As an older boomer I now feel like such a failure

[blues90]

I really did think in the 60's that we were turning the tide. We had JFK then to horror struck on Nov 22 1963. Then MLK was working for civil rights there was hope and RFK finally blended with MLK and suddenly they were both gone. All this while the Vietnam war was going on and not long after the horrid duck and cover we we forced to live with and think about.

I remember duck and cover so well and felt physically ill thinking we might enter a nuclear war. Then in 1967 the draft notice physical came in the mail.

All through this I though we as boomers even with all the insane hippy hype which was the medias main focus with a broad brush painting offered up. I though we were still headed for a better time , the end of poverty and the end of racism.

Now I'm not so sure we did the best we could have even though it seemed so at the time.

I just wish the youth today had good schools like we had and real news like we did have access to and jobs with on the job training and a shot at health care and no wars to even have to deal with or think about ,these should have ended long ago.

You just cannot see the future , who knew that the computers that were to save time would be used to move jobs away or that we would not manufacture products here anymore. None of this seemed even possible back then. I say this not to offer up an excuse but to ask what we might have done different to avoid what we face right now.

[omega minimo]

1. Good

The fact that you smear "all the insane hippy hype" suggests you lived through that time, like lots of others sunk into conventional family life and quit paying attention.

You CAN see the future but you have to be paying attention at the time. THEN you can do something about it.

"You just cannot see the future , who knew that the computers that were to save time would be used to move jobs away or that we would not manufacture products here anymore. None of this seemed even possible back then. I say this not to offer up an excuse but to ask what we might have done different to avoid what we face right now."

Too little, too late.

[boston bean]

2. baby boomers need to get over themselves

(snark)

[virgogal]

12. Ditto !

[winyanstaz]

95. The baby boomers at least tried....

They helped end the vietnam war...
They got rid of Nixon...
What wars have YOU ended?
What have YOU done?

[boston bean]

195. It wasn't me that said it... here take a look.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/weekinreview/21broder.html

[winyanstaz]

203. ty for the link.....

sorry...I thought you were saying it :)
I might have known it was an idiot at the times...no wonder they are going broke.

[Confusious]

224. What war did you end?

As far as I know from history, protests went on and on from 1966 to 1973. Doesn't seem like you were working to hard there.

Nixon was elected TWICE! Doesn't seem like they were working to hard there either.

They didn't do anything. They just sat around doing drugs and listening to music, THINKING about how great it would be to make the rest of us believe they changed the world.

Oh, I'm sorry, they did change the world. They elected ray gun.

[Hannah Bell]

245. Boomers didn't elect Reagan. He got a minority of their vote in 1980.

Their parents & grandparents put him into power.

[Confusious]

255. Boomers are one of the largest age groups

Either they didn't vote, or they voted for him. So he got into office.

Same for bush.

[Hannah Bell]

257. reagan received a minority of the boomer vote in 1980, sorry.

[Confusious]

265. Unicorns are real, sorry

I can write things without a link to prove it too.

[Hannah Bell]

270. Boomers were 19 to 34 in 1980 (b. 1946-1961)

AGE     Carter  Reagan  Anderson   
18-21     45      44      11  
22-29     44      44      11  
30-44     38      55       7  
45-59     39      55       6  
60+       41      55       4  


http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_80.html

[xchrom]

3. I'm a boomer and I say

Fuck that.

[EFerrari]

87. Ditto.

[Le Taz Hot]

124. +1

If the OP is a failure, that's on him/her.

[Fire1]

4. "What we might have done.." Nothing. You can't stop

progress.

[omega minimo]

5. nonsense.

[Fire1]

11. Ok then, how do you suggest fighting progress? n/t

[omega minimo]

14. "progress"?

[Fire1]

15. Yes, "progress." n/t

[Lorien]

81. Ah, so you think that screaming infotainment, dumbed down school curriculums,

the rise of the religious Right, the greater rise of corporate fascism and the erosion of civil rights and environmental collapse is "progress". Glad to hear that you're happy with the way things have regressed.

[Fire1]

89. It's a relative term in reference to technology, science and

innovation.

[seabeyond]

98. i guess it is all about priority. nt

[omega minimo]

120. It's a cliched term that enables unexamined complicity in what Lorien correctly calls

"regression" and "unraveling."

"Progress" in the way you use it, allows people to keep fucking up the planet with curent activities, in the blithe false assumption that unknown solutions invented in the future will undo the damage.

[Fire1]

127. Ok. n/t

[intheflow]

155. Beautifully and succinctly stated!

Though I do find it ironic that "progress" is bad but progressive is good! :)

[omega minimo]

119. + 1,000,000

[ThomThom]

199. be a republican

they do it every day

[Lorien]

80. Um, what's happening to our society isn't progress

it's an unraveling.

[NashVegas]

6. Face Your Fears

Sometimes, I think those old, "duck and cover" drills had more impact than anyone knew.

[pipi_k]

8. Oh, they did...

I lived in a state of absolute terror of nuclear war until at least my mid 20s.

Talk about a whole generation of kids being terrorized...

[Fumesucker]

18. I read "Alas Babylon" in 1962 at the age of 12...

It changed my life and made me aware of just how precarious our existence was and is..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alas,_Babylon

Then I saw "On The Beach" the next year, that was horrifying also.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29

[Jamastiene]

145. I still have my tattered (well, tattered for a hardback) copy

of Alas, Babylon. I reread it from time to time.

[Mojorabbit]

180. I read it too as a young person

but On the Beach will always first and foremost be a Neil Young album to me.

[madokie]

48. same here

I remember it like it was yesterday too. Going into the services somehow helped me with the anxiety but I'll never forget it.

[dflprincess]

99. I read an article once that speculated the reason the boomers

had trouble saving money - or apparently planning for the future at all - was because we grew up being told we were going to be blown up at any moment. Basically this created a generation of grasshoppers rather than ants.

When we started getting old, it came as a shock because somewhere in our subconsciouses we hadn't expected to live this long.

[alfredo]

150. I did enjoy the hedonism of the hippies, but was drawn to the separatism of

the beats.

[pipi_k]

7. Feeling like a failure is such a waste of time and energy, isn't it?

It's not like we were blessed with ESP or magic crystal balls.

How could we know then what we know now?

Our generation tried to change things...it's not like we didn't give a shit.


As far as "heading for the end of racism" goes, just think about that. Our generation got to see the first black US president. Sure, racism still exists, and it probably always will, to some extent or another. You can't do away with fear, which I believe is one of the causes of racism. As it probably is a primary cause for a whole lot of other terrible things. Fear, I mean.

And you know what? Even if you think our generation "failed", there's always something YOU personally can do something about. Leaving the world, and the people you meet, better for your having been here.

I think that's more important than feeling like shit over what we Baby Boomers, as a group, could or couldn't do.

[omega minimo]

16. "How could we know then what we know now?" Listen to the warnings

of consequences if certain paths are followed. Especially since we were repeating history that had already occurred, the predictions weren't THAT difficult.

[seabeyond]

31. you know. so right on. nt

[rufus dog]

9. You shouldn't personally feel like a failure.

You were probably on the right side of issues more times than not, well realistically 95 to 99% of the time. The problem is/was the fight between sides of your generation. The other side got all of those asshole College Reagan pukes in the 80's, (my time) and created a majority with the religious right. We now have the opposite demographics in play with twenty year olds strongly shifting to dems. Add to it the growing Hispanic population and we have a strong majority.

People need to realize that the asswipes didn't get everything they wanted, consider the big issues:

1. Reproductive rights
2. Woman's rights
3. Equal rights in general
4. Elimination of welfare
5. Elimination of Social Security
6. Elimination of Medicare

When you look at is realistically they got nothing, just ripped off like the rest of us by their political heroes.

Liberals and progressives will get a lot more they just need to remember how slow it is to reform.

There was no harm in the fight, think how bad it could have been without the fight, you need to focus your disappointment at the older boomers and the previous generation who went to school on the GI Bill, bought their first home with govt support, then figuratively said fuck you to everyone else and voted for Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Dimson, and McCain.

[dysfunctional press]

10. too many boomers paid too much attention to the shiny objects being dangled in front of them...

and not much attention to what was going on in the world around them(or at least not in their immediate vicinity).

[Walk away]

13. The generation before them wasn't paying attention to anything but...

Elvis. It's a wonder the Boomers managed to stop their Do Wop parents from shoving them all into the Vietnam meat grinder. People forget that the Boomers were a generation abused by their selfish, stupid and Stepford parents.

[annabanana]

20. The boomers didn't have do-wop parents... they had

do-wop baby sitters.. Boomers parents were the WWII vets and rosie the riveter . .

[Walk away]

97. I am a boomer born in '55 and my parents were in their teens and twenties in the 50s

My Mom marched on Washington against "the war". But my Dad was a real 50s guy.

[dysfunctional press]

21. i would say that elvis was there to captivate a LOT of the baby-boomers

most of his movies were in the sixties, when the boomers were getting/had gotten their hormones.

[seabeyond]

30. no. nt

[patrice]

86. What? Sacrilege you speak against the "Great Generation", how dare you!!

BTW, I agree. For all that the so-called "Great Generation" did, and they DID do some important stuff, they also crippled their children with their own VERY conditional regard.

[Le Taz Hot]

125. The "greatest generation"

also turned a blind eye to segregation, internment camps and women as second class citizens.

[dflprincess]

236. The "greatest generation" was really too young to do much about

about internment camps (and they were the cannon fodder then, not the ones in power). After the war, that's when they began to work on civil rights - even if they had to be dragged into the fight.

John & Robert Kennedy, George McGovern and Betty Friedan were all part of that generation.

My dad, who grew up in a small town in Minnesota where race was never an issue was shocked when he was stationed in the south for training and saw Jim Crow (not that there wasn't discrimination in the north, it was just ever so much more subtle). Years after the war he supported civil rights because it made him nuts that Black veterans were being denied the right to vote (among the other rights they were denied, but voting was the most fundamental to him). He wasn't a real activist but wrote checks to the NAACP and Southern Christian Leadership Council. There were a lot of ordinary people of that generation who knew the time had come to change things and some quietly gave support while others became more active.

BTW before Tom Brokaw came up with the "Greatest Generation", they were the Swing Generation - named after their music.

[RobinA]

262. VERY Conditional Regard

Is THAT the problem? I thought it was just MY family, not societal.

[Hannah Bell]

149. elvis = boomers. the parents of the boomers weren't doowopers.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

160. People who were in high school when Elvis hit the scene weren't boomers

Elvis first came to public attention around 1955, so the teenagers of that era would have been born between 1936 and 1943. Most boomers were either in grade school or too young for school at that time.

The major musical icons for boomers were first the Motown greats (early 1960s), and then the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (beginning about 1964).

[Hannah Bell]

166. his first mass album & first #1 single, heartbreak hotel = 1956. Oldest boomers were 10.

First movie = 1956, Ed Sullivan 1957, went into army 1958 & returned to recording 1960, when the oldest boomers were 14. return to sender = 1962.

his films were popular with tweeners when i was one. i'm a boomer.

comeback = 1968. cover of rolling stone 1969.

it may be his biggest fan base were those of his own age (b. 1935), but his influence wasn't limited to that group.

[omega minimo]

17. This is nice. The apologists have arrived. Have a nice

:grouphug:

[Marr]

26. You're really trying to pick a fight, aren't you?

Good luck.

[omega minimo]

44. No, that was a good bye, DUH

and come back to find more apologists, eloquently and erroneously making more excuses, where the OP for once was acknowledging and presenting an important question and discussion. It never occurs on DU. No one will take responsibility. No one will discuss whether there was more that could have been done or could be done now. The events aren't even examined, recalled in an honest way. It's all fuzzy history and apologist soothing of the Boomer soul, when it does reach that dark moment in the middle of the night and like the OP, cry out, "I don't feel good about what our in/action has brought."

