Re: OT - The 60's


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Posted by D. Sherman on Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 13:44:11 :

In Reply to: OT - The 60's posted by Steve on Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 23:53:03 :

I guess that's nostalgia for you. I was just a kid in the '60s, but what I remember was that every evening the news started with the day's body count from Vietnam, the Weathermen were blowing up government offices, a whole lot of people thought Martin Luther King was going to lead the blacks in a revolution that would end up with whites getting slaughtered, and there was some big anti-war or civil-rights protest just about every week that ended up with a lot of broken windows and cracked skulls. Yeah, the good music was good, but most of it was bubblegum pop. On our family vacation to Seaside Oregon, I watched a genuine riot, complete with a phalanx of riot police (how did they know it was going to happen?) take place right out on the beach by the turnaround. The hippies looked like they were having fun, and if I'd been 10 years older I probably would have joined them, but some of them were too far out for me, like the guy who was wearing a bloody kotex for a head band. My grandpa's brother's comment about the anti-war protesters has stuck with me, "If they won't fight, they ought to string 'em up and shoot 'em! And give 'em a haircut first!"

What all this nostalgia seems to forget is how divided the country was, how much each side demonized the other side, and how seriously they were all afraid of what the others might do to them.

Oh, and did I mention the pollution? I used to try to hold my breath all the way through Everett, Tacoma, Longview, or any of the other pulp-mill towns in the northwest. The clouds of brown stench went for at least 10 miles down-wind. Most of the cities dumped their raw sewage right into Puget Sound or Lake Washington. I'd find toilet paper and even turds floating near the beach all the time. Growing up near the water, I never saw an eagle, a heron, or a sea lion. They'd all been shot or poisoned, deliberately or accidentally. Even with all that obvious pollution, people reacted to any call to reduce the pollution as if it was a communist plot to destroy America, like somehow being "patriotic" meant you should enjoy swimming in sewage and breathing air that was so polluted it was literally killing trees.

Sorry, but even though I was just a boy in the '60s, and everybody should remember their childhood as being the best time there ever was, I don't think people in general were any more decent or honorable or hard-working back then than they are now. I liked the good music better than the music today, and I liked what the back-to-the-land people tried to do in the early '70s, but all in all it was a mighty contentious time. There were serious calls for an armed revolution (part of the reason they passed the 1964 Gun Control Act was out of fear of blacks arming themselves) and serious calls for a new constitutional convention. There were real communists who really were trying to overthrow the government. There were lots of angry people who would gladly join whatever riot was passing by that day just to break stuff. The "establishment" people felt like they were under siege from all directions.

It really is a testament to Americans that our country survived that period without breaking up into a dozen small countries like Yugoslavia or degenerating into permanent mob rule like seems to be happening in so many African countries. We even managed to come out of that period with some real improvements. We got out of Vietnam. We got rid of the bad pollution. We protected some wilderness. Even if those things are sometimes taken to excess today, we're still better off than if we hadn't done them.



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