My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #36, April, 1996

FLOWER CHILDREN

According to Newt Gingrich, the fall of western civilization is entirely attributable to the 1960's, when baby boomers rioted in the streets, burned bras and draft cards, did pot and LSD, and discovered sex and The Pill simultaneously; it was also when Big Government decided it could run people's lives better than they could.

And this man got a Ph.D. in history! (Of course, he himself talks about how dramatically our educational standards have declined.)

You see, I was there at the time, just a tad ahead of the baby boomers, and I don't recognize Newt's 1960's. For me, the '60's were a golden time. We were young and full of energy and ideals and optimism and, yes, a kind of revolting self-righteousness. As Janis Ian sang, "We were gonna make the whole world honest."

The sixties started with the election of a young man. Granted, he was still old enough to be our father. But a man with a young, beautiful, pregnant wife--a president who was demonstrably Doing It in the Lincoln bedroom. (Of course, at the time, we didn't know he was Doing It every place in the western hemisphere.) It was a startling idea for us, a president who was young and vigorous and still had all his hair.

Looking back, it seems like hair was a running symbol of the decade:

1. The President, and his brother, with that thick, long, shaggy hair.
2. Jackie Kennedy, with her bouffant hairdo.
3. My first civil rights protest, a demonstration outside a barber shop that refused to cut the hair of blacks.
4. Girls growing their hair halfway down their backs, and, if it was unfashionably curly, ironing it.
5. The musical, Hair
6. Guys growing their hair long, and growing seedy-looking beards to go with it.

(Since many of our male friends were doing the long hair thing, I used to cut their hair for them--I was the only one they could trust to cut it short enough so their mothers knew they had made the effort, but leave it long enough so that they didn't look like marines. There were barbers in those days, not hairdressers.)

When Kennedy was assassinated, our generation never really recovered. We saw plotters everywhere we looked. We saw Cubans and CIA agents and Mafia dons and conservatives who all hated Kennedy, and our theories incorporated all of them. We made conspiracy books best-sellers, and became instant experts on the grassy knoll, and the amount of time between shots, and angles of fire. Many of us looked at the world the way filmmaker Oliver Stone still does.

But we didn't really distrust the federal government, because the federal government was correcting the racial injustice of centuries. Not by choice, not without enormous prodding, to be sure--governments would always rather administer an unjust status quo than deal with the instability that justice would bring.

Civil rights was our first great cause. Many of us white kids had never much thought about the matter. It seemed to us the natural order of things, that white kids hung out with white kids, black kids with black, that we lived in nice houses and they lived in shabby tenements in ugly parts of town we were ordered to stay away from.

When Martin Luther King started preaching those incredibly powerful words, we began to understand that this was a manmade order, and an unjust one. When the NAACP and other civil rights groups began their peaceful protests, and white sheriffs responded with bulldogs and billyclubs, we were appalled. We had believed in those American ideas--freedom, justice, opportunity--and for the first time we realized how far short we fell of achieving them. The Civil Rights act passed in 1964 because we, as a nation, recognized that the federal government had to protect all citizens' rights--because the states could not be trusted to.

The civil rights movement may have been our downfall. The cause was so obviously just, and it was won with (what seemed to white kids, anyway) such incredible swiftness, that it maybe set our expectations a little too high, made us think that other causes could be won as quickly, could be just as universally recognized as correct. But the problem is, we didn't all agree on what those next causes should be.

For many of us, the next cause was Viet Nam. Would this have been such an obviously wrongheaded war to us if so many of us were not eligible for the draft? Probably not. We were human, and self-interest clearly affected our perceptions. But the fact that we, or the men we loved, were vulnerable to the draft made us look a lot harder at the government's reasons for the war, and the military's behavior in prosecuting it, and the more we learned, the more we hated the war, the more we distrusted our government.

For others, the cause was drugs. After all, the Pentagon Papers showed us how routinely and automatically the government lied about the war, so why should we believe what it told us about drugs? The government-sponsored, bizarrely overacted films about how marijuana inevitably led one to hopeless addiction, craziness and death became overnight camp classics.

Having been raised to be a good little girl, I never got into drugs. For me, it had been too long and hard a struggle to become fully conscious and aware, and I hated the idea of turning my brain over to unknown chemical forces. The whole idea scared me silly.

But my friends were experimenting with the stuff. The drugs seemed to me not that different in effect from perfectly legal alcohol. They could be harmless social lubricants that helped shy uncertain people loosen up in social situations, or they could bring out mean and hostile parts of people's personalities. Drugs could bring you in touch with parts of your mind and spirit you never knew were there, or they could keep you in a continuous stupor so that you never had to face yourself or your problems.

To me, drugs were a social experiment that didn't work out all that well. But they were also a significantly different kind of cause. When we fought for civil rights, we were fighting for the rights of others, and for the greater good of society. When we protested against Viet Nam, we fought to make our government live up to its own ideals.

But when some of us made drugs into a cause, we were seen as fighting for the right to self-indulgence. Coupled with the fact that the Pill had made casual, undiscriminating sex safe and commonplace, it made us look not like principled protesters but spoiled brats.

This probably had a lot to do with why our parents' generation really started disliking us. They had suvived a depression, and fought an unbelievably gory war to give us freedom and a chance for the good life. They had denied theselves a lot of luxuries in order to buy safe homes in the suburbs and save for our college educations. And in return for their generosity, we told them that they were hypocrites, that their gods were false, that traditional morality was too constricting, and that we were far better, freer people than they were.

What a bunch of twits. Of course they hated us. Of course Rosemary's Baby was a hit, both as book and movie--it told people that when normal well-meaning parents produced monstrous children, it was NOT THEIR FAULT; the devil did it.

But the sixties didn't ruin us. Far from it. The legacy of the sixties includes the enactment of racial equality before the law--an unmixed social good. It includes the notion of the full equality of women--a more mixed sort of notion, because it upset so many more applecarts. It includes Medicare, and a generally improved quality of life for our elderly. It includes the full participation of handicapped citizens in public life. It includes the idea that, if people are old enough to be sent to fight a war, they are old enough to vote on whether there should be a war in the first place.

All of this is certainly part of what I loved about the time. But I was also young and in love, just married, with a circle of friends who loved me--enough so that, for the first time in my life, I began to believe that maybe I was lovable. I was teaching, and discovering that I was really good at it. My friends and I were working for various causes, and we felt that what we did mattered. We felt important.

That's not a bad thing. I've gotten older, and a little more realistic about the size and depth of the problems I want to solve, a little more understanding of the people I have to challenge along the way. But the sixties taught me that big change mostly happens slowly. I learned to celebrate the small victories along the way. And I learned to forgive people for almost anything but meanness.

I was never a flower child. But I bloomed in the sixties. And I still love the soil that I was planted in.

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