[Cetacea]

19. Fey.

The so-called Boomer generation was behind the biggest social upheavel since the Revolution. Many people lost their lives and the world did change. It's not your fault that the 1980 election was basically stolen (Iran-Contra)and we had twelve(!)years of Reagan/Bush. (by all accounts Jimmy Carter would have won if the hostages would have been released prior to...12 noon on Inauguration Day)

[The Midway Rebel]

22. +1 n/t

[NashVegas]

23. Carter Was No Savior

Read a little more about El Salvador.

[Cetacea]

24. True, but relatively "speaking" he was God.

[we can do it]

28. +1

[patrice]

90. +1 and so it will be for subsequent generations. The idea that Boomers are any worse than any other

is just ignorant and naive. Sufficient to each generation, the challenges thereof.

[Confusious]

226. The idea that boomers are better

Falls into the same category.

We stopped a war!
We changed the world!
blah, blah, blah.

Bullshit.

[Greyhound]

25. Ironically it is because you did/were "turning the tide", that this has happened.

Think about it, by the mid-late 60's the demand for change had grown so strong that the parasites refusal caused the nation to literally burn. Civil rights, women's rights, the war, worker's rights, gay rights, all these fundamental cultural issues and more were forced to a head by you, and it scared the parasites shitless. They saw that "the jig was up" and too many people had caught on and were beating them the only way possible, by refusing to play their game.

You want to draft me? Fuck you, I'm not going to die to make you rich so you'll have to try to find me.

You want me to spend my one precious life toiling to make you richer? Fuck you, I can make enough doing what I want.

You want me to tolerate your open bigotry? Fuck you and your "social mores", I'll call you a fucking bigot to your face.

Etcetera, and so on.

Was it a majority? Not even close, but it was a significant minority and these conflicts brought people together that had successfully been pitted against each other for decades, the common enemy was exposed. And look at the results, by the mid-70's the worst racists asshole would check to see who was within earshot before going on his diatribe about the goddamn (insert racial epithet here). Women were able to tell their abusive Chauvinist prick husband to get lost because she was going back to work or school. People were far less puritanical regarding sex. Co-ops for everything from food to banking sprang up and created an avenue to bypass the "establishment" schemes, Archie Bunker figured out what an asshole he'd always been on national TeeVee (Norman Lear probably did more to enlighten our sick society than any other single person).

It was the freaks and hippies of your generation that showed the nation that just because these parasites told you "how it was", didn't mean that it had to be.

Your work in that decade caused the plans to leave to be laid. Your generation demanded to be represented and the Democratic Party decided it was better to lose elections than to allow change, and that still hasn't changed.

[patrice]

91. And a significant minority of us have also never forsaken that Revolution

We had to work it all out the best we could in the terms of our lives as they occurred, yes some forgot, but others translated what transpired into something different as much as possible under the circumstances and, in the process, recognizing the necessity of FREEING our children to do better at it all than we did.

[Nikki Stone1]

114. How are you doing this?

Serious question.

[patrice]

122. First of all, by how I raised my children. Second, by the fact that I have never

accepted a job that was just a paycheck. I have helped young people learn how to think by teaching Psychology and Language Arts and Journalism, encouraging them all along the way to make their lives their own. I am currently employed in Elder care by raising the professional status of the lowest and MOST important employees in the field, those who do the actual care, Certified Nursing and Medical Assistants.

I have been politically active almost all of the way to this my 61st year and I and the other Boomers in my family have drug my enormous family, many of them kicking and screaming the whole way, as far as they are capable of going and I will NEVER give up on them.

I also do not heed social taboos against talking about issues and politics to absolutely anyone and everyone at ANY opportunity.

[omega minimo]

126. Thank you Patrice

:yourock:

[patrice]

140. Thanks and I know that you know, of course, that I'm not the only one like me out there.

Liberals and Progressives in each generation stand on the shoulders of the Liberals and Progressives before them.

We ARE, literally, Family.

:hug:

[omega minimo]

142. Thank you for articulating for DU

some of the simple, powerful, effective ways that each individual can contribute. :toast:

[Cetacea]

191. I missed this earlier.

Thank you, Patrice.

[RobinA]

263. I Do It

by working with the mentally ill and fighting every chance I get for the way I believe things in this field should be done to benefit the patient. I sleep like a baby and chose to look at the victories rather than some lost utopia.

[Le Taz Hot]

130. Jaysus Christ

THANK YOU!

[patrice]

133. blushing . . . I haven't done as much as i wish. I do have some sympathy with OP . . .

but i also have not given up.

Talking to people face to face is one of the most useful things anyone can do.

[Nikki Stone1]

27. The leaders were killed and your movement was undermined with drugs and violent agent provocateurs

When you look back at the sit-ins of the early 60s, you see clean cut American kids, both black and white, in shirts & ties or dresses (for the girls). The middle class (outside the south) was temporarily able to side with the protesters and not the police. There was a strong moral argument and kids of whom the middle class could approve. The Vietnam protests started the same way. In order to undermine all this, the movement was infiltrated by agents like Timothy Leary, who took the energy and the moral high ground from the youth with drugs. Agent provocateurs brought protests to levels of violence that would never have happened otherwise. Despite all this, some changes were made, but these changes largely rewarded a small part of the population with the vast many still left without much.

Then, after the Vietnam war officially ended (1975), the boomers were encouraged to stop looking at the large issues and look at their inner selves, or "contemplate their navals" as the expression went. It was another way of diverting attention. By the 80's, you had the Big Chill, with boomers donning suits and ties and going into the stock market. There was a lot of disillusionment stemming from the 60s and 70s because the promise of social change got undermined with the "promise" of drugs. free sex, and self-realization. Eventually, those things became obvious for the empty things that they were and most of the boomers went back to their individual lives and to the way of life they knew from their parents.

Meanwhile, the power structure flooded black neighborhoods with CIA financed crack cocaine and created a "pink collar ghetto" in the service industry where most women ended up working for peanuts. The free sex movement and the early gay rights movement were undermined by AIDS, which the Reagan administration conveniently ignored for years, although the gay rights movement actually became galvanized during the Reagan years. In fact, if you are looking for the boomer spirit, a lot of that continues to exist in the gay rights movement.

The power structure also developed a host of psychological tools as well: the fundamentalist Christian movement began in the late counter culture era, with Jesus being seen as a hippy type, but by the late 70s, Jesus was part of William F. Buckley's YAF (The Young Americans for Freedom) which was infiltrating college campuses. It is now the Young America Foundation and is affiliated with the Campus Crusade for Christ. The YAF is the best funded off campus group, dwarfing all other groups. The YAF created a group of college educated conservative Christians whose views were strictly along neoconservative lines and whose Jesus wanted women at home and virgins until marriage and wanted the poor off of the welfare system. Buckley is now dead but the funding lives on. TPTB realized in the 60s how potent the youth movement was becoming and took the natural idealism of the college kids and guided it into their own way of thinking. In this way, they took a page from the Moonies, whose leader was also conservative and started the Washington Times.

So the deal is, they saw your power, they got terrified. They killed your leaders, undermined your movement, and put their own in place as kind of an innoculation. Too bad John Lennon was shot in 1980. He was the one popular link to that time who could have inspired the boomers and maybe a new generation in the 80s.

[blues90]

32. Yes that pretty much sums it all up right there , thanks .

I could not possibly have said it better. Plus, Lennon being murdered really did seem to stop the film and splice it onto the complete end of the 60's mindset. That entire story and how it happened or rather why, never did set well with me. I still don't buy that story. Lennon was a threat. He was out of the spot light for 5 years , makes an album that was not a threat, Reagan arrives. take it from there.

[Nikki Stone1]

35. Lennon had won his lawsuit against the US govt (Nixon) who wanted to deport him

I think it's possible that some rogue elements were ticked that Lennon didn't just go back to England and that he'd won through legal means. He also gave people like Bobby Seale (imprisoned) and Abby Hoffman (who committed suicide later) credibility.

[blues90]

38. True . Lennon at that time was concerned he was being watched

And he most likely was. As long as he stayed out of the light for the time he did he posed no threat and I always felt he stayed out of it out of that fear that he was still on a list.

When he came out with his new album in 1980 I thought ,well this album is not a revolt but a personal story , however deep in the bowels of the power drone he was back and that was a risk they would not allow.

[Nikki Stone1]

60. Who knows?

Once you're on an enemies list, certain elements never forget that. I'll bet he was being tapped.

[Cetacea]

84. He was being watched. And tapped. That was verfied through FOIA.

[Nikki Stone1]

109. Not at all a surprise.

Someone has got to write the complete history of Lennon and Nixon.

[lunatica]

204. Don't forget J. Edgar Hoover (Nixon didn't operate in a vacuum)

"Late in life and after his death, Hoover became an increasingly controversial figure. He exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI.<1> He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,<2> and to use illegal methods to collect evidence.<3> It is because of Hoover's long and controversial reign that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.<4>"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

He was the head of the FBI from 1935 to 1972. He also compiled files on John Lennon and presented them to Nixon in 1972.

Jon Wiener
Gimme Some Truth
The John Lennon FBI Files



When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover reported to the Nixon White House in 1972 about the Bureau's surveillance of John Lennon, he began by explaining that Lennon was a "former member of the Beatles singing group." When a copy of this letter arrived in response to Jon Wiener's 1981 Freedom of Information request, the entire text was withheld—along with almost 200 other pages—on the grounds that releasing it would endanger national security. This book tells the story of the author's remarkable fourteen-year court battle to win release of the Lennon files under the Freedom of Information Act in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. With the publication of Gimme Some Truth, 100 key pages of the Lennon FBI file are available—complete and unexpurgated, fully annotated and presented in a "before and after" format.

Lennon's file was compiled in 1972, when the war in Vietnam was at its peak, when Nixon was facing reelection, and when the "clever Beatle" was living in New York and joining up with the New Left and the anti-war movement. The Nixon administration's efforts to "neutralize" Lennon are the subject of Lennon's file. The documents are reproduced in facsimile so that readers can see all the classification stamps, marginal notes, blacked out passages and—in some cases—the initials of J. Edgar Hoover. The file includes lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges.

Fascinating, engrossing, at points hilarious and absurd, Gimme Some Truth documents an era when rock music seemed to have real political force and when youth culture challenged the status quo in Washington. It also delineates the ways the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations fought to preserve government secrecy, and highlights the legal strategies adopted by those who have challenged it.

http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8721.php

[Cetacea]

40. You might be interested in what his son said about it.

"Anyone who thinks my dad was killed by a lone nut is either crazy themselves or very stupid".

[Nikki Stone1]

61. Is that Julian or Sean?

?

[Cetacea]

88. Sean.

He was only five at the time but I'm he's a very bright man. I don't have a link but he basically blamed the government and said that his father was a major threat, "and that's why they killed him".

I always thought it odd that the only witness to one of the most famous crimes of the century was only referred to as "the doorman" for some six years after the murder. Yoko didn't actually see the shooting, and the lead detective didn't is on record saying he didn't believe MDC shot him.

[sendero]

33. I find it strange..

.... that you would consider Timothy Leary a "provocateur".

IMHO, LSD probably had more to do with the changes in mindset of the 60s than any other single factor.

[blues90]

36. I don't know , Leary at the time seemed to act like the movement

But with his idea of tune in and drop out brought with it a dimension that did much more harm. He reminded me of a politician that runs out front of movement to steer it off course rather than help it.

[sendero]

39. Well..

... if he was working for the "other side" they sure had a fine way of showing their appreciation.

