Forty years later we're living in a completely militarized society that's more plutocratic than anything seen since the Gilded Age. Boomers bear heavy responsiblity for this fiasco. Carl
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We sure have been over this one before. So here we go again.
In the popular history I carry around I don't associate the baby-boomers referring to the post-WWII generation say from late 40s through mid-50s, with the political activities of the 60s, except at the very end---when that particular age group began what I consider something of a compromised or almost counter-revolutionary roll back during the 70s, performed under the guise of professionalism and working with the system.
The political people I remember were all born in the late 30s through the mid 40s, War Babies in the popular lexicon, and hit jobs, college and the military about the same time, say late 50s through late-60s and also filled in the ranks of the civil rights and anti-war movements.
If you need examples, then the first student organizers in NLG John Mage mentioned, Ken Cloke and Bernadine Dorhn, would be good representatives of the kind of people I am talking about.
Whether they won, lost or drew a blank, they created an entire spectrum of activities and rhetoric that are still with us. Virtually all the progressive social services that everybody wants and needs (and that have been under constant attack since their inception) from childcare, family planning, and pre-school to legal aid, to help getting through school, to progressive alternates to public schools, and alternatives to work for corporations and petty producers, on out to alternate families, integration, humane urban re-development, inner city school and family support services, disability rights and independent living support, to community and senior support services, ex-offender services, prison reform and so forth, and then over to the environmental sciences and social awareness and overt political resistance, the focus, interest and linkage in progressive international developments in the developing world, blah, blah, blah...
Virtually ever thing that anybody here wants to argue about essentially didn't exist on the ground as an everyday reality worthy of debate in the US before the 60s. And all of it, good, bad, and ugly is still at the center of struggle. Whoever wrote that the 60s never ended is pretty much correct. Most of those activities center on what amounts to social and environmental re-construction to make up for the egregious economic inequalities and oppressions that constantly grind away at the society and if left unchecked will essentially destroy us. Since social reconstruction has been eroded to alarming proportions the society is now effectively in self-destruct mode thanks to neoliberal capitalism's avaricious consumption of all that lives and breaths on the planet.
I would argue the biggest failure of that period and its movements was the failure to directly attack capitalism and the economic system itself. The success was in articulating and exposing the linkages between segregation, war, and capital, but the failure was failing to directly attack those linkages once they were articulated. It seemed too big and too likely to fail and of course there was no job waiting to do that. Instead most people addressed the social consequences rather than the economic and institutional causes. Who understood that by taking on and re-framing social services and social reform, they would effectively be co-opted into producing the foundation for the so-called services based economy of neoliberalism? Or who would have thought that by developing those social reforms, we would merely provide the humanistic sounding rhetoric or happy face for furthering the vastly more powerful and institutionalized machinations of war and capital for Empire.
I have to wonder if Bernadine Dohrn who (according to google) teaches law in the family law and juvenal justice center at Northwestern, or Ken who works as a labor-management relations consultant in LA would have foreseen the transformation of every positive US social reform into a service commodity to be sold and exported as the new global services economy? I sure didn't.
The most important lesson to pass on is simply that you have to understand revolting against the system is a lifetime work and you will have to figure out how to live and revolt at the same time. Be prepared to pay in real time, with real blood, sweat and tears, along with committing disastrous mistakes and wildly bad judgments cause the evil Empire ain't gonna roll over and make friends. Nobody will come out of it clean.
Here is Bernadine Dohrn in an interview in 1998 talking about Wm. Kuntlser's defense of H Rap Brown on trial in New Orleans ('68) on conspiracy charges the US Congress trumped up as the Rap Brown amendment to the 1968 Civil Rights act that made it a federal crime to cross state lines to incite a riot, in other words to organize effectively:
``...And the thing that was always so striking about Bill is that he played by the rules and he rejected the rules, simultaneously. He rejected the framework in which the legal violation was being discussed, even as he repudiated the allegations, point-by-point...''
(http://zena.secureforum.com/Znet/zmag/articles/dohrnmay98.htm)
That pretty much sums up the magic trick you have to figure out how to perform and live as a daily routine. Good luck.
Chuck Grime