesy (all though this tended to by more a 70s issue, it arose from 60s expressions)
- Greater willingness among some people to go out and organize grass roots movements to correct public problems
- Among people not so motivated, far fewer people actually participating (since "it won’t do any good, anyway)
Actually, Lib, Rosa Parks made her “not in the back of the bus” sit-down protest on December 1, 1955, not in the sixties. I have excellent reasons for remembering the date.
I was quite young then (10 in 68) but I remember well.
It was a cultural revolution.
People thought society was plastic and rejected it and formed their own.
unfortunately, it didn’t last.
Cal
Right. But they lynched Rosa during the non-60s when there were no leaders (or followers for that matter) who gave a damn about what she’d done. She was lynched to present an example to the few renegade freedom fighters who, by the way, were also strung up. All this happened when George Wallace became president in non-1968.
Yes, the 60s mattered.
Civil Rights While the Birmingham Bus Boycott in 1955 started the civil rights movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that segregation around the country was directly challenged.
The Space Program The race with the Rusians to get to the moon first spun off a wealth of goodies for the civilian market, like MRI’s, CAT scans, lasers used in CD players, freeze-dried foods and many more.
Distrust of GovernmentIn the 50s, Americans believed
the government was on their side. During the Vietnam War, the Amrican population could see that the evening news reports from the battlefields contradicted government propoganda. That, combined with Watergate in 1972, has made Americans fear and dislike the government and the military.
Drugs We’re still living with the consequences of the expansion of recreational drug consumption from the hipster underground to becoming a rite of passafe for American youth
[Let’s go…]I know a guy who claims that if you can remember the 60s, then you weren’t there![/…to San Fransisco]
I was 10 in 68, with sisters who were 16 and 18 and hippies to their toes, so I remember it well.
I remember marching in civil rights protests years before with my mother, who was president of the Beverly Hills chapter of the NAACP. (A white woman president…I wonder if that happens today?)
I think the 60’s made a HUGE difference in the way we live. Enormous. Whether that was the intention or not, or what the motives were behind everyone’s behavior, is beside the point. It did end up making a difference. The culture we live in now would be a complete shock to an adult transplanted from 1950.
stoid
Consider:[ul]
[li]Vietnam still lasted thru 1975[/li][li]Racism is still around[/li][li]Gays didn’t fully come out until the 90s[/li][li]Nuclear power & fossil fuels are bigger than ever[/li][/ul]
Vietnam, discrimination, pollution were not eliminated, ended, or even significantly reduced.
More importantly, contrary to what a hippy might say this country was not significantly changed. Our Constitution, structure of government, armed forces, education system etc. are all today as they would have been without peace, love & music.
To paraphrase Grace Slick, “We were a bunch of spoiled kids with too much free time & money”.
It has always seemed to me that there were two 1960s. The first one starting with the Birmingham bus boycott in the mid 50s and continued through Dr. King’s murder in 1968. This was the period of the Kennedy-Nixon election and the heyday of the civil rights movement and the world looking into the abyss of thermo-nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crises in 1962. During this time young people, mostly college students dragged the country into implementing the promise of political equality.
The second 1960s overlapped with the first one. The second period started with the 1st Infantry Division going into Vietnam in 1965, and ended with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. This was a period when the country’s young people, again mostly college students, either abandon themselves to the pleasure of the moment or actively dragged the country back from the very real possibility of turning into an imperial dictatorship.
This may well be overly simplistic but it is my personal synthesis of the time. I graduated from high school in 1960, from college in 1964, from post grad in 1967, and was in the armed forces from 1967 until 1972. In other words, I lived through it. What I did not participate in I watched at first hand.
“The Sixties”
There was no ten-year period that was what the legend says the sixties were.
I graduated High School in 1965, and served in the army from 66-69. My Father served in the Army in 1956, in Vietnam. I could have been the second generation of my family to serve in that war. I became a conscientious objector while in the army. I never went to Vietnam, but that had nothing to do with my objections.
When I got back to the US, I found the world different. No one respected people for the position they held. The mayor was not honored. You only called him Your Honor if you wanted to go somewhere in city politics. The president was a war-mongering imperialist, and the Government was the enemy.
It was trendy in part. It was very fashionable to be revolutionary. It was a load of crap for a whole lot of people. But the fact is that I got kicked out of school in 1963 for wearing sandals to school, and again in 65 for having long hair. (It hung down over my ears, if you can imagine hair that long on a boy!) I was called a communist for doubting that mutually assured destruction was a rational policy when I mentioned it. I got spit on in Minnesota for being a peace freak.