Actually it was quite the opposite, Leary may have been too much of a "true believer" in what LSD could do, but I don't think his intentions were wrong at all.

[blues90]

46. Maybe , however

A true believer is many times the one who wants to be the new leader with his own cause or intent. Lennon was not out there saying LSD was the thing to do. When people took the song Lucy in the sky with Diamonds as LSD , Lennon was quick to tell the story or how it came about. Leary climbed into his position late.

[Nikki Stone1]

56. Lennon used drugs but he never "dropped out"

He was always in the forefront, politically and artistically, especially after he shed the Beatles straightjacket and was able to be his own man.

[Cetacea]

65. The Beatles turned a lot more people onto acid than Leary ever did.

[Nikki Stone1]

72. But only John took real political action.

George got into his music; Paul got into making money; and Ringo, well, he was Ringo. :)

[Hannah Bell]

170. george's concert for bangladesh was huge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concert_for_Bangladesh

[Nikki Stone1]

208. Nice concert. But Lennon lived a completely politically active life.

There's a difference.

[Hannah Bell]

252. he wasn't "the only one who was political" which = the original claim.

not "lived a completely political life".

which heroin addicts don't, either.

[sendero]

79. If you believe Lennon's story.

.... then you are pretty gullible. This song was written right in the middle of the Beatles acid days, and the imagery is not from a childs picture.

[blues90]

101. At the time it was from a childs imagery

Any child has an imagination when it comes to the heart. I always put a young lady even on grade school way on the top , say 6th grade when puberty kicks in. Even before that I was amazed and hypnotized by the opposite sex. We always had art class all through the years since the first grade and english class and back in the 50's they had a profound affect on how you expressed yourself.

With that said I can see Julian drawing such an image.

[sendero]

105. Believe what you will..

.... but after Lennon caught hell with the "bigger than Jesus" comment, he was not about to step in the hoya again admitting his song was a homage to acid. But it was.

[blues90]

118. I do see your point but all I have is my own experience to offer up

I cannot speak for anyone else. Yes he caught hell for that and apologized for it , that was early in their career and by the time Lennon did defend the LSD comment is past the time he grew up and admitted the image af the Beatles was just that , an image. They only performed live for what 4 years.

If anything Lennon did admit when he was wrong.

[Hannah Bell]

153. lucy in the sky dies

'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' dies
Classmate of Julian Lennon who inspired "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" dies

Julian gave father drawing of girl, saying "That's Lucy in the sky with diamonds"

Lucy Vodden's death had suffered from ulcerative skin disease for five years
Next Article in Entertainment »


By Peter Wilkinson
CNN


LONDON, England (CNN) -- The childhood friend of John Lennon's son who inspired the Beatles' psychedelic masterpiece "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" has died aged 46 from the chronic disease Lupus.


Julian Lennon showed his father a drawing he had done of Lucy Vodden. The rest is music history...

Lucy Vodden was a classmate of Julian Lennon, who came home from school one day carrying a drawing of his 4-year-old classmate. "That's Lucy in the sky with diamonds," he told his father.

Lennon seized on the image and embellished it in a song along with "newspaper taxis" and a "girl with kaleidoscope eyes."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/29/beatles.lucy.in.the.sky.with.diamonds/index.html

[sendero]

196. Yes..

.... we've all heard this story. And the existence of a kid's picture is moot. The psychedelic imagery is not from just a child's picture.

[Hannah Bell]

250. no one said it was; lennon said the child's picture was the genesis of the song.

i hadn't heard she died until recently. if "everyone" else did, guess i'm really out of the news stream.

[Art_from_Ark]

267. It was easy to get the impression that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"

was an indirect reference to LSD just by listening to the lyrics, and watching how it was visualized in the 1968 animated movie "Yellow Submarine". And in their heyday the Beatles did admit to experimentation with drugs.

[Nikki Stone1]

51. As I said, he could have been used.

Of course, all the harassment could have been building up street cred too. It's hard to tell. But the message was absolutely clear and it was effective.

[Hannah Bell]

152. he was fired from harvard 1963. you might ask how he supported himself

for the rest of his life.

[Hannah Bell]

162. from a long-term millbrook resident:

The "Bungalow" had been built in 1913, as a gift from Charles Dieterich to his son, Alfred. Rumsey, a non-practicing lawyer, was an old school chum of William and Thomas Mellon Hitchcock, who were twin brothers and bi-products of several generations of venereal congress between members of America's most bloated plutocratic dynasties. The handsome twins had inherited enormous trust funds in their early twenties, purchased the estate in 1963, and then offered the "Big House," a nineteenth-century extravaganza which had been the residence of the original owner, to Tim Leary, Dick Alpert and Ralph Metzner, as a "psychedelic research center."

Why? The super-rich do not ordinarily do things like this, or anything remotely resembling anything like this, nor does anyone in any other economic bracket very often do anything like this, for that matter. Youthful folly? Courage of Psychedelian conviction? Sympathy and generosity? Boredom? Innocence? Arrogance? Curiosity? Lecherous anticipation of variegated choirs of marijuana goddesses? The hypnotic spell of Timothy Leary? Did the coup d'état of 1963 have anything to do with it?

I asked Billy about his and Tommy's original motivations one time, after the whole project had been beaten into the ground by the powers that were.

"It was the only game in town," he replied, which was a very Billyish kind of thing to say, and not inconsistent with any or all of the above...

I didn't see Tim again until fall, when Billy and I went to visit him in the hillside house in Berkeley none of us at Millbrook knew he owned until it was all over. He was sprawled out on a wooden deck overlooking the bay, surrounded by "White Panthers" and others of similar persuasion, who were telling stories about blowing up power stations and other acts of wanton destruction, as was then the fashion. The presence of William Mellon Hitchcock, a capitalist if there ever was one, didn't faze these guys a bit. Were they aware Tim held stock in New England Nuclear, and that they were suggesting that he destroy his own property? Probably not, but it wasn't impossible some of them owned stock in New England Nuclear themselves, such were the bizarre mores of Berkeley in 1968.

http://okneoac.com/m/chs/a_word_of_explanation.html

[Hannah Bell]

182. David Black has contributed a long overdue new history of LSD

that does not retread Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's excellent Acid Dreams (1985) and does not fictionalize the topic like other recent books (Wisdom's Maw).


"For laundering, Hitchcock used the facilities offered by the fiscal paradise of the Bahamas, where he already had a private account at the Castle Bank and Trust. This laundromat for Mafia narcotics trafficking had been co-founded by Edward Halliwell, a CIA asset involved in Air America and Civil Air Transport. These 'airlines' were agency front companies for flying heroin around the Burma Triangle to bankroll covert operations in Indo-China. He made arrangements for the Brotherhood at Resorts International, a conduit for huge amounts of Mafia money, and at the Fiduciary Trust Company, an offshoot of Investors Overseas Services, headed by the notorious and crooked financier Bernie Cornfeld." (p. 18)

And what about Bernie Cornfeld? Nothing less than sugar daddy to Heidi Fleiss: you can quickly see how this nebulous web of synchronicity starts to add up.

The implications present in Black's book reach to the highest echelons of political power: not only does Black detail the complete history of the CIA's experimentation with LSD in its covert MK-ULTRA project, but we learn that John F. Kennedy's implied mistress, Mary Pinchot, was "turning on" a lot of higher-ups in Washington, D.c. with LSD supplied by Timothy Leary. When Kennedy was assassinated, Pinchot allegedly phoned Leary in a panicked state and said, 'they couldn't control him anymore. He was changing too fast... They've covered everything up." (p. 61). In October 1964, Pinchot was shot to death in a Georgetown apartment in what appeared to be a "professional hit."

The linchpin of Black's book, however, is the "international man of mystery" Ronald Stark. Stark's involvement with LSD trafficking began in the summer of 1969, when he approached the "hippie mafia" the Brotherhood of Eternal Love with an offer to bankroll their activities...

Stark did not hide the fact that he was well connected in the world of covert politics. He intimated, for example, that he had contacts with the Tibetan freedom fighters loyal to the Dalai Lama and with the Japanese Mafia who could help smuggle LSD into Tibet and dose the Chinese occupiers... however, the Idylwild hippies could not have possibly guessed that Ron Stark operated on four continents and compartmentalized his international activities so that those he did business with - be they American hippies, Lebanese warlords, corporate lawyers, British scientists, Japanese Mafioso or Italian train-bombers - would have little knowledge of his 'other' activities. He could speak ten languages fluently and had the 'bottle' , cunning, charm, and knowledge to pass himself off in various situations as a businessman, chemist, doctor, art collector, drug dealer, political activist and even as a Palestinian guerilla." (p. 20-21)

http://people.tribe.net/ionamiller/blog/e13d7d28-9185-4949-a52b-7fa397d54f8a

[Cetacea]

187. Looks to be a fascinating book. Thanks.

[Hannah Bell]

193. i haven't read it, it just looked interesting, & it apparently gets into the "strategy of tension"

in italy & elsewhere, one of my interests.

[Cetacea]

188. Did Mary Pinchot guide JFK through an LSD session?

http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v308/__show_article/_a000308-000178.htm

[Nikki Stone1]

214. This is the book I am looking for Hannah.

Your website link is interesting: so Nietzsche was a drug taker:

16) In 1866 at the University of Leipzig, Frederich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde became ergot-based initiates of a "neo-Eleusinian" group that was devoted to understanding early Greek culture by actually living as the Greeks did.
17) In 1872 in Basel, Nietzsche published his first work, "Birth of Tragedy," based on his close association with his mentor and prominent Basel citizen Johann Jacob Bachofen -- in which he counterpoises Dionysis (i.e. Eleusis) with Apollo.
18) Nietzsche, who was removed from the streets of Turin in 1889 and presumed to have "gone mad," was known to have been a wide-ranging drug taker, in part for his infirmities. Among the compounds citied is a preparation that is presumed to have included cannabis and opium as well as an ergot-derivative, ostensibly meant for migraines.


The association of nihilism and ergot use is interesting. It mimics the "drop out" of Leary.

[Nikki Stone1]

50. That is how I see him.

He may have done it knowingly or unknowingly. It's hard to tell. But the message was clear: stop struggling in the real world and contemplate your inner self with drugs.

[sendero]

197. Well...

.... dropping out is a radical form of protest. Many people are going to engage in a new form of dropping out, opting out of the corrupt economic system that has entrenched itself in this country and relying on barter, cash transactions and other forms of economic activity that cannot be skimmed by the federal/wallstreet complex.

So, I fundamentally disagree that dropping out is necessarily a bad thing.

[blues90]

207. Yes but you are talking about a different kind of dropping out

Which was the basic idea of the boomers to go back a rail against the system . Leary with the LSD was more of a drop out and tune out and do nothing , numb down and chill. The movie Jacobs Ladder was not fiction. Drugs were used to control.

If one was out tripping on acid they were not out there in action.

[Nikki Stone1]

212. +1

.

[Nikki Stone1]

211. Dropping out meant that the power structure didn't have to worry about your protest

That's all.

[Nikki Stone1]

49. The changes of mindset occurred before the LSD. It was black America and the draft

that shattered the American youth mindset. The southerners setting dogs and firehoses on Southern blacks was a shock to the Northerners, who had their own racism to deal with: it broke the comfort of the Levitowns. The draft shattered the comfortable lives of the middle class baby boomers, especially when it became clear that the government was lying about the war. The assassination of JFK was a watershed after which things could never be the same.

The popularization of the drug experience came after all this was already in motion. Subjectively, people may have felt "enlightened" by drugs and maybe even felt some thought patterns shift, but on the whole, the drugs retarded the movement and de-energized it. Eventually, the drugs destroyed icons (through overdose and addiction) and gave the American middle class the impression that the youth were no longer on the right side.

