The Road to Shalom

LATE SIXTIES: "All Ya Need Is Love" (or maybe not)

• Fran Sciacca • Season 2 • Episode 4

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     As the Sixties were winding down, hopes were ramping up. This, after all, was "the age of Aquarius." In the words of The Fifth Dimension, "harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, no more falsehoods or derisions, mystic crystal revelations and the mind's true liberation." Surely the best days were ahead! Woodstock was proof.
     Yet, five years later they were singing, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we'll never be the same, we're all forgiven because we're only living to leave the way we came." What happened? In the words of Annie Gottlieb, "'No!' can be shouted from a million throats, but 'yes' has to be said face-to-face, in response to love or reason." We were good at saying 'No!' but had no idea the cost of saying 'yes.' To be a part of rebuilding what we had torn down.
     The collapse of the Sixties ideology is a vital piece of the puzzle we're building in this series to understand how and when we wandered off the Road to Shalom.
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OTHER  RESOURCES BY FRAN SCIACCA:

Welcome to the third installment of, “There And Back Again: A Hippie’s Tale,” my attempt to make a little more sense of how and when God’s people wandered off the “Road to Shalom,” with the goal of perhaps getting back on it. I’m Fran Sciacca, your tour guide for this journey, and the host of the Road to Shalom podcast.

In our last episode, we flew over the decade of the Sixties and traced the rise of the counterculture, the civil rights movement, and the drug culture, the three “causes” that emerged from the Fifties affluence. As the Sixties were coming to a close, it was the polar opposite of the way the Fifties ended. There was disagreement with “the system” rather than the near total agreement with it of the Fifties. There was a disenchantment with life that burst into demonstration, rather than the enchantment and resignation of the Fifties. Music took a 90 degree turn in the Sixties and abandoned the mindless lyrics of rock and roll for the message-laden content of music in the later half of the Sixties. And, the attitude of rebellion floating aimlessly in the Fifties was replaced by an active rebellion and a counterculture that became massive as the Sixties came to a close.

I concluded last time with a few personal examples of how the church in Middle America’s allegiance to the flag eclipsed its allegiance to the Great Commission and caused them to view the counterculture with suspicion and disdain, and missed the mission field on its doorstep because of the the way we looked. And just like the Church of the Fifties sacrificed its biblical worldview, the Sixties Church sacrificed its credibility. At least in the eyes of my generation. The Church and everything associated with it, surrendered its place at the table of public discourse, and has been trying to get it back ever since. This is huge, because it will help make sense of the efforts made by the Church in Middle America in the 70’s to recover the credibility it lost in the Sixties.

A similar loss of missed opportunity can be seen with the Civil Rights Movement and people of color. Martin Luther King’s famous “Letter From A Birmingham Jail” was penned in response to eight white clergy who had written asking him to slow things down and delay his planned demonstrations in Birmingham. In that now famous letter King said, “Actually, we who engage in non-violent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.” He didn’t want to slow down the momentum that had built. Sixty years later, history has demonstrated the truth of his words back then, and it has also clarified how costly it was for people within the white majority culture to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and voiceless in their midst. At the end of the day, I guess what I’m saying is the decade of the Sixties in Middle America wasn’t Christianity’s finest hour.

America almost had a seizure as the Sixties was coming to a close. They were turbulent days. Nearly 30 year later, Time magazine would label 1968 as "the year [that] severed past from future." The late Sixties may have created a mile marker in history, but it fractured countless relationships as well. Family life in America suffered more casualties than ever before. Annie Gottlieb's comments in her book on the era, Do You Believe in Magic? are chilling in retrospect. She said,

If the right wing gets to write history, they will put us down not as the "Love Generation," but as the generation that destroyed the American family. They will point to the soaring rates of divorce, venereal disease, teen pregnancy, and abortion as sequelae of the Sixties. If they are right in their attribution of blame, then, ironically, the Sixties generation achieved one of our main objectives.

We might not have been able to tear down the state, but the family was closer. We could get our hands on it. And, like the Confucian Chinese, we believed that the family was the foundation of the state, as well as the collective state of mind. To us, its children, the Fifties nuclear family—with its hypocrisies, its covert power struggles, its substitution of materialism for love—was the cornerstone of the Nuclear Age. We truly believed that the family had to be torn apart to free love, which alone could heal the damage done when the atom was split to release energy.

