|
What a long strange road it's been, and what a long tale it would have to be.
Basically, the 60s were a time of hope and expectation. The 50s may have been oppressive, from our perspective today, but it was mainly a comfortable yoke for most ordinary people, and their personal lives, in social and economic terms, had improved steadily and significantly since the end of the war. They were doing much better than their parents had done, and we, their kids, had every expectation of doing better still. The sky was big, and there were good things over the horizon.
There were jobs. Yes, grasshopper, people had jobs. And job security. And unions. And benefits. Well, men did. But at least, as women began to make strides toward equality, there was something there to strive for.
Now, keep in mind that I'm talking about white middle-class and working-class people (being working-class wasn't all that bad then; there were good, secure blue-collar jobs for men, and I grew up in a subdivision full of families who owned houses those men's wages paid for), and of course I was in Canada. Life wasn't perfect. But it seemed entirely possible to keep improving it -- for individuals, and for disadvantaged groups like people of colour and women.
We didn't feel powerless. And in the case of my generation, there were just a whole lot of us all of a sudden. But we didn't have malls to work in and buy crap in. That's a huge difference between us and now. We just weren't consumption/production units first and students or activists or whatever else we were second. Our lives just didn't revolve around stuff.
Now of course not all of us were hippies, or even the modified hippies/political activists that I and my university student colleagues were. But a lot of us really didn't give a shit about stuff. We didn't own cars at 16 or even 21, or eat take-out food, or consume disposable batteries for multiple electronic gadgets faster than the earth will ever absorb them, and we bought our clothes used. And shoes didn't have brand names.
Yes, I think that we were morally superior to people who do all those things today, but that's not my point. ;) We weren't trapped in the hamster wheel of consumption -- although we regarded our parents' generation, the post-war couples (I'm a mid-term boomer), as being stuck in it. And we didn't want to be. Again, I'm talking about children of reasonably comfortable backgrounds, including the working class; we didn't have status, but we did have security. And of course there were more people in the US than here, people of colour, and the First Nations people in both places, who weren't coming out of the 50s as well off as the rest, but again, there were expectations and there was a feeling of powerfulness.
So what we had were those proverbial rising expectations. We wanted the world to be better, we didn't want what we saw as the empty and stuff-obsessed, conformist lives of our parents' generation, we wanted to do what made us happy; and we wanted it now, and there were enough of us to make a noise, and we expected to get what we wanted, and we believed it was possible. And again, in socio-political terms, in terms of the things we wanted that weren't just for ourselves, I'm talking about those of us who actually did give a shit, which wasn't by any means all of us.
Up here (where you and I are), in the late 60s, we had Pierre Trudeau. Now, this was a little different from the US, where they'd already had, and lost, JFK. But the decade had leaders who were perceived as idealists in both places, and this affected the society as a whole. In the US, Camelot/The Great Society (and the War on Poverty); in Canada, The Just Society: formal, government-framed commitments to actual values that sprang from something other than greed and hatred.
Of course the anger was greater in the US, because there was more to be angry about. And ultimately, less changed there than here. We did get our universal health care and student loans and youth employment programs and other trappings of social democracy. They got sidetracked with that war thing.
And that's a damned shame, because they just got stunted right there. All of the energy that went into stopping that war knocked them over. And ultimately, the war didn't end because the people of the US thought about what they were doing and decided it was atrocious; it ended because they decided that the sacrifice they were being asked to make, themselves, was too great. They didn't end the war because of the murdered children of My Lai; they ended it because of the bodies of USAmerican soldiers.
And they didn't come out of the war looking for new challenges to improve their society and the world; they turned to Ronnie for comfort food while they licked their wounds, and closed themselves in, and kept right on believing that the world out there was evil and was out to get them. Just like in the 50s. While the rest of us opened ourselves up to the world and to modernity. That's what Expo 67 was all about, after all.
And the failure to learn any lessons there, in the US at the end of the war, left the path open for all the atrocious things that the US has done in the world since then, up to Iraq. And people there became increasingly isolated from and hostile to the world, and thus increasingly vulnerable to the representations of reality they were fed and unable to assess what their governors were doing either to themselves or to the rest of the world.
