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A decade ago, I watched a television special called
1968: The Year Everything Went Wrong.
It was
certainly an accurate assessment of 1968.
However, now there are programs like
Thirtysomething
and The Wonder Years.
Long
after its release, The Big Chill
remains a popular
video rental. In many cities, the hottest radio wars are
between stations that air nothing but those Golden Oldies
from the 1960's.
The nostalgia merchants are at work, revising your history and mine into something pleasant. I can recall only one bright, shining moment in the '60s.
Go back to April 1, 1968. Lyndon Johnson had just announced he would not seek re-election. Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy would be the next president. No more war in Vietnam. Marijuana would be legal. From California to Czechoslovakia, the world was moving toward non-materialistic happiness, full of peace and love.
That was the last moment of optimism in the '60s. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Richard Nixon became president. The war ground on. Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. Chicago police bashed heads in Grant Park.
Those events are hardly the serene stuff of nostalgia. And look what happened to that promising new generation I belong to.
You once found people living 20 to a room in decrepit crash pads and communes. They spoke seriously of how they were renouncing the compulsive consumption and ostentation of materialistic America. They drove their point home by driving battered VW microbuses. Now they have become patronizing snobs who wouldn't be caught dead driving last year's BMW.
They once forsook the rat race to sample the quieter charms of life. Now they profess to find meaningful in a life along the rungs of the corporate ladder.
They advocated the immediate legalization of marijuana. Now they're bent on making it a felony to use tobacco in any form at any time or place.
There were people who went to court because they were
thrown out of restaurants on account of their rag-tag
clothes and bizarre appearance. They advocated their right
to be non-conformists, their right to be judged for their
intrinsic worth, not by how they dressed. Lately, of
course, they consult the latest edition of Dress for
Success and wouldn't dream of hiring anyone not attired
in a power wardrobe.
The generation that advocated love -- why is it so full of jerks, male and female, who abandon their children? Why so many Baby Boomers on their third or fourth marriages?
And what of the political power exercised now by the
same Baby Boomers who were horrified by the 1968 Democratic
Convention? Ronald Reagan, the villain at People's Park in
Berkeley, winning by landslides. So much harmony and
tolerance that most cities' schools are still under
desegregation orders, and bigoted Official English
laws fare well at the polls.
About all that remains relatively unchanged from the the '60s is the worst element of those social upheavals -- the assault on rational thought. Back then there were just a few astrology buffs; now we have thousands of New Age necromancers, still spouting the same nonsense, albeit in more refined ways.
Perhaps the worst thing that can be said of us Baby Boomers is that so many of us persist in looking back at all those colossal failures, and thinking it was all somehow wonderful.
It wasn't and it isn't. The one hopeful note is that we have created a culture that is even more materialistic, shallow, conformist and jingoistic than the one we rebelled against. And our kids have to be smarter than we were.
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