And the first step was to tear ourselves free from our parents.

The parent generation, including my own unfortunately, were accused of being shallow and dishonest. We boasted of our own depth, transparency, and honesty — which in hindsight was simply an excuse for disrespect and vulgarity. My parent’s generation had been raised to work hard and play fair, not to introspect and emote. When you’re working seven days a week, there’s not a lot of discretional time to daydream about changing the world. Sadly, for many adults, this inability to talk on the level of feelings, made their own children seem like foreign exchange students. Sociologists glibly called it the “generation gap.” In truth, it was more of a wound.

But the family was not the only battleground. It seemed like everyone was fighting everywhere over everything. There was the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, demonstrators captured the nation's attention at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, by chanting, "The whole world is watching!" as Mayor Daley's police attacked them. In May 1970, the Ohio National Guard battled protestors at Kent State University, the end of which was four dead and the Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a girl weeping over the body of a student, shot dead by the Ohio National Guard. That photo became a permanent part of our collective psyche, and onto the airwaves via the song “Ohio” by Crosby, Still, and Nash:

 Tin soldiers and Nixon coming

We're finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio

I was a sophomore in college. The lyrics were chilling for a 20 year old. As the Sixties were winding up, they were also falling apart. The counterculture was anything but a cohesive whole. Many whose minds are clouded with the fog of nostalgia, or who are simply students of the decade but were not actually there, seem to think that all of us living then were of one mind and soul. That we were all politically informed and militantly active. This caricature is simply not accurate.

There were centers of protest that easily and repeatedly captured the focus of the media: Berkeley for free speech; Oakland for the Black Panthers; San Francisco for Gay Pride; Chicago, Detroit, and Newark for race riots; Columbia University for student takeovers, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison for student bombings, just to mention the more obvious ones. Young people captured on film in all these places had an uncanny sameness. As a result, the understandable but faulty conclusion was that all American youth were as informed and impassioned about the causes of the Sixties as the counterculture "stars" who appeared nightly on the news.

The larger truth is the political Left and the bulk of the counterculture popularly known as "hippies" were distant cousins at best. In fact, the whole mess of us was more like the layers of an onion, than a billiard ball. At the center were the leftist proponents like Fay Stender, Huey Newton, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and a bunch of others. They were the "movers and shakers" who had the camera's eye, and therefore the nation’s attention, during the decade. They wrote the books, led the marches, burned their draft cards, and fought the law. But they were not representative of the entire generation, just a part of it. Moving out from this center of rage were varying layers of diminishing commitment to the antiwar and civil rights movements. So, why the confusion? Well, there were some common denominators among all the players. The two main ones were the counterculture lifestyle (i.e., drugs, sex, and music) and the uniform (jeans, tee shirts, and long hair). It was like we all got our clothes from the same store, so to speak, but when we walked out, even though we looked alike, we went different directions for different reasons. And they were social not ideological.
Speaking for myself, I thought deeply about life, and journaled about my inner struggles, but was pretty uneducated when it came to geo-politics and social history. I shared the spirit of the leftists, but I wasn’t reading Ramparts magazine or the rantings of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. I was just empty. Inside. Something was missing in my life, and I wanted to talk about it. A lot of kids my age did too. In fact, actual conversation is one of the things I miss most about those days. It happened all the time, everywhere. Today, the erie gray light reflecting off people’s faces from their devices, sitting across from one another is a source of great discouragement to me. The fading skills of eye contact and genuine curiosity will not easily be recovered by the generations that know the perfect emoji to use, but can’t read body language. Anyway, back then it was okay to have questions. And to ask them. When the folk-rock group I was part of, did warm-up for B. J. Thomas in Saint Paul, his repertoire included his hit song, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” We were singing songs about the war.

I didn't study Marx, Che Guevara, or Chairman Mao, but I did do drugs, listen to the music of the era, and protest the war. But my solidarity wasn’t with the political Left—it was with my friends. And my real goal was not to see an improved America, as much as filling a void inside myself. At the end of the day, I just wanted to belong to something, and the easiest path to that was doing what everyone else was. That's a phony commitment when it comes to changing the world, but it was the "orbit" in which I lived, and to be honest, so did most of us in the Sixties.

