I have just finished James R. Gaines’ The Fifties: An Underground History about people in the Fifties who advanced women’s rights, civil rights, homosexual rights, and environmental rights.
It is for environmental protections, Gaines follows the lives of Rachel Carson and Norbert Weiner, that I added Silent Spring to Obama’s three key events that moved us in the direction toward a less imperfect union.
The movements of the Sixties for black, women, gay, and protecting the environment did not appear out of nowhere. There were people, as Gaines shows, often alone or with a small group of friends who had come before and created the ideas that would create much bigger movements in the Sixties and beyond.
Gaines prefaces his book with a quotation from Richard Rorty that should remind us that those who try to create a more perfect union are the real patriots.
We have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming actual.
One of the huge mistakes the anti-war movement in the Sixties made was giving up on flying the American flag. That flag, for us, should represent the dream country we want to see become a reality. It is after all in our Declaration of Independence that we ALL have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Gaines reveals in his introduction he was a student at that University of Michigan to graduate in 1969. [I entered university in 1968.] His final paragraph:
My generation had our victories too, but looking back, I cannot help feeling that people like those in this book were the more authentic rebels, in part because they did not think of themselves that way. In a decade [the Fifties] and a nation perhaps readier with opprobrium than ever before, they defied the most powerful forces and conventions of their time just to be the people they were, in the country it had always promised to be. Thanks to that, they lit a path for the rest of us to a somewhat less imperfect union, which is about the best thing any citizen can do.
We must never abandon that path, blazed by the many who came before, towards a less imperfect union.