A decade is ending, thus presenting a fine opportunity for reflection on the 1980s. But instead I find myself unaccountably drawn back 20 years further, to the 1960s. I am not alone. This past year such events as the death of former Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the re-emergence of Ringo Starr, the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, and reunions of the Rolling Stones and the Who all evoked a kind of national nostalgia for that tumultuous time.
I was 10 when the sixties began, and 20 when it ended. In certain ways I passed through the decade protected by a Teflon shield of religion and subculture. I had never developed a taste for much music written after 1890, and mind-altering drugs never tempted me. More, I spent the later sixties on the campus of a Christian college: while secular university students were holding college presidents hostage and bombing buildings, our most daring protestors lobbied meekly against compulsory chapel. Still, despite my isolation, in other ways I was profoundly affected by those years of discontent.
A Fluke Of Demographics
At the time, it appeared that the world stood at a threshold.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—W. B. Yeats
When Parisian students took to the barricades in 1968, political conservatives shrieked about the decline of all civilization and the freedom-smashing juggernaut of communism. Evangelical gurus like Francis Schaeffer predicted mounting unrest that would lead to cultural anarchy. No one, absolutely no one, foretold what actually did take place over the next two decades: a withdrawal from political to personal concerns, a surge in M.B.A. degrees, the conquests of yuppiedom, a retreat from civil-rights activism, the election and re-election of Ronald Reagan.
It soon became clear that the sixties represented, more than anything, a fluke of demographics. Baby Boomers were the first generation in U.S. history larger than the generation that would follow; naturally, their rite of passage would have a disproportionate impact. The population bulge moved through adolescence and young adulthood like a small pig moving through a boa constrictor: it surely changed the shape of its surroundings, but eventually, like everything else, it too was absorbed.
The sixties began with an emphasis on ideals: peace, love, community, justice, equality. Ideals being abstractions, however, a passion for them is always difficult to sustain, and gradually the focus shifted away from substance toward style.
American corporations jumped in, cranking out designer blue jeans and sneakers, machine-cut leather fringe, and prewashed, tie-dyed T-shirts. Facial hair sprouted in the strangest places: on bankers and politicians and stock brokers. Music groups like the Beatles, who had begun as antiestablishment rebels, became billion-dollar properties.
As the ideals faded, or got co-opted, what remained was an emphasis on physicality. Think of what has endured as a legacy from the sixties: an active involvement with the outdoors; music that can be felt, literally, in the body’s vibrating cells; a body consciousness expressed through meditation, t’ai chi, or other New Age transmutations; drugs; and, of course, the sexual revolution. All these features of our modern landscape express a heightened awareness of bodily experience that can be traced back to the sixties.
I find it ironic, and sad, that so many of the lofty ideals from that era have evaporated, leaving us with mere physical emblems—for the part of the sixties that marked me had nothing to do with these emblems. I think back with nostalgia on the passionate spirit of that decade. Though wild and unformed, that spirit was strong enough to prompt thousands of clergy and students to head South on buses and risk their lives for a cause in Mississippi and Alabama, and it was strong enough to inspire students to resist a war they could not support.
The Reign Of The Heart
In the sixties, people thought more with their hearts than with their heads. As e. e. cummings put it: “since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things?”
The sixties made us question cherished national values, such as global power, unlimited economic growth, conspicuous consumption. If someone inquired about career goals, you would be too ashamed to answer, “I think I’ll specialize in arbitrage, or maybe junk-bond financing.” The respectable response then was “social work” or “legal services for the poor.” We questioned everyday things, too, like the macho ritual of football, and lusty beauty pageants.
Today, football, beauty pageants, and economic growth are all thriving. Apparently, the boa constrictor has absorbed the lump. The funny thing is, the many important questions raised in the sixties are now more relevant than ever. People worried about the environment back then, long before anyone had heard such phrases as “greenhouse effect” and “ozone depletion.” They worried about the national debt LBJ was piling up to pay for the war in Vietnam; those amounts would barely cover a month’s interest on the national debt of the eighties. They worried about overpopulation at a time when the brittle earth supported two billion fewer human beings, and about income distribution during the years we were shipping billions in loans to the Third World—the same loans they are now scrambling desperately to make interest payments on. Maybe the main problem with the spirit of the sixties is that it surfaced twenty years too soon.
I have a premonition that we haven’t seen the end of convulsive protest. Perhaps the youth of the next century will resume marching in the streets—in protest against the monstrous national debt we have bequeathed them, and the polluted, overcrowded, soil-depleted, clear-cut, strip-mined planet we’ve left behind. And, who knows, we oldsters who grew up in the sixties may take to the streets again as well. But I have a hunch that if we do so, this time around we will be agitating for increased social security benefits, health care, and other legislative largesse we’ve come to call “entitlements.”