I have always had my doubts about Leary, though he may have been sincere but used by others. He was a professor/researcher in psychology at Berkeley and Harvard (two prime centers of LSD experimentation) testing hallucinogens for therapeutic benefits. I don't know where the grant money came from for that research (probably NSF), but the MKUltra program was in full swing around the same time and Harvard was a center. Leary's goals seem to have been therapeutic, and certainly LSD was being used in England at the time by the National Health Service in psychological therapies. The idea was that it would free up the Freudian "repressions" in the mind. The therapy was later stopped in Britain. In the US, most of the work on LSD and hallucinogens in general was funded by the military, who wanted a way to "free up" information from captured POWs.

There's no way for me to know what his own intentions were, or of those around him. But encouraging kids to "drop out" when there was so much important work that needed to be done certainly served the goals of TPTB: it shifted focus to the internal and sucked energy from the movement. It was a message, ultimately, of non-resistance, non-action.

[blues90]

55. "It was a message, ultimately, of non-resistance, non-action."

That was the key to Learys message. People think Jacobs Ladder was just a movie or fiction.

[Nikki Stone1]

59. Yes, that was the key.

Which is why I have my doubts about the man. Lennon, the real McCoy, was out fighting. He used LSD but never dropped out.

[Cetacea]

63. Leary was just one person. And acid didn't make people lethargic.

Cocaine and heroin did, which is why both were flooded into the cities.
The war split polarized people far more than acid did. It was literally parents against children, and vice verse.

[Nikki Stone1]

70. It wasn't about the acid: it was about the message to "drop out"

Let's see how this was done.

You have a strong social movement focusing on ending an unjust war and ending unjust racism. The young people (and some older ones) thought if they just got out there and protested and applied enough pressure, TPTB would change things. And there was enough pressure that TBTP and their agents in Congress had to do something, but they did what they always do: they rewarded some targeted sectors (middle class blacks, educated middle class women, eg.), but mostly they had to divert that wave of energy. They wouldn't stop the war, had no intention of doing so, and had to make the protests go away. How do you do that?

There are actually several answers:

1. You kill the leadership
2. You co-opt the leadership by bringing them on board and having them sell the others out
3. You threaten the protesters with military force, although this goes only so far, especially when television records it all
4. You destroy the credibility of the protesters:
*you plant agents who do violent things that will cause the middle class to recoil.
*You convince the protesters to do things themselves that will make the middle class recoil

5. You destroy the will of the protesters.

* You deflect their attention away from the movement
* You divide people along racial lines (Killing MLK and Malcolm helped this along)
* You make them unable or unwilling to fight. This is where drugs help. This is also where the message to "drop out" was helpful. Make the kids feel that they are missing the true inner meaning of life by spending all their time fighting for (real) political freedom. Bait and switch.

Finally, you make sure it never happens again by gaining control of the media and by planting a fundamentalist Christianity on college campuses that will give the youth a place to put their idealism, a place that tells them to be good conservatives and support war, "family values" and the government.

[Cetacea]

82. Ever read "Acid Dreams"?

http://books.google.com/books?id=e39s92O14EsC&dq=acid+dreams&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=jglAS6KNLImVtgeC9Zn9CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

[Nikki Stone1]

107. I'll check it out.

Thanks.

[Nikki Stone1]

135. OK, started reading the online version, which is missing a ton of pages, but part is funny

"While parapsychology has long been ridiculed by the scientific establishment, The CIA seriously entertained the notion that such phenomena might be highly significant for the spy trade.... Along this line, the CIA began infiltrating seances and occult gatherings."

:rofl:

This was just hysterical.

Edited to add:

OMG even better!

"The CIA also sought to develop techniques whereby ESP powers of a group of psychics could be used "to produce factual information that could not be obtained in any other way."...In a rather bizarre twist, during the late 1960's the CIA experimented with mediums in an effort to contact (and debrief?) dead agents...."

:rofl:

[Nikki Stone1]

139. And this is interesting though more ominous

"Of all the chemicals that caused mental derangement, none was as powerful as LSD. Acid not only made people extremely anxious, it also broke down the character defenses for handling anxiety. A skillful interrogator could exploit this vulnerability by threatening to keep an unwitting subject in a tripped-out state indefinitely unless he spilled the beans. This tactic often proved successful where others had failed. CIA documents indicate that LSD was employed as an aid to interrogation on an operational basis from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s." (page 19)

[Nikki Stone1]

141. The abuse of unwitting subjects is stunning and awful

See page 24. It's unbelievable how inhumane these CIA sponsored doctors and scientists were.

[Cetacea]

158. I know.

Dosing "subjects" with huge amounts of LSD and then shocking them into a state of infancy as per MK ultra..
Lovely.

[Nikki Stone1]

216. There was more to it than just trying to "loosen up" information

That kind of treatment is about something else entirely.

[Nikki Stone1]

222. And here it is:

"It was from Hoffmann-La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, that Edgewood Arsenal obtained its first sample of a drug called quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. The army learned that BZ inhibits the production of a chemical substance that facilitates the transfer of messages along the nerve endings, thereby disrupting normal perceptual pattems. The effects generally lasted about three days, although symptoms--headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavlor-could persist for as long as six weeks. "During the period of acute efiects," noted an army doctor, "the person is completely out of touch with his environment.".....

.....According to Dr. Solomon Snyder, a leading psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, which conducted drug research for the Chemical Corps, "The army's testing of LSD was just a sideshow compared to its use of BZ." Clinical studies with EA-2277 (the code number for BZ) were initiated at Edgewood Arsenal in 1959 and continued until 1975. During this period an estimated twenty-eight hundred soldiers were exposed to the superhallucinogen. A number of military personnel have since come forward claiming that they were never the same after their encounter with BZ. Robert Bowen, a former air force enlisted man, felt disoriented for several weeks after his exposure. Bowen said the drug produced a temporary feeling of insanity but that he reacted less severely than other test subjects. One paratrooper lost all muscle control ior a time and later seemed totally divorced from reality "The last time I saw him," said Bowen, "he was taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar."

During the early 1960s the CIA and the military began to phase out their in-house acid tests in favor of more powerful chemicals such as BZ, which became the army's standard incapacitating agent. By this time the superhallucinogen was ready for deployment in a grenade, a 750-pound cluster bomb, and at least one other large-scale bomb. In addition the army tested a number of other advanced BZ munitions, including mortar, artillery, and missile warheads. The superhallucinogen was later employed by American troops as a countennsurgency weapon in Vietnam, and according to CIA documents there may be contingency plans to use the drug in the event of a major civilian insurrection. As Major General William Creasy warned shortly after he retired from the Army Chemical Corps, "We will use these things as we very well see fit, when we think it is in the best interest of the US and their allies."

http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/Text%20Files/BZ%20Bombs%20Away

[Nikki Stone1]

146. Oops. No more pages.

...

[Cetacea]

159. Try this one.

http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/Text%20Files/

[Nikki Stone1]

217. Here we go:

"The use of LSD among young people in the US reached a peak in the late 1960s, shortly after the CIA initiated a series of covert operations designed to disrupt, discredit, and neutralize the New Left. Was this merely a historical coincidence, or did the Agency actually take steps to promote the illicit acid trade? Not surprisingly, CIA spokesmen dismiss such a notion out oi hand. "We do not target American citizens," former CIA director Richard Helms told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1971...The nation must to a degree take it on faith that we who lead the CIA are honorable men, devoted to the nation's service."

Helms' reassurances are hardly comforting in light of his own role as the prime instigator of Operation MK-ULTRA, which utilized unwitting Americans as guinea pigs for testing LSD and other mind-altering substances. During Helms's tenure as CIA director, the Agency conducted a massive illegal domestic campaign against the antiwar movement and other dissident elements in the US. The New Left was in a shambles when Helms retired from the Agency in 1973. Most of the official records pertaining to the CIA's drug and mind control projects were summarily destroyed on orders from Helms shortly before his departure. The files were shredded, according to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA's Technical Services Staff, because of "a burgeoning paper problem." Lost in the process were all existing copies of a classified C IA manual titled, "LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications."

http://www.levity.com/aciddreams/Text%20Files/Autopsy

[Hannah Bell]

165. The drug sequence of the 60s went: pot, psychedelics, speed, heroin.

heroin came in quantity after the "summer of love".

basic schema = pot = early 60s & on, psychedelics = mid-60s, speed to heroin = late 60s/70s.

the drugs mirror the politics. or vice-versa.



cocaine as mass consumer drug = late 70s/early 80s.

[Hannah Bell]

147. change for the worse.

[Cetacea]

34. Good analysis.

I would add that the inner cities were flooded with heroin. LSD was a double-edged sword as it can be argued that it also helped fuel the movement. It was more of an "eye-opener" as opposed to the numbing drugs like heroin and cocaine which were later pumped into the community.

Personally I felt Lennon's death was the unofficial end of the movement. He was the one person who could mobilize a million people to march on Washington in a heartbeat. He had the major media in his palms. Music also lost it's political punch in large measure after Lennon was gone. It was either Sinatra or Gore Vidal who described him as "a genius of the spirit" and I believe he was also the conscience of the movement and popular music as well.

Out with Lennon, in with Reagan.

I would add that "boomer spirit" is found in the environmental movement as well as the gay rights movement.

[omega minimo]

47. Oh, it was "official" all right

Thanks for the quote from Sean.

[Nikki Stone1]

53. Heroin from Southeast Asia

And guess who was running that?

The message to "drop out" was what Leary really had to sell, and this was the message that the white kids especially responded to. The blacks, who couldn't drop out if they wanted to survive and whose anger was justified and targeted were instead destroyed by heroin addiction, which killed pain and everything else.

I am totally convinced that drugs were a major part of the war against the social justice movement.

[Hannah Bell]

171. I did too. I was working in Seattle then, walked to bus stop around 6 am, icy cold & dark,

only person at stop, & newspaper box headlined the death. It was so out of the blue the moment felt surreal. Friend called that eve crying.

st helens had blown up that summer (personal loss to me due to many summers there) & reagan came to power. my roommate & i called in sick from work.

terrible year, definitely an ending. i went overseas & when i came back 5 years later it was a different world. lots of homeless people & smarmy business types, my friends turned into suburban replicas of their parents.

[Cetacea]

190. And unlike the manufactured mourning for Reagan,

the sorrow felt around the world at Lennon's passing was quite real and unprecedented. The fact that most of the world, including major media outlets paused for ten minutes of silence...incredible.

[omega minimo]

42. THAT'S WHY THEY SHOT HIM.

:crazy:

[Nikki Stone1]

54. No one knows why Lennon was shot

But his death severed the ties the boomers had to their movement. I don't think it's any surprise that "The Big Chill" came out a couple of years after his death.

[blues90]

57. No and we never will know .

Yet this is how it all works.

[omega minimo]

62. Lennon was assassinated.

You can research it yourself.

[Nikki Stone1]

73. I'd love to see the proof.

I really would. That's not a snarky comment.

[omega minimo]

77. As I said, you can research it yourself

one google will do it. There is so much information, that you can consider the evidence and decide for yourself.

[Nikki Stone1]

112. Do you have some sources that you think are more credible than others?

You know the net often has just plain crap.

[Cetacea]

132. delete

[Cetacea]

64. I would guess his son has a pretty good idea.

[nannah]

115. greyhound, patrice and you nikki have said it all.

we were effective which is why people were killed then and a continually divisive discourse dominates the airways now.... the lesson: never let the people come together.

[jaysunb]

134. You're a very smart person...

seriously.
I think we could all add a tweak or in depth view of how we won and lost at the same time,but,you've done a good job of summing up the whole picture.

We had the power(just like the current generation) but we decided to have a splash of water with our Bourbon.

