LINK Exorcising the Ghosts of the Sixties - TheHumanist.com
“I COULD NOT UNDERSTAND how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign.” That authorial “I” was John Updike in his self-deluding memoir, Self-Consciousness; the rebels he was referring to were fed-up blacks, middle-class students, the working poor, disenchanted professionals, and left-wing zealots; and the “benign” system was our own in the 1960s.
That “benign” system was destroying almost two million acres of land in South Vietnam by dropping more bombs on the country than we had dropped in all of World War II and the Korean War combined. That “benign” system had local law enforcement collaborating with the Ku Klux Klan to murder “uppity negroes”—then all-white juries, heartened by defense attorneys to defend Anglo-Saxonism against its enemies, would acquit the murderers.
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Good article with a lot of very valid points. The 60's were in fact very turbulent, but the end result was quite conflicted compromises which, as the article points out in several examples, were never fully resolved such that the sources of the conflict still lingered, even as the public perception of the issues gradually softened. The reaction to the 60's included the Nixon and Reagan approach to make political capital out of class and regional (and racial) divisions. But the long term legacy was the defunding of public education and the introduction, with Reagan's repeal of the fairness doctrine, of true propaganda into the American discourse. We still pay the price for that circumstance.
zeuser
Level 9
Aug 22, 2018
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I feel very lucky to have grown up on the wave that the 1960s created--in that slim bit of time between 1970 and 1980, when I turned 18. Things had settled down a bit and some of what had been extreme ideas were becoming mainstream. Reagan came in like a dark cloud and helped turn me into someone who paid closer attention, who took action, however small, to add to the voices that I felt were the kindest and safest for the future. It'll take a revolution to change the direction of things now, and it's a bit scary. We can only start from where we are. I'd like the world to be a friendlier place, and I want to enjoy life here and now. It's an ongoing balancing act on so many levels.
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