The world did not suddenly get better because of some nebulous enlightenment growing out of the hippie movement. The hippie movement was a trash basket term invented to include all the many points of view that questioned the June Cleaver/Jim Anderson loyalty at any cost image of America was an exclusive prescription for desirable human existence. The fifties were so strangulating that it was simply unacceptable to most people that anyone might not want to have a house in the suburbs. They had to be the enemy, and they (me!) were dangerous, and unpatriotic.
The main reason that the various protestation views got involved together was the fact that the extreme right lumped them together in common disdain, and hate. The big change didn’t come from the left; it came from the middle. Decent people in ordinary situations watched quiet, harmless folks doing nothing violent being beaten and killed by the legally constituted authorities. It was horrifying. Somewhere along the way a lot of very moderate people decided that the folks with the dogs and clubs and hoses were not really living the “American Dream” quite the way they had always imagined it. So, they looked at the un-American wierdo hippie peace creeps, and thought about them.
It did change things. It did not solve all the world’s problems, and it certainly did not alter the fact that the very few real hippies in the sixties were mostly vague minded stoners looking for free love. Among them though, and accepting of them were fellow travelers that really had ethical systems, and really did try to make changes in the way people lived and thought. The biggest difference was that it now was possible to talk about that, and have people listen.
You don’t judge the intellectual importance of the Black Power movement by Mohammed Ali, or even Bobby Seale; you judge it by Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcom X. Arlo Guthrie didn’t lead the Moratorium March, he just sang at the concert. But the presence of half a million people on the Mall did get the President’s attention, even though he was out of town. The media presented the image that sold the most TV time. But the D C Police (and a lot of indiscriminate tear gas use) educated a lot of people, who came only to support a stand against the war. Some of them left with some basic distrust for authority.
And by the way, my hair is longer now, and I still have a lot of the same opinions and attitudes I had then, and I still boycott, and protest, and I try very hard to make a difference. I had a job back then too, by the way.
I did give up dope, though.
Peace!
Tris
“Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower ~
<< Our Constitution, structure of government, armed forces, education system etc. are all today as they would have been without peace, love & music. >>
If you think the 60s was only about “peace, love & music” then no doubt you are correct.
If you have any knowledge of the times, you would not make such a silly comment. The Constitution actually has changed – there were some amendments passed since 1960, IIRC. But even if the Constitution is unchanged, the structure of political government (primary system) is certainly vastly different now than it was in 1965. The armed forces (voluntary) is very different now than it was in 1965. The education system (types of course offered in college, for a simple example) is different now than it was in 1965.
THe idea that the 60s didn’t change anything is silly, Hail Ants
[list]
[li]The Johnson and Nixon administrations’ credibility gap on Vietnam is the direct source of our distrust of the US government.[/li][li]The perceived class injustice in the draft system and the subsequent abolition of the draft has contributed to the balkanization of our society.[/li][li]The radical racial political struggle that rose from the ashes of the civil rights movement led to the current emphasis on ethnic origin as personal identification. We would have no hip hop nation if it had not been for Martin, Malcom, and James Brown.[/li][li]In university, literary deconstructionism came out of the intellectual ferment of the 1960s. The impact of the idea that there is no objective truth on American society cannot be over estimated. People can major in Gay Studies, Black Studies, and Peace Studies because of student demands for “relevant” courses. The inclusion of works by non-white and female authors, like Toni Morrison and Richard Wright, is a product of the intellectual enlightenment of the 1960s. Before the 60s, the idea that useful ideas could[/li]come from outside the canon of Dead White Males was unheard of.
The 26th amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, came from the demands of Boomer Youth to be heard in politics.
Well, if you look at what life was like in 1959 and then in 1970, you would think you were on another planet. A lot of things started in the 1960’s that are still in effect today. It was a time of enormous change, and most of it for the good: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, technological revolution, environmentalism, volunteerism.
1968 is often sited as the privotal year.
But the PC came from hippies, usually with long hair from MIT or wherever, a lot of ‘dropping out’ etc. I don’t think that without the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out and do your own thing’ idea of the 6os that people would have ‘tried’ things.
In fact, i think that is the main legacy of the 60s, that we accept its ok to challege established ideas and ‘do your own thing’.