I grew up in the 60s,70s. I liked America when rebellion was an American value.

[shockey80]

Now rebellion is a crime. I don't recognize the American people anymore. They have changed for the worse. Of course I am speaking in general terms.

America has not changed, the people have changed.

[RKP5637]

1. People in the 60s and 70s had the guts to try change. Also, IMO, most paid more attention to

what was going on in the country. Today, far too many seem aloof, and a good number IMO don't give a F and are far too easily led.

[tonyt53]

2. I'm with you on the timeline and your opinion about change.

It was a different world and NOBODY fell for fake news.

[Ohiogal]

3. Remember ....

"Don't Trust Anyone Over 30"?

[MineralMan]

5. Oh, I wouldn't say that NOBODY fell for fake news.

Not at all. I was active all through the 60s, in civil rights and anti-war matters. Plenty of people saw that as wrong, and fought tooth and nail to keep things the way they were. Some people saw the truth, and eventually enough did to create some changes. But, there was never a time when everyone was on the side of truth. There probably never will be such a time.

[tonyt53]

6. Hell fake news was created mostly by people like J. Edgar Hoover.

But most people had any, or very little exposure to it. Walter Cronkite didn't pass along the fake news.

[RKP5637]

4. Also, and I know I will get screamed at for this ... but it seems to me the democratic party

had more guts back them. Many democrats were hard nosed.

[Bluepinky]

8. Big money didn't have so much power then.

I wish Democrats would all agree to accept no corporate money. We can’t beat Repubs based on which party has/spends more money, but we can win based on platform, values and messaging. We need to keep saying we are the party for the people, whereas the Repubs are the party for the corporations and wealthy. The Republican Party has been bought out by the richest Americans and non-Americans for the sole purpose of amassing more power and wealth.

[Nitram]

20. RKP, the Chicago riots were a protest against a Democratic Party that was running the Vietnam War.

[RKP5637]

22. It all gets very sad. War just seems endemic to many humans. n/t

[Hekate]

7. You're looking back with rose colored glasses. Young rebels (for we were young) were not appreciated

...at all. They got beat up and locked up, sneered at and called fags for their long hair. In the end, our side prevailed -- for a time.

Now we need to encourage the new generation, as well as find it in ourselves to fight one more time -- for this is worse than ever before.

[Nitram]

19. That's true, Hekate. The police beat men for wearing their hair long.

And they beat people for protesting the Vietnam War, demonstrating for civil rights, and just for looking like freaks.

[The Blue Flower]

9. People like the Cliven Bundy family have co-opted rebellion

Il drumpf attacking the intelligence agencies sounds like the 60s rebels talking about "the pigs" and "the man." I don't think things have gone well in that area.

[Wellstone ruled]

10. Remember how the Churches joined

the Establishment in attacking we Hippy-Bastards for causing trouble. Hoover would issue his decrees on a weekly basis,threatening reprisals . Yup,drugs booze and that damn Rock and Roll. Come to find out that Guy was a Closet Queen.

[Yonnie3]

11. I think of it more as dissent than rebellion.

I grew up in the same time period. We dissented and committed civil disobedience. We made sure that the "powers that be" and the rest of America knew what our position was. From their viewpoint I am sure that they thought we were rebellious, but the word subversive was more often used. It was considered a crime then by much of the country.

I also think that in many ways we have become passive. There are lots of tweeters, bloggers, etc. who are pushing their causes, but many don't take any direct action. Their activities may help a lot at the ballot box, which may be more important than direct action. There were no tools like this back then. We had mailing lists and flyers, but it was expensive and labor intensive to use them.

There has always been a large number of our citizens with their heads in the sand. I think it is a similar percentage now as it was then.

I'm going to think about this more. Thanks for your post.

[shockey80]

12. I rebelled against everything I thought was not right, including my parents when I was young.

Come to think of it, I am now 60 and I am still doing the same thing. I have not changed. The 60s,70s was a great era, We were more free back then. Thats a fact. It was also a crazy era.

[pennylane100]

13. When I look back on the sixties and seventies I do not see it in quite the same way.

I saw a lot more conformity, although barriers were being broken but not on a large scale basis. Christianity ruled and atheists were thought to be from out of space. The police were always considered good (and some of them still are).

Racism was rampant and when I first came here in the sixties, I overheard a neighbor ask my mother-in-law how she felt about me Catholicism, That to me was mind boggling. I was not a regular church goer but when we visited, I always took my kids to church so my in-laws would not ask to take them to their church.

I think we still have a long way to go but I like to think we are more outspoken about what is wrong with our world but I do not expect the perfect society in my lifetime.

[dameatball]

14. cable news has a lot to do with it. In my teens it was Cronkite, Huntley & Brinkley

[Codeine]

15. Like most old people

you don’t know enough young people, and you don’t understand any of them.

[SeattleVet]

16. We also had the draft and an extremely unpopular war.

Those were very direct threats to a of of the people that were rebelling.

I first became politically aware (and active) in 1968, at age 14. I was spending the summer with my cousins in Indiana, a few miles east of Chicago. Saw the local cops harassing young people for no apparent reason, essentially telling them (us) to 'get out of our town and get to Chicago if that's where you're headed.' Had no idea what they were talking about, until a couple of weeks later when I got back home to NY and saw the TV coverage of the Democratic National Convention. That event opened my eyes.

The killing of the students at Kent State was another watershed event. We had the so-called 'Silent Majority', Nixon, Agnew and the rest of the crooks and wingnuts that were manipulating the blue-collar workers to act against their own children. (I remember the big scuffles between construction workers and young activists.) The country was polarized - mostly by the war.

Today the country is polarized (to an even wider extent, in some ways), but it isn't as much generational today as political. Look at the numbers of young white supremacists, neo-nazis, as assorted racists, fascists, and other deplorables. Sure, we had the 'Young Republicans', but they were a minor sideshow compared to the gangs of assholes that are allowed to run around today...including someone like a relatively young lawyer in NYC (Schlossberg).

News sources are totally segmented, and few people will ever cross over out of their comfort zone and even bother to look at what is coming from the people that disagree with them. That's why your Fox-News watching uncle claims that ANYTHING coming from a non-right-wing source is 'fake news', no matter how much hard evidence is being presented. That's why the Orange Horror can claim that a 'source' doesn't exist, even when a dozen reporters directly heard them state something the day before, and have their spokesturds back him up, knowing full well that they are lying their asses off...their supporters don't care about truth, only loyalty to their dear leader.

(Don't get me wrong - there is propaganda from both sides, and many on the left are missing out on a lot of 'opposition research' by avoiding seeing or hearing points of view that we disagree with.)

Unless there is something that directly hits people's lives they will tend to remain fat, dumb, and happy being spoonfed the 'news' that they want to hear. I'm not sure what it will take to get people to wake up to what is happening to them. Look at the Harley-Davidson situation (job elimination and opening the foreign factory), the migrant labor cutbacks that will massively raise food prices, and the in-your-face hypocrisy of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who decries the lack of American manufacturing jobs while having all of his (and his family's) products being produced elsewhere.

I fear it will take something like reinstating the draft to get people to start taking a long, hard look at where we are now, and how the hell we got here. Unfortunately, the very people that *need* to be slapped with reality are the very last ones that I would want to have serving alongside me, and the ones that I would least like to be trained in weapons and tactics, or be trusted with any of our nation's classified information.

[DavidDvorkin]

17. The rebels of the 60s were spurned by the majority

and derided in the press and scorned by the majority.

It wasn't all that different from now.

[handmade34]

18. a Country

is merely a People and their collective culture... the United States has and is changing... evolution and change is a given

[wasupaloopa]

21. In 1967 I was at Long Binh near Saigon Vietnam. We saw a large column of black smoke off in the

distance about a mile away. We contacted S2 the intelligence and security people to ask what was happening. They would not tell us.

A week later my mom sent me a local newspaper clipping with a picture of the same black smoke. It looked like it was taken from where we were when we saw the smoke. The clipping said that our outdoor warehouse was hit by VC and set ablaze.

My mom in her letter asked "is this anywhere near you" She knew more about the war than I did!

Imagine something like that today. never happen.