I think that many of us who lived through the Sixties era suffer from a sort of countercultural amnesia when it comes to either the degree or motivation of our involvement in the movement. We sometimes talk about it like we were all in for all the right reasons. The late Jerry Garcia, of Grateful Dead fame, spoke for most of us in a Rolling Stone interview in 1989, "For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part."

The "spiritual part" Garcia speaks of was the search, the quest for some meaning to life apart from accumulating stuff. Most of the Sixties generation shared that passion. And in the minds of a growing majority, meaning was personal, it had to be found through experience. That’s one of the reasons why drugs were such a big part. The austere image of the leftist radical was much less appealing than the pleasure-seeking lifestyle of the flower child. In short, for most of us, partying was preferable to politics. Veteran leftist and self-acclaimed Sixties authority Todd Gitlin admitted this house-divided within our ranks in his book, The Sixties:Years of Hope, Days of Rage:

On the verge of the 1967 "Summer of Love," many were the radicals and cultural revolutionaries in search of convergence, trying to nudge the New Left and the counterculture together, to imagine them as yin and yang of the same epochal transformation. . . . Thanks to the sheer numbers and concentration of youth, the torrent of drugs, the sexual revolution, the traumatic war, the general stampede away from authority, and the trend-spotting media, it was easy to assume that all the styles of revolt and disaffection were spilling together, tributaries into a common torrent of youth and euphoria, life against death, joy over sacrifice, now over later, remaking the whole . . . world.

This perception that things were “converging” was just that and nothing more. The sheer numbers of the youthful baby boom created an illusion of unity that just wasn’t there. Then, like today, a highly vocal minority created an illusion of solidarity and majority.

In the minds of most American youth, the war had degenerated from a reality to a cause, moving further and further away from their own world on its way to the nether world of statistics and talk. Protesting the war had deteriorated from a passion to an occupation.

A friend of mine was a student at Berkeley in the Sixties and his commentary on what went on would have be comical if it wasn’t so tragic. He had to drive past the California Highway Patrol post in Oakland every morning on his way to campus. As he drove by, he saw the patrol cars file out of the station like clockwork every day at 8:00 A.M. By the time they reached the Berkeley campus, the demonstrators were beginning to arrive. And almost as if on cue, the TV trucks would pull up at the same time. The protesters protested, the police policed, and the TV reporters reported. They all did their "job" until 5:00 P.M. when the TV crews went home to their wives and children. Then, a reverse migration occurred after the television trucks left. First the protestors would trickle off, followed by the highway patrol. The daily routine was as predictable as an episode of The Office.

This phenomenon of the spontaneous-become-routine also had a detrimental effect. It diminished the sense of passion and belonging for those of us already on the edges of commitment. People simply do not maintain involvement in issues that are impersonal, vague, or distant. Trying to topple something as unquantifiable as “the system,” or protest a war on the other side of the world seemed noble, but both lacked personal contact and measurable results. They simply weren’t sustainable. For those of us on the margins, the movement lost its motion, and it would soon lose its meaning.

Even the reaction to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy in 1968 was affected by this growing apathy. Youthful idealism staggered under the very real possibility that even if you do get to a position where you can help others, you may be shot. The perennial question, “What's the use?” reared its ugly head. For adult America looking on, there seemed to be a pause in the pandemonium. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath, wondering what was next. And they could point to the landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon in July of 1969 as evidence that we were moving forward and that, despite the noise and clamor of the decade, things were starting to look like America again.

The disruptions on the campuses, though still intense, were diminishing in number and the majority of us seemed to be settling for the hippie lifestyle rather than the activist worldview. This put parents more at ease because, although bizarre and equally unconventional, hippies were not as violent as their militant peers. This was a new normal. But more normal than things had been for a while.

We were optimistic too. The U.S. was preparing to begin withdrawals from Vietnam. The flower children, whose flag was the peace symbol and whose state flower was cannabis, seemed to be usurping the public eye. Moral "uptightness" seemed to be weakening as living together and homosexuality began to be recognized as valid alternative lifestyles. 

