I've sat here for 24 hours now, flabbergasted at the charge that the movements of the 1960's were a failure.
Absolutely flabbergasted.
The only conclusion I can come to is that the people who did not live through those times simply can't understand what life was like before that period of our history, that those who claim "failure" for those movements were born in - and are currently swimming in - the amniotic fluid those successes created. "Failure" proponents are so immersed in the benefits of the successes that they think it a natural element, like oxygen. What younger people assume to be "the way things just are" are only the way things are because of those years.
Because it wasn't the legislation that passed in the 1960's that left its lasting mark (legislation, after all, can be undone, as we are learning with the dismantling of the New Deal), it was a whole paradigmatic shift in world view that I can only sum up as:
There are other ways to live and it's okay to try them.
The grip that conformity had on this nation in the 1950's and early 1960's cannot be overestimated. And the greatest and most lasting successes of that time - that have trickled down to minority groups and specific programs and legislation - can all be traced back to that overthrow of conformity.
Watch "Leave It to Beaver" or "Ozzie and Harriett" or "Father Knows Best." Imagine growing up with those family structures and assumptions being the only thing on the menu for your proposed future. The only thing.
Imagine growing up in a country where if a female teacher got pregnant, she was forced to leave her position (as my fourth grade teacher was), so that the little children wouldn't be sullied by the bulging evidence of marital sex.
It was a world in which no questions were asked, where stability and conformity were held to be the highest social aspirations. It was a stultifying, preordained, hierarchical world where very, very few people challenged the status quo.
I am a late boomer (born 1958), and much of what I experienced about those years came from watching the restraints - and the upheaval in loosening them - through my older sister, who was born in 1951.
As girls, we were forced to wear dresses to school even though it snowed. My sister, in high school, was not offered career counseling or college counseling, despite a 4.0. She and I both were required to take home economics (which we both did very poorly in). There was an absolute assumption that women would marry and had no need of a career. We went to church each Sunday even though our father didn't believe. We went because we were supposed to. We went because it was expected.
My future husband (born 1956), was living in Kentucky, where there were separate schools for blacks and whites in grade school and then because of forced integration, a mix in high school - a high school that skirted the law by still having separate classes and lunch periods and locker rooms for blacks.
And no one - and I mean no one - thought this was odd, that smart girls weren't funneled toward college in the public school system, that they were required to freeze their asses off at the bus stops for the sake of propriety, that blacks had a completely different "school within a school."
If that wasn't bad enough, you could spend eight years in jail for one joint in your pocket. You couldn't even sedate yourself into submission to this soul-killing conformity.
And then, the world exploded, opened up and scared people shitless at the same time it exhilarated them. The pressure clearly had been building for years, and it wasn't one single thing - or even one enumerated set of single things - that did it. It was the combination of all of it - the war, the music, the protests, the example of the Beats, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the assassinations, the drugs. Cause and effect became so intertwined it was impossible to separate one from the other. It was, in social terms, an example of Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" applied to a whole society.
What people who didn't live through that time can't grasp is how fast it happened. The world seemed to unravel all at once. Consider: within a five-year period we went from cute Liverpool boys in matching suits and haircuts singing "Do You Want to Know a Secret" (ooh-aah--oh) to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
The fact that those who follow in the wake of those convulsive years can term those times a failure and take them for granted in an ironic way testifies to their success.
That we can sit here online and discuss gay issues, transgender issues, whether pie ads degrade women, what it means for either gender to choose childlessness or to opt out of marriage, whether abortion is moral or not ... the fact that these issues are even on the table for discussion, whichever view you take, is a testament to the success of the 1960's.
Flex time, working from home, dropping in and out of the workforce, returning to college in your 40's, switching careers, men being primary caregivers to children while the mothers work ... again, discussions that can only exist because of the legacy of the 1960's.
Awareness of Native American and other indigenous cultures, of the impact of corporate malfeasance on the economy and the environment, the rise of alternative spiritual and health practices, recycling, organic farming, natural childbirth ... thank you, 1960's.
Questioning authority. Questioning the motives of the powerful. Questioning the views of your "fellow travelers." Questioning - and looking into - your very own self. These are standard practices now that would have made you a freak of nature in 1959.
So yeah, we dressed kind of freaky and we certainly underestimated the toll that drugs could take on a society (and individual lives) as a whole. But you know what? We left you with a gift, one you may not even realize you've accepted. But that's okay. We don't need thanks. We were glad to do it. Here it is:
There are other ways to live and it's okay to try them.