> I wasn't there, but here's my sense of things.
>
> There were victories, of a sort, there were surely
> defeats and there was absorption of much of the energy
> generated into the machinery of capital. So, the fact
> that I've yet to have a really bad job experience
> based upon my color (oh, some incidents here and there
> but no sustained anti-cyberNegro campaign) means that
> I'm experiencing an improved social situation than my
> Grandmother did at my age.
I was there (even a little older than the stereotypical " '60s generation," since I was in grad school when they were in college), and here's my sense.
The common belief among the '60s generation was that total revolution was around the corner -- plug a few flowers into a few National Guard rifles, levitate the Pentagon, smoke some weed, drop some acid, and -- hey, presto! -- everything would be different. Heaven would blossom on earth.
Side by side with that "generation," which got all the headlines and press coverage, were a lot of others who were seriously engaged in political work. The results of the '60s generation, which is what most people even today think of when "the '60s" is mentioned, blew away with the smoke of their roaches. Total, immediate revolution didn't happen, after all, so they shaved their excess hair, put on their suits, and went off to get their MBAs.
The results of the serious political work, taking place mostly in the darkness of lack of attention from the news media, did indeed accomplish things like making your situation different from your grandmother's (and mine, as a middle-class white, different from mine, even).
In sort, total immediate revolution is always an illusion. But it seems that several people on this list are still suffering from it. Because everything is not heaven today, they insist that everything is hell.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt