Where's the Outrage? (by Beth Arnold for HuffPost)

[marmar]

Beth Arnold

Where's the Outrage?
Posted July 23, 2007 | 04:16 PM (EST)

I am a child of the 70s. Not old enough to have been on the first line of bra-burners, civil rights activists, or protesters of the Vietnam War, but old enough to have taken up the causes and run with them. I am old enough to have been an intern on Capitol Hill during Watergate and to have been disillusioned with the hypocrisy of our society and government and to have wished Richard Nixon ill for his subterfuge and lies. I am old enough to have believed in the American dream, despite my drenching baptism in cynicism, and to have believed myself to be one of a million Dorothys skipping down a yellow brick road that was paved by our social, sexual, cultural, and civil rights revolutions. I thought I was home free to do whatever I wanted in life without limitation, though I turned out to be mistaken -- but that's a different column.

These were American revolutions that my generation lived through and most of us participated in to some degree. We did change the world even though some of us grew up and edited our values or sold them out in the end, becoming revised editions of the people we once railed against -- or zealous consumers who yipped our material yuppiedom by the light of our silvery BMWs.

That's not to say we didn't intellectually support the right causes and even sometimes go overboard in becoming too politically correct, but what we taught our children was how to buy trendy goods or objects, and what we didn't teach them was how to stand up and fight for what really counted. Where did our ideas of these three I's -- integrity, independence, and responsible individualism -- go awry?

Been to San Francisco lately? The gentle people who might have been wearing flowers in their hair in the summer of 1967 are now sipping frappuccinos at Starbucks, telling the rest of us what we should eat and drink and smoke, while looking out at their blue state and their blue city from their million dollar flats. They're wearing Gucci kid gloves and running down the heartland, with which they have totally lost touch. Their dogs have walkers and therapists. Keep it real, homies. And that's just one city on one coast. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beth-arnold/wheres-the-outrage_b_57450.html

[NewJeffCT]

1. everything is sanitized for our consumption now

pictures of soldiers coming home in body bags is not allowed on our TVs... and, besides, they are not body bags any more. They're "transfer tubes."

Protest songs don't make it onto the radio because it's controlled by a few big corporations, including Clear Channel, whose CEO has been a huge Bush supporter. Back in the 60s and 70s, there were plenty of independent and regional radio stations.

Back then, the news was not a profit center bringing you the nightly celebrity roundup. They actually reported the real news. Sure, it was still not perfect, but it was a heck of a lot better than what we have now! It's hard to get people together for a march on Washington when it gets little to no media coverage.

But, I also think the so-called "latte-sipping" ex-hippies living in million dollar homes in San Francisco are probably less out of touch than some of our politicians and beltway pundits - and the author of the article - believes.