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but a fair number of those who did listen to the Beatles, went to Doors concerts, and fired up got a little conservative in their old age. Now, we're all entitled, but we don't get to have it both ways - can't have had a great 60's, and then go vote for Doober, for example.
My own take on it, being a member of the "nuclear warning shot" generation (class of 82) growing up in a college town with a rich history of potsmoking and free concerts is that there was a committed core involved in movement politics in the 60s and 70s who are still and will always be a committed core. And didn't partake of various orgies of gluttony in the 80s and 90s, but instead are still farming organically, heading for Washington when the call goes out, and living simply that others may simply live. They deserve our thanks and respect for being part of a vanguard which did the work, at a young age and in the face of disgusting opposition, to create fundamental social change and overthrow blatantly corrupt social orders which served a consumptive social hierarchy, from which all other corruption, including governmental, flowed. The personal was and still is political.
Around them was and is a mass penumbra of fellow participants, who maybe didn't do the inner work themselves and mount the barricades in the first wave, but who saw that it was good and were swept along in the current. They're still not hardcore GOPers, but any radicalism they might have felt part of at some point is hard to find, they've had long often difficult lives, and have partaken of the mainstream because it was the most immediate choice. Not social innovators, rather followers of trends which were in some cases unfortunately commodified, but by no means vigorously offensive conservatives of the kind we discuss here.
Beyond them is another group which I characterize as those who enjoyed the 60s for the fucking and the drugs. Antiwar groups were a great place to get laid, and a generally consumerist attitude fairly indiscernable from the parents they proclaimed were square was a hallmark. I ask myself whether these folks morphed 10 years after into the 80s "greed is good" crew, certainly they were often as talented and energetic as their more enlightened age-mates. Now I ask myself whether this particular demographic is the one which emits a self-satisfied complacency of been-there-done-that, still-hipper-than-thou while climbing in and out of the SUV and chatting with friends from the Coast in the wine bar about their latest visit to the wellness retreat.
I feel free to share here because my generation in turn has been characterized by yours, and also your parents', as being all-round soft, and not vigorous enough in our own political radicalism, with the emphasis on vigor as opposed to content. When we in turn confronted a resurgent conservative machine which had refined its techniques (made evident in the attempts at socially engineering us into a "Connected" society under Bush I) and presented us instead of with the choice of being individually being killed in a foreign land for no reason, with the choice of being turned into radioactive waste as the most immediate path to settling the cold war.
We all have our crosses to bear, and living near Woodstock and Rhinebeck in NY, I get to see both the best and the worst of the "60s generation". I wish you all well, and hope that subsequent generations will be able to write as evocatively in the book of human history. But surprise at discontinuities in political orientation seems a little misplaced.
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