A sense of solidarity filled the air and the hearts of American youth in the counterculture. Suddenly, it seemed as though we were a bona fide counterculture, not merely some anomaly. In the words of rock star Janis Joplin, "There's lots and lots of us, more than anybody ever thought before. We used to think of ourselves as little clumps of weirdos. But now we're a whole new minority group." We were beginning to believe that all the riots, sit-ins, marches, and speeches had actually accomplished something of real value and lasting worth. Although we had only participated in spirit, even those of us on the fringes wanted to share the spoils of victory. We honestly believed we had hard evidence of our success. 

In January of 1967, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park was the repository for nearly ten thousand "long hairs" pouring in for what was promoted as the first "Human Be-In." Newsweek magazine covered the event:

They wore blowzy furs, fresh flowers, jangling beads, floppy-brimmed hats, even Indian war paint. They waved sticks of burning incense, swirled abstractly designed banners, tooted on fifes and recorders. There under the warm sun with the faithful was the whole range of the hippie hierarchy. Poet Allen Ginsberg tried to lead the crowd in a Hare Krishna swami chant; Timothy Leary, headmaster of the LSD school, delivered a plea to "turn on, tune in and drop out," and Pig-Pen, the pop organist whose gaudy sweatshirts have become standard apparel for hundreds of teen-age girls, invoked the hippies via another favorite idiom—rock music.

The Human Be-In was a caricature of what the counterculture itself had become—an altruistic stew of nonpolitical politics, naive idealism, Eastern mysticism, drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll. 1967 was also the year of the famous, "Summer of Love" in that city. In the words of Todd Gitlin:

Only fifty or seventy-five thousand young pilgrims poured into the Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, but they were at the center of the nation's fantasy life. Music, dress, language, sex, and intoxicant habits changed with breathtaking speed

This flowering optimism was clear in the lyrics of a song about these events, “San Francisco,” by Scott McKenzie, which came out that same year:

If you're going to San Francisco, 

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

If you're going to San Francisco,

You're gonna meet some gentle people there. . . .

All across the nation, such a strong vibration. . . .

There's a whole generation with a new explanation.

And finally, just to cap off the year’s achievements, on October 21, 1967, during the March on the Pentagon, a group made a seemingly serious effort to exorcize the demons of war and death by trying to "levitate" the world’s largest office building — the Pentagon! Just for the record…it didn’t…levitate that is.

If what happened in Golden Gate Park and Haight-Ashbury was tangible evidence of the reality and permanence of the counterculture, then what was to occur two years later on the other side of the continent seemed to proved beyond any reasonable doubt — well, at least for six months — that a new age was about to dawn. In August of 1969, four hundred thousand card-carrying members of the counterculture converged on a dairy farm owned by Max Yasgur in Bethel, New York, for what was billed as the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair: An Aquarian Exposition”—known forever since simply as Woodstock.

Today, just say the word and people have flashes of nostalgia. If you talk to anyone in the baby boom generation, they'll know of Woodstock. We saw it as an apologetic for the reality and permanence of the counterculture. We were real. We were here. We are the world. The optimism that inflated the significance of Woodstock was nearly universal among the counterculture near the close of the Sixties. And as always, our optimism was best reflected and in music. Aquarius, the theme song from the rock musical Hair, made popular by the group, The 5th Dimension, said it all. I’m sure the lyrics are familiar to you. But, listen to them again—maybe for the first time— in the larger context of what we’ve been looking at:

When the moon is in the seventh house,

And Jupiter aligns with Mars,

Then peace will guide the planets

And love will steer the stars;

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, . . . 

Harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding.

No more falsehoods or derisions,

Golden living dreams of visions,

Mystic crystal revelation, and the mind's true liberation

Or how about this prediction of folk singer Arlo Guthrie’s in Newsweek magazine? “All political systems are on the way out. We're finally gonna get to the point where there's no more bigotry or greed or war. Peace is on the way. . . . People are simply gonna learn that they can get more by being groovy than by being greedy.” Pay no attention to the contradiction about getting more and greed, in those lyrics. Arlo was only 22 when he wrote them. Ya gotta cut the guy some slack.

Then there’s Carole King’s song, Beautiful, recorded about this time.

“You’ve got to get up every morning

With a smile in your face

And show the world all the love in your heart.