I remain hopeful that the gen y'ers and millennials will use our template to help realize our dreams.

[seabeyond]

29. in freedom we stepped away from responsibility. imo.

there are good schools and education out there, if we are willing to have expectation of our kids. i am bummed about the job outlook, but then i dont think that was hard to see what was gonna happen. i saw it way back in the 90's when they were talking about it. seemed pretty obvious to me.

but the greatest part i think is that in the freedom we let go of what our part in it all was and our children will pay the price because of it.

[Mari333]

37. you cannot save the world.

[blues90]

41. No I can't . Now it is a task just to stay afloat .At the time

When one is still young you feel you can change the world. It seems at least to me at a certain point in ones life you without trying, begin to look back and attempt to sort out all you have filed away , ie , sorting the lies from the truth to attempt to make sense of it all.

[mmonk]

43. Yes, I know what you mean.

And no, we won't get over ourselves as far as the things we did right, especially in forcing issues such as the advancement of civil rights and standing firm against the war. How it all went wrong is I guess is many lost the priciples they fought for.

[omega minimo]

45. The question is why all that work was allowed to be dismantled so passively, so completely, so quick

ly

[blues90]

52. I wouldn't say it was allowed .

If you look at how Nikki Stone1 framed it there is a power structure that was threatened. Every one of the people who lead the people to a better future was murdered. You can even take it as far as JFK Jr.

Just for the sake of arguement and for that idea only, what if this same sort of thing happened today. How would it be viewed.

[omega minimo]

58. It was allowed. By you. That's why you feel bad.

NikkiStone describes how "they" "feared your power." So "you" let them dismantle every bit of it. Despite the other posters glowing claims about social progress, ALL of it was reversed, regressed (a poster here claims you "can't fight progress"), disassembled, deregulated, disinformed ...

And to answer your question, with another question, how did all these lame asses come out of all those experiences, not understanding that it was up to THEM to make a difference, not wait for the next "leader."

[blues90]

75. I feel guilt because I did not see it coming .

Yes the signs were there but in the moment of all the murders of leaders and war " we must stop communists" crap.

I can't say anyone really came out of it. I am not sure who you mean by the lame asses.

Certainly the leaders we did have at the time were telling us it was up to us all along and we needed to make the change.

I know I did not come out of it nore was I looking for another leader,
That's why I brought this subject up. At times I feel I could have helped more to keep that idea alive. I don't know how the hell I would have. Yet I still think about it and compare it to today hoping we are not past the tipping point.

[omega minimo]

83. I appreciate you bringing the topic up with some honesty.

"Certainly the leaders we did have at the time were telling us it was up to us all along and we needed to make the change."

Yes, that was the message. And some who came at the tail end of the boom GOT that, and still (like me) get frustrated with those who can't quite say WHY they quit knowing/being that. Esp. since the arrival of Reagan was so EFFing blatant that he INTENDED to reverse every success of the recent past, every progressive achievement of the past decades and lull everyone with phony smiles and bullshit platitudes. Call us punks if you must but :wtf:

"At times I feel I could have helped more to keep that idea alive. I don't know how the hell I would have. Yet I still think about it and compare it to today hoping we are not past the tipping point."

We are way past the tipping point. A big red flag, no matter what one's politicis, was the various violations of our civil rights over the decades before 2000. Were the "up to us all along" folks paying attention and taking action then? No.

[Hannah Bell]

186. boomers went majority for carter & anderson in 1980, not for reagan.

[omega minimo]

220. stop hammering your one point while ignoring actual post comments, eh?

[Hannah Bell]

242. i haven't ignored anything. you have, though, by not correcting your misinformation

on voter election participation.

[Hannah Bell]

173. & by you. as we speak. why are you allowing it?

[mmonk]

67. I have no answer. I guess it can be traced back to Milton

Friedman, Jack Kemp, and the emergence of the Reagan revolution. I wrote my economics thesis in 1979 when it was being discussed as Reagan was going to accept Kemp's solutions, on why I thought the precepts would fail and lead to bankrupt states and debt.

[Luminous Animal]

76. Youth acquiesced.

There are only so many times that you are willing to put your liberty on the line. There are only so many times that you can arrange your life around possible incarceration with your family and/or employers.

Progress was only going to go so far when next generation is unwilling to continue the fight.

[omega minimo]

85. Boomers acquiesced

"Next generation" is still badgering them for a decent, honest answer, not that lame copout.

[Cetacea]

117. To borrow from Nikki Stone, it's difficult when your leaders keep getting shot.

And not just our leaders. The National Guard shooting and killing peaceful students at Kent State played a major part in a chain of "Chilling Affect" events.

[omega minimo]

123. I understand and I don't buy it.

If our political and social leaders are sending the message, which is "You can do this, you MUST do this, it is up to all of us..." we cannot chicken out and be hypocrites, pretending we have rights that are being siphoned off every moment, believing in progress that we received due to their sacrifice, enjoying the comforts and avoiding the inconvenient truths of their lives/deaths.

[Cetacea]

172. "And then Reagan happened".

I'm not sure exactly what happened at that point. Lennon was dead, Rush was born and the right-ring media take-over was in motion. I still find it hard to believe that so many people-democrats included- were duped by that guy. Coup d'état? CIA director Casey suffered brain explosion right before testifying before the Iran/Contra Commitee, and it was common knowledge that he had the info to sink the whole administration.

[omega minimo]

184. It's reassuring to know that people are not lazy hypocrites, they're scared shitless of having

their lives destroyed by the criminals in power.

That's when this is no longer America.

[Luminous Animal]

144. What lame copout?

That a generation can only be tear-gassed and cracked on the head so many times? That they can watch their leaders be incarcerated or killed only so many times? Every movement involves only a small percentage of the population. Their activism leads the nation towards a new consciousness but, in the face of state oppression and corporate propaganda, without new blood, they burnout. This is a fact.

[omega minimo]

148. Okay. That is a fact. Then follows the 30 year nap, where those younger who

ARE engaged are left with a bunch of snoozing Rumpelstiltskins, Reagan Democrats, Alex Keatons and Dallas addicts. Thanks a fuckin lot.

[Luminous Animal]

156. Who can you name from the generation that followed

the hippies that risked their life or liberty for a better world? If you think the hippies had the hearts and minds of majority of Americans, you are sadly misinformed.

Like I said, every movement only engages a small percentage of the population. At best, the anti-war protesters, the civil rights protesters, the women's rights protesters, the actual feet on the ground were represented by 10-15% percent of the population. Sure, there were inactive sympathizers but the percentage of the population who was willing to put their liberty on the line was quite small. In order for any of those movements to be sustained, new people needed to step up. When they didn't, when their was no new fresh white middle class heads that were willing to be cracked with billy clubs, or bodies bullied and corralled by police horses, or controlled by fire-hoses, or bitten by police dogs, that 10-15% went home and became community organizers, homeless advocates, social workers, etc.

The labor movement took 100 years until it saw substantive results. Women's suffrage? 80 years. Emancipation (with the rejection of Jim Crow) 100 years. Not one of those movements succeeded by denigrating the efforts of the generations of activists that came before them. Rather, they take lessons learned and build upon them. We are an ignorant culture raised in ignorance. Our history books give remarkable short shrift to the power of citizen movements and thus we are more apt to ascribe leaps of social justice towards the belated efforts of political leaders rather than the masses of people who demanded it.

[Hannah Bell]

192. can we not castigate *your* generation for being insufficiently involved?

i'm not sure what it serves, any more than the similar "don't trust anyone over 30" served us.

better to study the past & learn from it than (excuse me, don't mean it personally) whine because mom & dad weren't perfect parents.

For myself, I tend to agree with the general schema nikki stone laid out above. There was a noticeable break in the "movement" somewhere in the mid-60s, from fairly disciplined, "serious" political activity into a kind of lifestyle politics, "do your own thing," hippie stuff. (Not meaning that all hippies were poseurs, but a lot were.)

And lots of "actions" which were essentially just geared to piss off "silent majority" types who'd previously had some sympathy with some movement goals. Just pointless in your face/more radical than thou stuff. Contrast the intensive training & "respectable" white shirts & ties of the Civil Rights movement & the early anti-war movement to what developed. The "respectable" clothing wasn't accidental: its aim was to say: "we're serious, we're not flakes or freaks."

Someone who was in Detroit/Ann Arbor movement politics in the 60s (which was the hard core of "the movement") said that what had been up to then been a mainly working class movement with long-range strategy was taken over by preppy types from privileged backgrounds who steered it in the direction of senseless provocation -- giving the finger to mom & dad -- & escalating violence.

Which pretty much killed it.

Folks like Bill Ayers, son of this guy:

"Thomas G. Ayers (February 16, 1915, Detroit, Michigan – June 8, 2007, Chicago, Illinois) was president (1964–1980), CEO and chairman (1973–1980) of Commonwealth Edison.<1>

Board of directors of Sears, G.D. Searle, Chicago Pacific Corp., Zenith Corp., Northwest Industries, General Dynamics Corp. of St. Louis, First National Bank of Chicago, the Chicago Cubs, and the Tribune Co.

His son William Ayers, once the leader of the radical Weather Underground, has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 1987.<3> His son John Ayers, once on the staff (1983–1986) of former U.S. Rep. Lane Evans (D-IL), is a national leader in charter school development."

Who I've always believed was a plant. He was the leader of Weatherman & got off without a scratch, then stepped into a cushy position, while some of his "comrades" still sit in jail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gilbert

now he does "charter schools lite" while his brother does "charter schools heavy."

and his silly wife, one of the prime movers in the destruction of SDS, the most effective grassroots political organization since king's.

which was when the preppy types moved in to take over.



Mark Rudd, who was one of the provocateur types in the 60s, has had a change of heart:

"'Organizing is a process – creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics.'”

In other words, it's not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they've got to move toward “organizing masses of people.”

Aha! Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building.

Until recently, I'd rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.” The common term for years has been “activists.” Organizing was reduced to the behind the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration.

But forty years ago, we only used the word “activist” to mock our enemies' view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us “mindless activists.” We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy and tactics (and, later, contributing to our downfall ideology).

While reading I've Got the Light of Freedom, I realized that much of what we had practiced in SDS was derived from SNCC and this developmental organizing tradition, up to and including the vision of “participatory democracy,” which was incorporated in the 1962 SDS founding document, “The Port Huron Statement.» Columbia SDS's work was patient, strategic, base-building, using both confrontation and education. I, myself, had been nurtured and developed into a leadership position through years of close friendship with older organizers.

However, my clique's downfall came post-1968, when, under the spell of the illusion of revolution, we abandoned organizing, first for militant confrontation (Weatherman and the Days of Rage, Oct. 1969) and then armed urban guerilla warfare (the Weather Underground, 1970-1976). We had, in effect, moved backward from organizing to self-expression, believing, ridiculously, that that would build the movement. At the moment when more organizing was needed to build a permanent anti-imperialist mass movement, we abandoned organizing.

This is the story I tell in my book, Underground. It's about good organizing (Columbia), leading to worse (Weatherman), leading to horrible (the Weather Underground). I hope it's useful to contemporary organizers, as they contemplate how to build the coming mass movement(s)."

http://www.counterpunch.org/rudd12252009.html


For myself, I think "the left," broadly defined, is still stuck in the lifestyle/identity/issue politics paradigm, & it's a big LOSER.

[Hannah Bell]

174. the dismantlement didn't occur quickly, or without resistance, & is still ongoing.

& i take exception to the reading that it's the fault specifically of boomers. voting patterns, for one, don't bear out that storyline.

[blues90]

66. You know the saying " everything' is cured by time"

I probably screwed that up. Yet as time goes by and the force of technology rages on, one moment your feet are planted on the ground and the next you lost footing. They have all the inventions in wait then suddenly they let them out.

[NNN0LHI]

68. There will never be an end to poverty or racism. Might reduce. But no end ever

But did you think a black man would ever be elected President of the USA during your lifetime?

I sure didn't.

Don

[LanternWaste]

69. I believe that change does happen...

I believe that change does happen and has been happening, albeit gradually, slowly (relative to our desire for instant gratification) and subtly. In the end, I think the human race is puttering along a steady pace of three steps forward and two steps back every 50 years or so.

I imagine that it's difficult for any current generation to perceive all the changes (good and bad) wrought by the previous one. At the time, no one knew the true impact of the Reformation, or the Renaissance, or the defeat of the German's in WW2. It's only after much time had passed, and the histories written that the consequences of a generation's course of action becomes readily apparent.

I think that raising out fists in victory, or lowering our heads in defeat is always premature at best in that many of our greatest achievements (industrialism, standardization, et. al.) themselves have hidden and negative consequences felt by future generations. And that our most dramatic defeats (the Dark Ages, the Holocaust, etc) may often have collective positive results not seen for many years.

We are I'd hazard but one color in one small corner of a large painting-- it's very difficult for us to see what the actual picture is, let alone what its true value will be over time.

[patrice]

103. +1~ ~ There are WAY too many top-down assumptions in this thread, not enough understanding

of how individuals CAN change things from the bottom up.

not so small example, where would the Gay Rights movement be if it weren't for the Boomers' grandchildren and where would those grandchildren be if it weren't for Bommers' positives and negatives?

The over-simplified zero-sum stuff we see in this thread needs to end.

[starroute]

71. Do you know how many of them and how few of us there were?

You can compile a long long list of early boomers, starting with George W. (1946), who got a leg up on the wealth-and-power thing while we were still scraping along trying to fight the system or going to grad school or getting jobs and having kids.

Even back in the 60's, there were a lot more of them than there were of us -- they just weren't grabbing the headlines. They were the frat rats, the YAFers, the neatly groomed ones who hated hippies and protesters and grew up to be good little Republicans.

And now they're running the show, while we're still scraping along on the outside.

So it's not like "our generation" failed. We were a crazy-desperate minority then and we're a crazy-desperate minority now. And while that's certainly better than the alternative, it's not like we can blame ourselves for missing our opportunity to make things right while we had the chance.

We never did have the chance -- and if we managed to change a few things along the way, if there will be more like us the next time round, then that's enough to be proud of.

And we're not done yet. At least I'm not.

[Nikki Stone1]

74. +1

.

[patrice]

106. !!! . . . crying

:hug: much!

[Cetacea]

167. ++

[patrice]

201. ". . . Build thee ever more stately mansions, oh my soul, as the swift seasons role, . . .

Leave thy low-vaulted past. Let each new dwelling, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
'Til at length, thou art free
To leave thine outgrown shell by life's un-resting sea."

My Pappa's favorite poem, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. I know the whole thing by heart.

My father was a member of the Great Generation and certainly had his chains to wear, not only from growing up during the depression in rural Arkansas, but also from being amongst the first to arrive (on his GI Harley) in newly liberated German Concentration Camps. He was passed-on now, but while he was here, these things and, perhaps, his Irish descent pre-disposed him to substitute the dream for reality, often until reality came crashing down of its own weight.

I mention this, because it is interesting to me how much his life differed from OWH's, how far most people would say he was from anything like educated or noble and how much trouble that caused him (in some ways) and us by extension and, yet, even in that somewhat crippled culture, he felt this connection to OWH's words and communicated that to me. Maybe that's why you made me cry lastnight, starroute. I don't explicitly know why your avatar is a chambered nautilus, but I recognize some of the spirit of that poem in your words and tomorrow IS my father's birthday.

Thank You, Starroute.

[starroute]

229. You're welcome Patrice

My avatar is a Golden Spiral, which is the geometry behind a chambered nautilus, and which has a great depth of meaning.. (http://www.ka-gold-jewelry.com/p-articles/golden-spiral.php)

It also reminds me of a roller coaster at night and thus seems like a fitting representation of the last 50 years.

[Lorien]

78. Hell, I was born in the middle of the 1960s and I really believed that things would

have ended up 180 degrees from where we are now. You're right; schools were better, the media was 1000% better, and jobs were nowhere near as hard to come by. We thought that we were moving toward a peaceful, enlightened, civilized, egalitarian, green future. Then Reagan came along.

[blues90]

93. Yes Reagan came along .

And there was that insane group of Reagan democrates that I will never understand when Reagan as gov of calif wanted a blood bath remember that?

[Hannah Bell]

177. boomers (1946-1962) went majority for carter or anderson in 1980.

[Cetacea]

178. First stolen election?

I find it auspicious that W said in interview in 1999 that he was engaged in a "war against 60s idealism."

[Luminous Animal]

179. Three way vote split.

[omega minimo]

185. Reagan's "landslide" was 51% of eligible 37% of voters. 63% didn't vote.

[Hannah Bell]

189. In 1980, 52.6% of eligible voters voted. In 1984, 53.1%.

Which is not *so* different from historic highs of ~60-63% of eligible.

Nor can I see that the entry of younger groups into the voting pool has raised turnout.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html

Boomers didn't go for reagan in 1980. & though they did in '84 -- the landslide election -- they were the *least* likely to do so of all age groups. The '84 landslide, IMO, was the product of recovery from the awful recession of 1980-82 & the dampening of inflation, + lower interest rates = boom.

[RagAss]

92. Most of you were failures in the purest sense. The rest of you were criminal bastards !

[winyanstaz]

96. and what have YOU done?

Where is YOUR generation? Have they stepped up to the plate yet?

[omega minimo]

100. That post was just flamebait bullshit. They're not serious.

[RagAss]

102. I'm a boomer...just having fun...jeez..How can a generation fail? ...

Except the one that gave rise to Nazi Germany.

[unkachuck]

94. "...I now feel like such a failure"

....as well you should, and so should I....for being 80 million strong, we have precious little progressivism to show for our generations presence....we did not even come close to what our grandparents and parents achieved....and they had much less to work with under more difficult circumstances....

....we're a spoiled, greedy, self-centered, me-me-me generation that has destroyed the planet and could care less about the future beyond our own demise....

[blues90]

108. May I ask what generation you are from or your age?

Just to get an idea, so I can respond and compare?

[unkachuck]

116. like you, I'm a boomer, and not proud of it....n/t

[Cetacea]

110. Your parents generation destroyed the planet, not the boomers.

We've been screamimg about the environment since the '60s and your parent's generation flipped us the bird.
Now it's mostly republicans flipping us the bird.

It's easy to generalize. Part of the problem is that there was a schism in the boomer generation in that some were as you say 'self-centered " while others were altruistic and activist.

Many of the ideals of the boomer have been gradually assimilated into contemporary culture so it wasn't a total failure. But it could have been so much better if they hadn't shot all of our leaders and took over the media.

[blues90]

138. I can now only imagine what it would be like if our leaders

at that time would have lived. Perhaps by now we still would have the same situation , who can say.

I never let by 60's beliefs die. People can walk up to me and peg me right away , now matter how I cut my hair. They seem to be able to peg me as a boomer.

All we really had back then if we needed to be able to live at least in my small world was a trade. I had to make a living but I never sold out and never cheated anyone. I still was a carpenter or a mechanic or built guitars because they were jobs that carried on. In my eyes they were real jobs that required perfection and time and I like working with my hands and mind. I started playing guitar because of the Beatles but before that my choice at 8 was the cello but I did not come from money so I got a clarinet.

I never saw money as success and now I have nothing much but my own value as a person.

The 60's to me was a bottom up approach not this trickle down insanity.

I worked in factories along all races and back then we didn't seem to have a problem with that. I do know many did but I amoung many did not.

In chicago and the suburbs at the time many people worked of all races in dumpy factories and we could even joke about eachothers place yet it was known it was all in gest , never a fight broke out, we worked , punched out took our low pay and had the weekends off and a 40 hour week. Levety got many through the horrid times of war and death back then. We did not need politically correct we were correct by being simply people who all broke a sweat and helped eachother without question but mutual trust and respect. There by then was an understanding and trust me I worked many a crap job , spoke in what was at times sign langauge but we got through it. I am a white male and even when working with any race and they said "you rich" and then they laughed we knew it was in gest.

I don't feel it was the working class hero that had the issues it was always the upper crust who did the bidding and drove the wedge.

[patrice]

113. I, for one, freed my children and they are NOT living the lies that I grew up with.

And that's a pure fact!

[Prism]

104. History is not a stair moving ever upwards

It's a winding road with twists and turns unanticipated by even the most observant travelers.

We'll never know how we'll get there, but it's good to have faith that we eventually will.

If you ever need cheering up, simply look at civil rights, where we were fifty years ago, and where we are today.

The Boomers are why I, as a gay thirty year-old, am on the cusp of equality. It was, quite simply, unimaginable before the Boomers arrived and the generations they're leaving behind them.

[mdmc]

111. I forgive you for voting for Ray-gun

if you voted for Carter then carry on the good fight..

[blues90]

121. I never voted for Raygun .

He was my worst enemy in so many ways . I did vote for Carter even when the peanut farmer rage ws going on , I saw more than that and railed against it.

[mdmc]

128. thank you

I only debate two political issues
1- Dick Cheney deserves a fair trial.
2- Ray-gun was the worst president of my lifetime.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

161. I never voted for Reagan, either

I still remember sitting stunned in the living room of our shared graduate student apartment with several friends, all of stunned and horrified that Ronald Reagan had been elected president.

We would have been more horrified if we had known how badly his policies would trash our country.

[Le Taz Hot]

129. Oh, goody!

More boomer bashing. You and people like you, who, my guess were never involved in activism in the first place, are the equivalent of Phyllis Schlafly and the Womens Movement (look it up). To blame America's downfall on the boomers is the height of self-hatred, all the while forgetting what all WE (OK, maybe not you) did. But you do serve a purpose -- the "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" will just LOVE this post. EPIC FAIL!

[Fire1]

136. Ditto. n/t

[omega minimo]

143. Ah the Smugger Than Thou have arrived!!!

And where were you while your civil liberties -- and ours -- were being cut off from under your nose?

[Le Taz Hot]

163. What do you think I was doing?

The same thing I've been doing since 1968 but here they are, not necessarily in order (and what I can remember):

-Worked for RFK's campaign, Mondale's, Dukakis', Carter's, Cranston's, Feinstein's, Boxer's, Dean's and Kucinich's . . . on the national scene. Too many to name on the local level.
-Joined the Womens Movement to fight for the right for reproductive choice -- finally successful in 1973, but STILL fighting.
-Educated myself about the Viet Nam war, handed out informational material and regularly protested against it.
-Joined NOW and was VERY involved with NOW from the mid-1970's on.
-Was a volunteer Escort for women entering the Planned Parenthood Family Planning building -- some of whom were going in for PRE-NATAL services.
-Taught Parolees Basic Adult Education
-Volunteer at the Homeless Shelter (since 1980 and still going).
-Protested against the IWR -- literally weekly with sometimes only 5 or 6 of us (all baby boomers I might add) showing up.
-Written innumerable letters, e-mails and faxes, ran off thermofax and Xerox copies to fill a forest and made so many phone calls for one cause or another that I was sure the phone would be permanently attached to my ear.
-Ensured I learned how to use a computer (1991) and the internet to keep informed.
-Was a member of the Democratic Party from 1973 to 2004.
-Read probably 20-25 social/political books a year.
-As an educator, ensured my students developed critical thinking skills and taught them to never take anyone's word for anything -- to do their own research and make up their own minds.
-As an Administrator protected the rights of teachers -- often being the only one in the room doing so.
-Fighting to overturn Proposition H8 in California.


