kittycago wrote a highly recommended diary today that was sparked by one of those email chains waxing nostalgically about some long lost time, in this case, the 1950s.
The detailed and intriguing journey concludes in part with a direction to Millenials
In closing I would hope that those of you under the age of 30 would really read this timeine and see what many of the right wing talking points mean and where they came from.They are based on a dishonest assessment of the laws that they look upon with such disdain and why these laws had to be enacted
As someone who happens to be under 30, I thought it might be interesting to look at the 1960s not as a participant, but rather as someone who only knows about the time as history.
Amusingly, the sender of the 1950s-nostalgic email dates him/herself more than probably intended by the listing.
"We never heard of Aids, Red M&M's, Compact Disc, Computers, Push Button Telephones, Answering Machines, ID Box's, Cable TV, VCR's, Remote Control, The Beatles, Hippies, Riots in the Street, Vietnam, Shopping Malls, Drive By Shotings, Disco, Heavy Metal, and Bill Gates.
A significant chunk of those things I don't have, not because they haven't been invented yet, but rather, because they were invented so long ago they're now obsolete. I haven't bought an audio CD this millennium. My phone has a touchscreen. Answering machines go with landlines, something the residence I inhabit doesn't even have. AIDS isn't something to be scared of, it's something to be cured with further advances in medical science. I'm not sure I could really say what heavy metal is, exactly. Etc.
And more generally, I very much agree with kittycago that the decade of the 1950s isn't something to which we would want to return. What I might be able to add is the perspective that we don't really want to return to the 1960s, either. There are valuable takeaways from both decades. Here's one person's take (mine) on how somebody born two decades later might analyze three contributions of the 1960s from a historical perspective to see what's applicable as we look forward to the next decade and beyond. I hope it's clear this is by no means an exhaustive exploration of the decade; just a few observations in helpful diary form.
Collective Action Rocks - It even brings us moonrocks
I remember watching some History channel show about the Cold War a few years ago that looked at the space race. They were comparing the number of scientists that the Soviets could bring to bear for a mission to the moon, about 20,000, to the number of Americans working on the Apollo program at its height, something like 400,000. That is just an amazing mobilization of resources, both human and financial, and it happened because government organized the resources to do it. It was successful, too. We didn't just send a man to the moon. We brought him back. With rocks. And then we did it again.
The phrase rocket science has entered our lingo precisely to capture the essence of these kinds of government-coordinated activities. The logic speaks to us loudly today. Healthcare ain't rocket science. Neither is environmental protection, or financial industry regulation, or transportation policy, or a whole host of challenges we face today. Don't tell Americans what can't be done. Tell us your plan to do it, or get out of the way and let somebody in who can get it done. [brief aside to the GOP: nobody really even hears you anymore when you shrilly scream no; we are the generation of yes.]
We Live in a Democracy - We die with democracy
Whatever might be the perspective of people who lived through the 1960s, one of the things almost everyone learns about the 1960s is the Kent State Massacre. Those of us who know that as history, I don't think, really understand it. On the one hand, it seems like such blatantly un-American behavior, but on the other hand, it seems like pretty standard behavior. Our government has policies that kill people. The farther the gulf between public opinion and state policy, the more killing that tends to happen.
What is oddly jarring and numbing is that death isn't really even news. Sanctions kill people. Air pollution kills people. Privatized health insurance kills people. Prison policies kill people. When's the last time there was national attention focused on an inmate who died while being incarcerated? Will the effort by Feingold and Conyers to restore voting rights to ex-offenders go anywhere? When do we consider the human costs of protecting our 'national security' through sanctions and predator strikes? The very corporate media that focuses on random violence but never state-controlled policies demonstrates best the gap between democracy and our present system. Few policies are as universally detested by members of all political parties, genders, races, and religious faiths as media consolidation.
It's Easier to Celebrate a Man - Harder to celebrate what he advocated
One of the great institutional changes affected by the 1960s is the addition of federal recognition of MLK day. If you didn't grow up after the 1960s, perhaps it's worth stopping a minute and exploring what that changed. Schools all across the country now interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to discuss a black man. Now, certainly, some do it better than others. Some make a bigger deal of it than others. But there is no other date on the calendar that Gen Xers and Gen Yers grew up with that was devoted to one person. Not Presidents' Day. Not Veterans' Day. Not Labor Day. Not Thanksgiving. Even Jesus has to share Christmas with jolly 'ole St. Nick.
The flip side of that coin, though, is embracing a trend that has permeated our American consciousness, elevating personal fame over the substance of the actual, complex, multi-dimensional person underneath. For what is sad as someone who deeply respects and longs for the kind of vision presented by the Reverend Doctor is that much of what he actually advocated would be treated as naive, ignorant, irresponsible, and/or extreme leftist by today's narrowly-restricted bound for what is Serious Talk and what is not.
MLK would find our minimum wage appallingly low and the state of workers' rights abysmal. He would emphasize the linkages between racism, militarism, and economic opportunity. He would probably be more outspoken as a critic of Iraq, the Af-Pak war, and our general global footprint than in his own day he was outspoken for being a critic of the Vietnam War. His appeal would be to what we can do, not the artificial limits imposed from On High (ie, inside the beltway). He would remind us that he himself was arrested and imprisoned. Are we prepared to deal with true justice? True economic opportunity? True end to war?
Younger Gen Xers and Gen Yers are fed up with the GOP; that much is clear both anecdotally and via analyzing voting patterns (and even the ones who aren't don't want to send women back to the kitchen or blacks back to the fields). Our whole lives we've been waiting for people to stop taking the GOP seriously, and unfortunately, it seems things had to get pretty bad before the corporatists/oligarchs/plutocrats/insert-your-favorite-word-here of the times were thrown out of office.
But we don't just want to turn back the clock to a bygone era before we were even born. Rather, we want to empower a future that builds upon the victories of the past while embracing change where the past was incomplete.
Perhaps we'll know the ultimate success of the 2010s if people look back nostalgically in 2050 and say hey, remember what we did back then!