Or The Beatles, in 1967

All You Need Is Love, Love

Love Is All You Need

Okay, so, we believed that a new age was dawning—the inevitable fruit of all the love we had generated. We really thought that after the smoke cleared, the country would see clearly that we knew what we were talking about. The counterculture would become the accepted culture. We believed that we were the true architects of the Great Society. Our children and grandchildren would be the beneficiaries of our blood, sweat, and tears. We would be heroes!

It is indisputably true that our children did inherit the fruit of our labors, we never could have imagined what a foul harvest it would be.

The decade that almost destroyed a nation was coming to a close, and the nation's youth held their breath and waited. Maybe we were going back to the best of times once more! There was a sort of hiatus in the rebellion, and a spirit of jubilation in the music. But, if illusion is the parent of disillusion, then despair is its grandchild. The darkest days were just ahead, just around the corner and out of sight.
  From the time I entered college till the time I left, the Aquarian Dream had turned into a nightmare. We were like modern-day children of Job; the roof of our house caving in on us while we were at the height of our party. The glowing optimism of the latter Sixties turned into a pessimism of the darkest shade by the time the seventies were underway. A mournful cry of the soul permeated the youth culture. Music, at least a bunch of it, was more of a lament than a lark. The opening years of the Seventies brought with it a chilly wave of hopeless music. Much of it sung by the same minstrels who had brought us hope just a few years earlier, as the curtain on the Sixties closed. In 1967 The Beatles were telling us that “love was all we need.” But in 1973, Paul McCartney was singing with a Wings, his new group, because The Beatles were in conflict as a group and on the road to break-up.

You used to say live and let live. . . .

But if this ever-changing world in which we live in

Makes you give it a cry,

Say live and let die!

Apparently, love wasn’t all you need. The Fifth Dimension, the ones who gave us the banner song, Aquarius about “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding,” had changed their tune too:

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

We'll never be the same.

We're all forgiven

Because we're only livin'

To leave the way we came.

In August of 1969, Woodstock was our proof of the solidarity and wisdom of the counterculture. But four months later, Altamont, a San Francisco area free concert stripped that naive optimism naked. The entire counterculture was deconstructing. Listen to Rolling Stone Magazine’s assessment

At the end of their 1969 U.S. tour, the Rolling Stones planned a free concert near San Francisco. It came to be called a festival, and despite the fact that the site was changed less than 24 hours before the show, some 300,000 fans converged on the Altamont Speedway, near a freeway about 40 miles southeast of San Francisco. There was no way that basic necessities could be provided for so many people on such short notice, and Altamont turned into a nightmare of drug casualties, stench from toilets and fires and food and vomit, faulty sound, and finally, the brutal violence visited on the audience by pool cue- and knife-wielding Hell's Angels who said they had been hired (by the Stones and cosponsors Grateful Dead, for $500 worth of beer) as security guards. The climax came as the Stones played late in the day, when a young black man drew a gun, and was knifed repeatedly by Angels; he died, as three others had in the course of the day. (There had been deaths at Woodstock, but they had been conveniently overlooked in all the romantic youth-cult hype.) Altamont was hailed as the end of the counterculture; more accurately, it was a graphic symbol for what the counterculture had in truth become.

The year 1970 witnessed the drug-related deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Doors' Jim Morrison, as well as the intensely emotional and spiteful breakup of the Beatles. Change came to my own life as well. Our folk-rock group disbanded. A sociology professor who had championed moral relativism as a lifestyle was found dead in her car in the garage—the engine running. Another Marxist sociology professor, who had called the apostle Paul a bastard, and was the leader of a commune, lost all of the commune's funds in a pool game at a local bar. My philosophy professor, who had exploited his academic freedom by having a lecture hall full of us chant the “F” word at the top of our lungs to help us see our “moral hangups”, was fired for sexual misconduct with coeds.

I spent that summer living in Minneapolis in an area known as the West Bank, a sort of miniature Haight-Ashbury in the Midwest. I watched hippie "brothers" steal each others' drugs, money, and bedmates. It slowly became evident that the brotherhood I thought I was part of was a sham.

My wife's countercultural peer group began to unravel before her eyes as well. She started to seriously question the validity and integrity of the movement when her friends sat and laughed as one of them burned his arms with lit cigarettes while high on speed. Others in her world ended up in institutions or funeral homes because of drugs or mental problems. Like the rest of us, she watched the countercultural ideology unravel like an old sweater.