As I said, that's off the top of my head and what I enumerated is probably a third of the activism in which I've been involved but it should be enough to answer your "question."

On edit: And after posting all that, **crickets**. Why am I not surprised. I'm beginning to think DU isn't the place for Boomers.

[H2O Man]

131. be here now .....

'cause it's not like it was before it was now (George)

[patrice]

137. Hugs H2O Man!

:hi: :hug: Have a Good 2010!! :hug: :hi:

[Cetacea]

169. +1

[liberal_at_heart]

151. I wouldn't worry too much

Things happen in cycles. This will not always be. The poor will eventually demand equality. The wealth will be redistributed and people will suffer less for a while. Unfortunately because things happen in cycles that too will not last forever. The rich will always find a way to funnel the money back to themselves.

[blues90]

154. well the rich are doing it right now .

All my 61 years they have been doing this at the sacrifice of the people who built this country and just about everything we have in it.
I sort of doubt I will see the end of this cycle, I am past my youth.

Only now the funnel is wide open and flowing real good for the wealthy and we sit here and gather the crumbs they drop.

[liberal_at_heart]

157. Yes it is very worrisome right now

I have two children and I worry alot for their future.

[Desertrose]

164. We did the best we could at the time...

sure if we knew what was ahead we may have done it all very differently...but hey, can't change the past now.


And it was completely disheartening to see our leaders taken out one by one our brothers and lovers and husbands snet to a pointless brutal war.....I'd say a whole movement was pretty much derailed. I wonder what would have been different if we weren't manipulated through fear even then.....

[chimpyisstillsatan]

168. as someone who's been in your generation's wake

for my entire life, I say, screw you all. We've had to listen to how your generation "redefined" sex, music, careers, femininity, aging, and now even death. Yawn. Get the hell over yourselves for once. You fucked up everything with your insouciant narcissism.

Own it for once.

[omega minimo]

183. That's not an honest assessment either. That's a marketing version. You've been sold that junk.

[winyanstaz]

205. And what did your generation do?

It is not the Boomer's that made this great banking mess..Boomers are all retired or retiring or dead or dying and in the nursing homes. They are not the hot shot CEO's of today.
It is YOUR generation in power now and that has steadily grown in places of power for some time now.
Your music is so great? I think not. Of course there is the occasional great song but most of it is screaming or rap and I tell you...that is not very musical to my ears.
Yours is the generation that outsourced our jobs and are now trying now to deny women's rights to their own bodies again.
Your generation is the one that tries to judge people on how skinny they are or how young or how much money one makes now.
If your generation gets any shallower we will have to start calling you the flat generation.
Your generation is the one that is controlling the news now..making the movies..buying the toys.
Your generation now are the ones giving up everyone's civil rights so you can feel "safe".
Never mind all of your ancestors and parents that fought and died so long and hard to win those civil rights for us all.
I see grandma's in Code Pink out fighting your fights.
Where the hell are you?
And you still want to bitch about your parents' generation?
The boomer's had their day..and did do some wonderful things to make the world better.
Boomer's just stopped too soon.
Sounds like you are still wanting mom and dad to make everything all better for you.
You need to stop blaming the boomer's and look in the mirror.
Your a grownup..have been one for some time. Why is it you are still blaming your mom and dad and grandparents?
Tell us all..exactly what have YOU and your generation done so far to help the world except whine a lot?

[tranche]

218. What are you talking about?

Boomer's weren't heading the major banks during this mess? They were run by 35 year olds? WTF are you talking about? This is a pretty harsh list coming from a stinking boomer. The generation who soaked up all the wealth this country created over the last thirty years, will now be hiring their children and grand children to empty their bedpans, and still don't feel enough shame to shut the hell up. I say, collect your social security, medicare, and inflated housing wealth and ride off into the sunset with your subsidized scooter.

[winyanstaz]

230. well kid....I am a baby boomer and my kids are well past 35....

stop blaming your parents and get out there and fix things like we had to.....you spoiled rotten whining little punk.
and your on iggy now...so flame away punk....

[chimpyisstillsatan]

235. now THAT'S funny

fix things like we had to. Bwah ha ha.

[Hannah Bell]

247. & the history-making actions you're taking = ?????? oh, i see, whining

about how "boomers" control everything - on DU.

[Hannah Bell]

246. sure "boomers" run the banks - not a semi-hereditary ruling class.

"boomers" own everything - not a semi-hereditary ruling class.

social security = theft.

god you're silly.

[chimpyisstillsatan]

234. senility is so tragic

I like the way you try to shove all the responsibility for things that are unequivocally the fault of your generation onto a demographic that's been in a position to take over newly vacated Boomer jobs and responsibilities for at most what, five years?

And no, I'm not going to let you claim that there's this huge mass of Boomer retirements going on, either. Most boomers I know are content to rest on their laurels a few years longer until something changes with their retirement portfolios. It's the same old boring story. What's good for the Boomers flies, and fuck everyone else.

And all you magnanimous recent retirees are SO giving and willing to sacrifice the entitlements you voted for yourselves these past three generations, right? Right...

I know you're old and all, but you may want to at least VISIT a college campus in the near future to see the role volunteerism plays in most undergraduate lives these days. Iknow it's not eating acid at some dorm in Kansas and acting like you had skin in the game at Kent State, but it's pretty worthwhile anyway.

[blues90]

238. Try this on .

First off the boomers who still work did put in their time and have the experience that does not come just from an education. Much of the work back then was hard work , coined the jobs most americans don't want to do. I had to go to work for my father at age 7 and spent each three month summer school vacation without choice working for him as a carpenter. No one seemed to be checking child labor laws back then nor did we have teachers who were not allowed to use the ruler at will.

Most boomers I knew did not have a car until they had a job no matter what and most were brought up by parents who went through the WW II and we were not allowed to waste a thing , we were taught not to waste and X-mas was not a pile of shiny things under a tree.

Certainly this did not apply to all boomers but it did in most middle class and poor at the time. I'm talking about the 60's those who grew up in the late 40's through the 50's.

And go back being 18 and there was a draft , you are 1-A not in college , not married and have no children and a letter arrives one fine day that says greetings with a train ticket BE THERE.

Every single Boomer I knew at that time fit that profile other than two who did not pass the physical and most returned in a closed box, ones that did return were never the same and a few couldn't make it just like today , just add in the draft.

[chimpyisstillsatan]

239. boomers benefited from favorable employment conditions

As long as we're getting all anecdotal...

In my field, biomedical research, there were literally jobs created for them. This was true in most technical fields, including engineering, chemistry, computer science, and Physics. Now we compete with Chinese and Indian graduates for every job.

Today, Boomers in research won't relinquish their positions for the next generation, especially since the two decade Boomer Ponzi scheme imploded. My peers (who typically spent 6 years in doctoral training doctorate, 4-6 more postdoc, 2-4 as non tenure track serfs, a 5-9% grant approval and tenure rate) are forced to sit around and wait for tenured and established boomers to die or retire. The latter who, thanks to their parents' "war on cancer" and newly approved NIH funding went only 3-4 years on average to their doctorate, did 0-2 years postdoc, had 50% or greater grant approval rates, and saw a 60-80% tenure rate) refuse to step aside for the next generation. Average age for a Boomer's first faculty or industry research position? 28. Average age for me and my peers? 42.

Life was tough for Boomer? Cry me a river. I and many of my doctoral classmates live on Ramen noodles and paid our rent by donating blood and participating in clinical trials as guinea pigs. A labmate of mine literally lived in a utility closet since he couldn't sustain himself in San Fransisco on a grad student stipend. There are examples of everything in a given population, but by far, the Boomers had it EASY.

And cut the bullshit on the draft. Connected Boomers made it through just fine. Poor Boomers and dark-skinned Boomers went to Nam. And don't start in on how fucking hard it was to see friends go to war and come back in boxes. We're fighting two similar conflicts today. The draft isn't necessary since Boomers fucked up our economy so badly with your greed, the military is the only viable employment option for many, many kids today.

[blues90]

258. whatever . I did state that there were boomer's who had it good so

Your last paragraph just repeats what I already said, try reading what I wrote. You can stand there in your situation and say the boomer's had it better , perhaps in your field. I wouldn't know.

I'll never get where you blame the boomer's for fucking up the economy and with what greed , where is the proof of this?

[Hannah Bell]

243. why should boomers sacrifice what they paid for? in the case of

social security, paid for twice, these last 30 years.


If you want change, it might be more effective to go after the rulers instead of whining about your "selfish" parents.

& btw, if they lose what they paid for, it's you who'll be supporting them in their old age. Or abandoning them.

Do you like that future better?

[chimpyisstillsatan]

264. if what you paid for was all you're demanding

then that's fine. The average retiree rips through what they put into the system in a very few years (3 or 4).

[blues90]

209. My OP is about owning it and so are many of the comments here.

Perhaps if you read through the replies you might learn something.

[LanternWaste]

231. The petulant, inarticulate bleating of youth...

The petulant, inarticulate bleating of youth... Petulance in C Major. Pettiness in F Sharp. Variations on History.

You see, each generation blames the one prior to it, and weeps for the examples given by the upcoming generation. And you are little different in that regard.

[seabeyond]

175. boomers are 46-64. i was born in 61. part of boomer. high school didnt even happen until 76

i certainly dont feel like my time is the period people are talking on this thread.

[bertman]

176. We could have done better for sure, but don't beat yourself up over it. Most of us in

your (and my) age group did what we thought was right. We may have been short-sighted and we may have been lulled into a sense of entitlement without realizing it; however, we can still work to change it.

Don't give up. Get involved. We need to energize the Progressive wing of the party. Failing that, we need to start our own Progressive party. Screw the status quo.

[old mark]

181. As an older boomer I feel like the ignorant young shitheads who came after us let us down,

and are not worth the fucking room they take up.

Go play with your Wii, you fucking useless,whining assholes.

mark

[tranche]

219. We'll be emptying your bedpans over the next 20 years. So shut up mark.

What a statement. Coming from a generation who soaked up all the wealth this country created over the last thirty years, will now be hiring their children and grand children to empty their bedpans, and still don't feel enough shame to shut the hell up. I say, collect your social security, medicare, and inflated housing wealth and ride off into the sunset with your subsidized scooter. What a bunch of dicks.

[suzie]

268. Soaked up all the wealth, what are you talking about?

We were a huge demographic--who do you think created that wealth? The surpluses that we saw in government came at the peak earning years of the Boomers passing through the work force.

But the next generation that required brand new cars while in college, every possible electronic device, could only wear Nike or whatever every brand name piece of merchandise, that had to have a new house with everything new in it right when they married--that's the generation that's whining about Boomers soaking up all the wealth?

Wow.

[B Calm]

194. It's not the boomers fault. Blame the YUPPIES!

[pecwae]

198. Fah! I'm not taking on such blame and angst.

I was part of the "hippie hype", but hardly insane.

If the current generation wants to blame Boomers for every social and economic ill, so be it. That's a very convenient excuse for non-action on their part.

[TwilightGardener]

200. Meh, get over yourselves.

[wordpix]

202. another boomer weighing in

Except when I was very young in the 60's-early 70's (feeling like it was the "best of times" then, especially when we stopped the war), I've often felt like I've been swimming against the tide as an activist in environmental movement since the mid-70's. I can truly say I know what it feels like to be discriminated against, even though I'm white. I've been ridiculed, written about as "batty," and more, and sometimes all the work I've done feels like a big failure, but there are some hopeful signs today that people are taking us environmentalists more seriously---at least, the young people are. sigh.

