In 1996, I was driving through rural Maryland and stopped at a diner. I noticed an unusual situation. The old people looked fine; the kids looked fine; but the middle-aged people all looked sick and haggard.
It appears to me that these people were being worked to death. The conservatives had success in convincing others that the so-called “60s generation” were a bunch of evil brats, and they wanted to make things as bad for them as they could so that nobody else got the idea to do anything like 1960s ever again.
Now I have known a number of people who have been part of 1960s, and I was impressed by them. They were accused of not having morals; however they had better morals than people who were attacking them. They didn’t want seeing workers mistreated. They didn’t want to see women mistreated. They didn’t want to see people of other races mistreated. They didn’t want to see environment blindly plundered. All these are good values, and they are better values than are held by people who hated a whole generation.
Old hippies are accused of being selfish. They didn’t start out being selfish; they started out fighting for causes that didn’t give anything to them personally. Then they lost their connectivity as the nation moved to the Right, and all they had left was themselves. And people who have only themselves left will come across as being selfish. I want these people to regain connectivity and pass on their legacy. Just as World War II generation deserves a strong legacy, so do the baby boomers.
As for myself, I don’t look back to 1960s; I look back to 1920s. In 1920s there was a technological boom and a cultural blossoming. It was a golden age that vitalized both the productive and the creative in people, resulting in a time that people look back fondly to now. My position is an unusual one. I am in favour of both technology and the arts. Both sides are wrong in attacking each other. There is merit in both, and the two can and should be able to get along. As they did in 1920s, in Renaissance Italy, and in the Incan and Moore empires.
The most attractive men are the businessmen; the most attractive women are the artists. I see value in both business and the arts. Some think the two to be incompatible with each other; but any knowledge of history would prove these people wrong. On one side we are seeing fulfilment of man’s productive potentials; on the other, of man’s creative potentials. You have both together, and you have the full picture.
As for the 1960s people, I have found the attacks on them to be uninformed. The Republican gen-X women who hate “the sixties generation” owe to that generation their ability to have other options in life besides being stay-at-home wives. They were accused of being bad parents; but many of them were excellent parents. My mother was a baby boomer, but she was the best mother one could have hoped to have.
As for the World War II generation, while many of them were strong, hard-working and patriotic, they also tended to be heavy-handed and authoritarian. This was not limited to Americans; the Soviets of that generation behaved the same way. Americans saw the baby boomers who espoused leftism as being traitors and ungrateful brats; the Soviets of the same generation saw Soviet baby boomers, many of whom wanted to come to America, in the same way. And while many people miss the family values of 1950s, I know a number of people raised in that time whose parents raped them repeatedly and murdered their siblings. And while that generation won the Second World War, they also fought in the Second World War for the other side. So that while some see the goings-on in 1960s as a bunch of spoiled brats rebelling against a superior order, many of these people came from a place that should be understood.
I myself gain nothing for myself by standing up for the baby boomers. I see it wrong to hate a whole generation. We will see good and bad in every generation, including World War II generation and Generation X. They will all be good in some ways and bad in other ways. And we will see this continue to be expressed through all of history.