AJC.com > Opinion > Woman to Woman > Archives > 2007 > November > 17
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Is the Legacy of the 1960’s positive or negative?
Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
Andy cheerleads the sixties just months after Rolling Stone magazine’s 40th anniversary and weeks after the passing of writer Norman Mailer. Both were groundbreakers for the “anything goes” revolution. But in Rolling Stone’s anniversary interview, even Mailer criticized several of its results, including the explosion in drug use — which he himself struggled with. He blamed activists like Timothy “turn on, tune in, drop out” Leary for “wasting a generation.”
Unlike Andy, I’m grateful that my parents didn’t join the “anything goes” sixties cultural revolution. Instead of letting it all hang out at Woodstock, they served in the Peace Corps in India. (And it’s just a tad ironic that because they then named me the Hindi word for “peace,” people who are nostalgic for the psychedelic sixties chant Shanti, Shanti, Shanti in yoga classes from Berkley to Boston.)
What Andy calls ‘excesses’ are actually the natural result of a movement that transitioned our entire culture away from natural law and objective standards. In “The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America,” Roger Kimball documents just how radical the shift was. As he writes, “The success of America’s recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.”
Yes, specific injustices needed to be addressed - but many activists never realized that correcting them required the very absolute truths - like “all men and women are created equal” - that they were trying to erase! And once absolute values were gone, social problems skyrocketed: everything from STD’s to violent crime to divorce. Since the 1960’s, for example, except for a brief uptick during WWII, the divorce rate has been consistently two to three times higher than it was before.
Norman Mailer lamented to Rolling Stone, that in the 1960’s “everything was getting cheapened… We live in a cheaper environment now than we used to.” How tragic, that many people only see the powerful need for absolutes once they are gone.
Commentary
By Andrea Cornell Sarvady
Generations following the baby boom grew up hearing about the 1960’s like it was a fantastic party they had just missed. Yet once overly revered, the era now haplessly stands trial in a kangaroo court, blamed for everything that’s wrong with America. While writing his new book, “Boom! Voices from the Sixties,” best-selling author Tom Brokaw (“The Greatest Generation”) kept hearing from wary boomers, “What are you going to call this one? The Worst Generation?”
Newt Gingrich might have used that title, as well as his compatriot Dick Armey, who once announced, “I think all the troubles in the country began in the sixties.” Oh really, Dick? So I guess rigidly prescribed sex roles and segregation were good things?
In evaluating the sixties. it’s smart to start a few years earlier. As Woodrow Wilson once said, “The seed of revolution is in repression”. The stability of the fifties was marred by repression, marred by institutionalized racism.
Despite its excesses, the decade that followed spawned a revolution with many lasting triumphs: the ideals of Martin Luther King, increased opportunities for women, a war that inspired legions of social activists, many of whom, stereotypes to the contrary, continue to work for the disenfranchised.
Some developments of the era still haunt us, like the terrible fallout of drug abuse. Other problems have been nullified. Vietnam soldiers often returned home to less than a hero’s welcome. Yet when an Atlanta radio station recently conducted a campaign to send 375,000 overseas service members a Thanksgiving letter, listeners of all political stripes participated. They saw no connection between supporting a soldier and supporting a military conflict.
Tom Brokaw concludes rightfully in “BOOM!” that the jury is still out on the sixties.
Yet we can’t allow detractors from the right to hang the whole decade in effigy as they continue to chip away at social gains and civil liberties, all that went right in that sometimes wrong-headed decade.
Remember: the seed of revolution is in repression. So if you still feel like there was a party you missed, hang on. With the way things are going around here, you just might get a second chance.