[hayu_lol]

206. Really hard to blame the boomers...

for being born after the war. The world(depression years)had changed. Millions of guys came home from WWII eager to set up housekeeping and start their families. For years, there had been little civilian production; people were hungry for new things: washers, refrigerators, homes, cars and the like...all that want stemmed from the millions of marriages and the arrival of the first boomers.

But, the old world had changed. Many women during the war worked outside the home for the first time. They did not want to go back and their family needs called for two wage earners. A generation grew up preoccupied with things but mothers were working to pay for all the changes.

An early sociologist, Vance Packard, wrote about many of these problems and if interested, boomers are advised to check out their libraries for these two books: Insolent chariots, about cars and car culture of the period, and Crack In The Picture Window(about the explosion of the tract home explosion). His books are worth the time and effort to find. Some of the answers can be found in both.

Life changed. Both parents working. Latchkey kids. Things and not thoughts. Exploding school and infrastructure problems. New educational methods to ease the problems didn't always work.

Life in these United States never recovered. Boomers cannot actually be faulted. After the war, the population really became fluid and families became separated and lost track of each other.

As I've said, Vance Packard wrote about this stuff. Get his books(interesting reads)and see for yourself.

Me? A depression kid with parents still coming out of the Victorian era. Extended family in the home.

[robdogbucky]

249. See also Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders

Business (advertising) had a hand in molding the direction things went in:

THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS
VANCE PACKARD
1957

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
The Depth Approach
PERSUADING US AS CONSUMERS

The Trouble with People
So Ad Men Become Depth Men
... And the Hooks Abe Lowered
Self-Images for Everybody
I£ for Our Secret Distresses
Marketing Eight Hidden Needs
The Built-in Sexual Overtone
Back to the Breast, and Beyond
Babes in Consumerland
Class and Caste in the Salesroom
Selling Symbols to Upward Strivers
Cures for Our Hidden Aversions
Coping with Our Pesky Inner Ear
The Psycho-Seduction of Children
New Frontiers for Recruiting Customers
PERSUADING US AS CITIZENS

Politics and the Image Builders
Molding "Team Players" for Free Enterprise
The Engineered Yes
Care and Feeding of Positive Thinkers
The Packaged Soul?
IN RETROSPECT

The Question of Validity
The Question of Morality
Index

http://www.ditext.com/packard/toc.html


Just my dos centavos

robdogbucky

[raccoon]

260. The books you mentioned weren't by Vance Packard, although his

THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS and THE WASTE MAKERS are certainly worth reading today.

THe books you mentioned were by John Keats (seriously.


The crack in the picture window by John Keats (1956)

http://www.amazon.com/crack-picture-window-John-Keats/dp/B0007ERARK


The Insolent Chariots by John Keats (1959)

http://www.amazon.com/Insolent-Chariots-John-Keats/dp/B000DCOEZM/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262637977&sr=1-2

[Redwoodhippie]

210. Keep on truckin and don't forget to BOGGIE!!!

I am an older boomber being born in 1945, one year before the 'official' start of the boombers. I was a California creative social activist before Herb Caen of the San Francsico Chronicle labeled us as "hippies'. I was at the Human Be-In and the Gathering of the Tribes in the Golden Gate Park panhandle and was at one of Ken Kesey's Trips Festivals in the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco, yet was not completely there, as I did not partake of the leomonade, as it was not summer, and I did not realize the leomonade was the vehicle whereby one would get stoned with free LSD. I did enjoy the light show and the music. Within a month or two I did take my first of many acid trips. In 1967-68 I was the Mid-Peninsula Free University printer. The MFU was an underground experiment branching out from Stanford University similar to Free Univeristies elsewhere like Heliotrope, of San Francisco and another one in Berkeley. We had 3,000 people involved at our height and The Grateful Dead and the The Jefferson Aeroplane played concerts at the Stanford Amphi-theatre and donated the proceeds to the Stanford Committee on Radical Education and these funds were then donated to the MFU. Timothy Leary, Ram Das (Richard Alpert), and Ken Kesey were all a part of the MFU as was Big Daddy Eric Nord otherwise known as the 'father of the beatniks'. The energies we shared at the MFU and among those in the psychedelic world seem to have been occurring among many groups across the North American continent and Europe and possibly in other countries around the world. I do believe with the energies beautifully expressed by the Beattles, especially John Lennon and Paul McCartney much of the new age philosophy was shared across the culture and around the world. I was surprised when I met a young person in the early eighties in a remote area of New Zealand who had not heard of the Beattles yet I know this person was an exception. While the more egalitarian left will lay claim to the Beattles many on the right also find an affinity with their music and ideas. Social activists were inspired by the energy of the times. I read an account from one of the founders of the American Indian Movement where he expressed that observing white middle class students wearing long hair and beads inspired him to go back and speak with tribal elders to revive the traditional ways. I am happy that I was able to join the first Native American Longest Walk in Washington, D. C. in 1978. On the other hand I can lament and be sorry I did not participate in any of the following walks, however why should I do this if I wish to be happy? That I did not do this or that is only of value if it helps me to spur myself into actions of today as the eternal now is still here and many opportunities will always be present. I remember and agree with a line of a Beattles song, “It’s alright if I am wrong, I am right where I belong.” We have free will and yet we have to chose and are confined to move along pathways that result from our prior actions and actions of those around us as well as natures twists and turns and our genetics and our general health. As many Native Americans will say life moves in the great circle and all will return. Also I appreciate the Chinese saying, “All things that ever have been will be again and again forever more.” So life is cyclic and in the thirties in Germany there was also a back to the land movement similar to the hippies of the sixties. The struggle of man to find a balance of how to live and learn and discover new ways and still retain a healthy balance with nature is a long struggle with many ups and downs. I do believe the future appears gloomy and that man may not avoid a devastating crash due to excessive greed and egocentric desire to control others as evidenced by the present United States Project for a New American Century neocon endless war full spectrum control of the planet. The future does not look good, however in order to maintain an inner balance as an 'evolving cosmic spirit being' we each need to retain hope and in the eternal ever present now reaffirm what we appreciate. And while life gets hard at times we are each a thread of the cosmic life force and it is up to us to affirm what we like. If we like being happy we should allow and encourage this manifestation of our being. We should strive to keep creating pockets of heaven from within and allow our inner energy to radiate and lighten the surroundings. We should smile and be happy, projecting our happiness to others, inspiring those around us, and if we do, we may see their reflective energies and smiles coming back to yet inspire us as well. If we care about something we should express ourselves. If we like free speech we should exercise it. Peace…..Keep on truckin and don’t forget to BOOGIE!!!!!

[haikugal]

233. Wavy Gravy

Wavy is that YOU?? :hi:

Great thread by the way...

[Redwoodhippie]

241. Hi Haikugal

Haikugal this is not Wavy Gravy however I did have a memorable experience with him. We were both at a San Francisco anti nuclear power plant demonstration with music probably by Bonnie Raite. I was picking up recyclables and putting them in black plastic bags that were there for the purpose. I found another black plastic bag that had a costume in it and not wanting it to be thrown in with the recyclables I put it to the side. Awhile later a man came around screaming as he was all upset about something. After a bit I realized he was looking for his clown suit and then the light went off, and I told him I had it. I showed him where it was. He was very happy that I had it. At the next anti nuclear event when I saw him and asked him if he remembered me, he said, "You found my clown suit. I could never forget you." So while I am not Wavy Gravy I am one who got to meet him and share a memorable experience. I am thinking you may have known Wavy Gravy much better than I and I hope you will tell me a story. I heard that he passed away a few years ago. Correct me if I am wrong. peace redwoodhippie

[Morning Dew]

256. I think Wavy Gravy is still kickin'

"We are all the same person trying to shake hands with our self." - Wavy Gravy

[Hannah Bell]

248. hugh romney = trust funder.

how do you think these folks could run around displaying themselves for 40 years without working?

[SmileyRose]

213. Unfortunately President Stupidass and Bernie Madoff are boomers too

If the 1980's to now are any indication, the boomer generation that's been more or less in charge of this country for the last 20-30 years has more greedy fucking assholes than previous generations.

I'm late boomer and I have no illusions that my generation is fairly greedy.

[dem mba]

215. Nothing could have been done differently

when China and India can offer manufacturing for fractions of the price of American workers and plants than there is literally no policy, outside of total isolationism or ridiculous tariffs, that would prevent the inevitable tides of outsourcing.

If you are going to criticize the computing industry for the loss of American jobs, than let's hope you don't forget that Microsoft and Apple are both American companies. Heard of them? They're beating the pants off of Sony and every other Asian competitor. You have to take the good with the bad.

[omega minimo]

221. nonsense.

[dem mba]

227. well i stand corrected

i guess?

:shrug:

[happy_liberal]

223. JFK, MLK, RFK were the death of our democracy

Moving past those obvious CIA hits and just pretending nothing happened has led us to where we are now.

It is important to look at what could have been done differently. It is also important to look at what we have to do now.

Instead of fighting, the boomers need to realize their work is not done, and the following generations need to reach out and unite because it is going to take all of us to rid our government of the evil that has taken over in the last 40+ years.

By not stopping these bastards in the 60s, the terrorists have become emboldened and they will continue until we stop them.

[slackmaster]

225. In 1968 I thought science, high technology, and engineering would solve the world's problems

It troubles me greatly that we actually have people who think evolution is a plot to undermine Christianity.

I'll turn 52 in February.

[DisgustedInMN]

228. k&r

[mimitabby]

232. OP i feel your pain. I have the same heartaches

I really thought we were going somewhere once and again and again I felt like i was kicked in the gut
as Nixon got elected, as Reagan got elected. True, I've seen some positive changes, some of which I am sure
we were instrumental in making happen, but it's surely not enough. What makes me even sadder
is how the younger generation is reacting. well, they're not. They're not even trying.
This last presidential election so far as I'm concerned was my last hope. No, I haven't given up, but I'm pretty discouraged.
Quit beating up on the original poster, he's entitled to his feelings and he's not alone.

[graywarrior]

237. DU has turned into one huge blame game

What a waste of 8 years.

[Peacetrain]

240. ahhh yep...

nah nah nah boo boo gets us zip..

[Romulox]

244. I sense that there's a mint to be made pandering to the boomer's sense of guilt!

Some will want to wallow in it, some will be desperate to assuage it. Extreme narcissism being the uniting thread.

[Hannah Bell]

251. you mistake irritation for guilt. i feel not one whit of guilt for "my generation's failure"

to stop the train of history.

i feel a great deal of irritation to see young people repeating the mistakes of the past.

[Romulox]

253. Look upthread. Defensiveness is born from guilt. nt

[Hannah Bell]

261. where do you read defensiveness & how is it possible for an individual to be guilty

in this case?

[raccoon]

254. Ah, blues, some of us did the best we could.

:hug:

"You just cannot see the future ," Amen to that!

You might have had good schools but the ones I went to were REAL crappy. Not ALL the schools of yesteryear were good.

Best wishes to you.

[blues90]

259. No not all schools were good

We moved back and forth from Chicago to Tampa. And back to the Chicago suburbs because my father being a carpenter tried to work in worm weather. The FL schools were horrid places . The IL schools we had old schools but great teaches.

I did do the best I could at the time. Nothing was what it appeared especially TV and all the shows were not anything like reality.

The cuban missile crisis came along when I was in Jr high with the duck and cover and the thought we might be in a nuclear war.

We were told lies and shown filtered wonderful world TV.

[mkultra]

266. Go Amish

Its not to late

[jillan]

269. What I'm wondering is why we haven't had a repeat of the 60s. I feel

like that was the last time that true liberalism existed. That we really had a voice and were a force to be reckoned with.
What happened? Why has no other generation rebelled against the establishment as we did in the 60's.

Don't feel like a failure - FEEL PROUD! We were heard, and earned our place in history.