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BS ‘n’ About…
The Sixties
Every nation has its defining moments, times which test its resolve, times which re-define its direction. It is how those times are handled that write the history of that nation and that people. For America, the Sixties were such a time.
We tend to look back on those days with nostalgia, focusing on the clothes, the music, the flowers, and the lifestyles. And since it was an era that dissolved almost overnight, its participants selling out so wholeheartedly, today we tend to forget why we threw the Sixties in the first place.
For those who lived through them, it was a scary time, the biggest insurrection in America since the Civil War. Everybody had an opinion. Tempers flared and heads butted. People marched on Washington by the hundreds of thousands. The National Guard was shooting our kids. We were up to our eyeballs in a war we knew we weren’t going to win.
But we were a people learning to fight for the concept that ‘all men are created equal’. We were a people willing to fight for our political beliefs. We were a people willing to fight for the other guy. It was anarchy. It was virtually revolution. But it was also Democracy at its finest.
For what is Democracy but a government by, of, and for the people? The more voices being heard, the more democratic the government. That isn’t to say that the Sixties were the best way to handle a difference of opinion, but at least back then we knew what opinions were and dared to have them.
We entered the Sixties with the riches of the Fifties being pumped into Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial-complex’, government’s focus abroad rather than at home. Meanwhile, many Americans still felt like second-class citizens. Sparked by the war, we rose up and demanded justice: Civil Rights & the Womens’ Movement, Farm Workers and the Environmentalists, the Black Panthers and the Gray Panthers, families and communities, students and vets. The people roared and Washington had no choice but to listen. Virtually every sub-segment of citizens in this country can trace its freedoms and supports back to those Democratic Congresses of the Sixties.
It was the highwater mark for the American citizen. Most legislation since has been aimed at limiting those rights and supports, rather than expanding them. Very few voices get heard anymore. America has recently enjoyed the longest period of sustained growth and prosperity in our history, an economic boom of unprecedented proportions. Yet worker rights, health coverage, educational opportunities, and retirement security are mere shadows of what they so recently were. Wall Street has boomed while Main Street has withered.
The Sixties were a heady time and none of the parties involved handled it very well, but it was too much a defining moment in the history of our nation to be written off as nostalgia. Never have the American people been so personally involved in the running of their nation. Never have the American people thought so much about the issues or the other guy. Three network TV and nothing but news at six and eleven kept even the least interested of us abreast of the issues and personalities. The Voice of the People was coming from so many different directions at once that our leaders had no choice but to sit up and take notice.
Any government that survives a turmoil like the Sixties would, I imagine, take steps to see to it that it doesn’t happen again. And undoubtedly ours has. The sixty hours a week both Mom and Dad have to put in just to keep the cable bill paid and kids in Air Jordans has something to do with it. The Bread & Circuses distractions brought to us by Big Media do too.
The issues America faces today are every bit as momentous and future-altering as the ones faced by our predecessors just a generation ago. We are at war and bodybags they won’t let us see are being shipped home everyday. The Constitution is being re-interpreted, re-defined, and re-invented in ways that defy precedent. We have our very own gulag. Gas prices are a joke. Drugs infest our schools. Raising a family is almost impossible. Our politicians and business leaders are lechers and crooks.
Yet We, the People are no longer part of the process. We’ve become poll numbers and focus groups who docilely pay whatever they decide to charge us for gas, march off to war without a whimper, and allow ourselves to be ‘downsized’ at Wall Street’s whim. We are so overloaded by input that we have no time to process or take action on any of it. And, plugged in as we are to modern technology, we no longer are connected enough to our fellow man to share any real opinions amongst each other.
Have we changed so much as a people in such a short time? We’ve certainly changed as a nation. The Sixties were a full-blown insurrection. Yet we didn’t feel the need to set up a Department of Homeland Security, we didn’t assault the Constitution, we weren’t the ones declaring the wars, we didn’t feel the need for a gulag, our daughters weren’t torturing prisoners, and most of the world still looked to us as the undisputed “Good Guys”. Even our enemies, as it turns out. We were having violent differences of opinion, but they were being openly worked out. We were dealing with the issues, not the spin.
The Sixties beckon to all of us who lived through them, and demand closer study from those who didn’t. The issues we faced back then were in many ways much smaller and less Constitutionally threatening than those we face today. Back then, We, the People roared. Today we do absolutely nothing.
The Sixties may have gotten a lot of things wrong, but it seems an awful lot of hearts were in an awful lot of the right places at the time. As if we were learning to be a better people. Have those hearts hardened or merely been divided and conquered? America has changed much as a nation in a very short time. We, the People need to look within and ask if those changes truly reflect our will.
Every nation has its defining moments, times which test its resolve, times which re-define its direction. It is how those times are handled that write the history of that nation and that people. For America, now is such a time.
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