So the task in the US now is orders of magnitude larger than it was in the 60s ... and look how that turned out.
In the 60s, we talked about, and did, our own culture; we expressly aimed to reshape the one we lived in and humanize it. It wasn't a matter of buying CDs and concert tickets, it was cultural festivals and political actions and content, but most importantly doing, not consuming. We lived in clusters (there were 18 people in my big old undergrad house), not in condos. We communicated in person, and collectively and publicly, not by text message. Our discourse was message, not medium.
Yup, I'm a fogey. And I'm sure that people that age have a culture today. But the extent to which they have become the products being traded in the marketplace -- they are the vehicle by which money is made, whether as labour or as consumer, not the subjects of the culture; they are acted on, not the actors -- is disturbing.
And of course this is the political culture in the US now too. Voters are not the recipients of messages which they examine from the perspective of their own values and needs and from which they choose -- they themselves are fashioned by the message. Just as their needs for food and clothing are fashioned by the producers and marketers of the commodities.
So they're just not equipped to shape their own destiny. They're essentially the complete opposite of what we were. We were all about existence -- we were engaged in the action of creating ourselves and our world. To do is to be; the subject, acting, becoming. I see a world of people now who all about essence: they are, rather than doing; they do what they are made for, rather than making themselves by what they do; they are objectified and they perform as programmed.
Even the people who want them to perform differently seem to be thinking within that paradigm, I tend to think when reading some of the things here in the last couple of days. I get enormously frustrated when the body-bags message is used to generate opposition to the occupation of Iraq, for instance. In the short term, it may succeed in getting support for the desired action, from people who see that message as fitting the image of themselves they see in the mirror that their society has made for them. But nothing will have changed. They will still be ripe for the next smooth operator who can offer them a better image of themselves and sign them on.
People do need to take responsibility for what and who they are, and what they do. And they don't do that -- people don't change -- unless they are UNcomfortable with what they are. The body-bag argument makes them uncomfortable with what is happening to them, not with what they are doing. And it's what they are doing that needs to change, for all of our collective good.
People need to feel cognitive dissonance. They need to know that outlawing abortion will kill women, and to know that they will be responsible for this, and feel the extreme discomfort of knowing that their actions are having consequences that are the exact opposite of the values they claim. The occupation of Iraq is hurting people; gobbling resources and spewing waste is hurting people; excluding gay men and lesbians from society is hurting people.
There was just this strong "moral" content to the messages of the 60s. We didn't "reframe" our messages to lessen the discomfort they might cause people. We called cops "pigs" because that's how they behaved; we called sexist men "pigs" because that's how they behaved. Of course, our messages were rejected by much of our audience, too. Too much discomfort all at once can cause a backlash effect.
All of us tend far too much to think that we can change other people. Those for whom this election was their first big political action are suffering the concussion that comes from being hit on the head by the great big fact that no matter what one does, one can't make someone else change.
But damn ... all this ... and I guess it comes down to that doing vs. being thing, and how it informs the strategies one uses. People working for social change and social justice today are dealing with a world of people who are treated, and behave, like commodities. For all kinds of reasons, we who were the young generation in the 60s had grown up to be agents, not acted on. So when we wanted change, we set about making it, to actually change the world to our image.
Now, those who oppose change make it their business to interpret and reinterpret the world to suit the image they have assigned to the people in it, and those people just don't see that the world isn't the way they're being told it looks. If they did see it as it is, it wouldn't fit with their image of themselves -- as decent, patriotic, moral folks ... all of them, of course, on the upper half of the income scale, no matter how poor they really are. They'd see that they're fucking a whole lot of people over, and getting fucked over themselves. And those are unpleasant things to see -- and if they don't see a way out of the shit, remembering that people who are essentially objects in their own lives don't have any practice at creating ways, they're not going to want to see the shit.
So hmm, I guess everybody has a harder row to hoe these days than we did, but hopefully something to learn from our mistakes. ;) Don't make the message so uncomfortable that people turn right away from it. But don't play the people-as-commodities game and try to get them to do what you want them to do by offering them outs. The first will get you backlash, and the second will get you an endless loop of manipulation and counter-manipulation in which you'll always be fighting uphill on ice with a bent sword.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(737 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