What had happened? How do you explain the overwhelming evidence that an entire generation appeared to be chronically depressed? Was it merely a cultural hangover after an enormous national party, or something much deeper? I quoted author Annie Gottlieb earlier. Listen to her take on all this:

Like all reactions, the Anti-Americadrew its energy from that which it opposed. When the war ended and Nixon resigned, its necessary destructive work was finished and its energy ebbed. Constructive work would take much longer, and it could not be achieved by the mere amassing of bodies. "No" can be shouted from a million throats, "yes" is said face-to-face in response to love or reason. . . . The counterculture was only a negative. We just said "no" to whatever the Old America had said "yes" to.

What Gottlieb says about the Left applies to the entire Sixties youth culture. It was simply a reaction, a youthful knee-jerk response to what what we thought was wrong with Middle America. We were critics of the present social order, with no sense of responsibility, much less a plan, for the new order we were demanding. 

Tearing America down had been easy. Rebuilding had never crossed our minds. Former radical Peter Collier, writing to a friend who had accused him of abandoning the leftist cause, informed him that the heart of the political Left had nothing to do with construction, only demolition. Listen to this confession of a former Leftist radical:

 Take a careful look at what you still believe, because it is a mirror of the dark center of the radical heart: not compassion but resentment—the envious whine of have not and want; not the longing for justice but the desire for revenge; not a quest for peace but a call to arms. It is war that feeds the true radical passions, which are not altruism and love but nihilism and hate

The thought that we had any responsibility for, much less complicity in the evils of this system had never entered our minds. But by the end of the decade, it began to dawn on us that we had shouted "fire" only to discover matches in our own hands. We were a part of the problem because we were not part of the solution.

This ambiguous relationship of the counterculture with its perceived nemesis—the military-industrial complex of America, is best exemplified in the industry that helped fuel the Sixties rebellion in the first place—rock music. The Rolling Stones are one excellent example of our ability to live with paradox. It was easy for Mick Jagger to sing about being a poor boy who had to sing for a living, in his 1968 song, “Street Fightin’ Man,” to rail against wealth and affluence, yet he had tons of it himself. Life for him was very comfortable, and conveniently profitable. And if being political was the rage, count him in. Stuart Goldman, wrote about this artistic disconnect in National Review at the end of the 80’s, unmasking the true politics beneath this hypocrisy:

So, if rock is neither conservative nor Marxist nor liberal, that leaves the anti-authority doctrine of anarchism. This is nearer to the mark; rockers routinely denounce "the system"—governments, parents, teachers, etc. However, they usually do this while driving around in limos, talking on car phones with managers, lawyers, and accountants. Ask any young rocker his dream and you'll find that it involves wealth, fame, and power.

Rock politics, in short, is a sort of parasitic anarchism. Rockers are comfortably aware that the hated system will doubtless outlive them, continuing to provide its despised benefits. At the heavy-metal extreme, this becomes a form of hypocritical nihilism in which all the normal values of civilized decency are sneered at and—in everyday business transactions—relied upon.

Goldman accused rock activists of dealing of both sides of the deck. Taking a few bucks out of your front pocket to give to charity is one way to encourage people to put money in your back pocket! Altruism and philanthropy are easier if the needle of net worth doesn’t have to move much.

We who identified with the Sixties counterculture were parasitic anarchists to be sure. And when nearly every institution in the land wilted under the shouting masses, we had to face the fact that, in a sort of surrealistic twist of events, we were now in the driver's seat. It's easy being a parasite until you kill your host!

When we pulled down the walls of authority, the very boundaries that provided some sense of meaning to society, we had no alternative to put in its place. We hadn't considered that we would need a “counter system." If you erase the lines on a soccer field, it’s difficult to resume play until you know where the game is supposed to take place. This naive ignorance of the complexities of society was part of our youthful idealism. But as the smoke of the era cleared, it became apparent that we were guilty of much more than mere rebellion. 

Much of the motivation for our actions was blatantly selfish. I’m not proud of that, and I’m sure there are plenty of folks my age that would disagree. Still, at the end of the day, what we sanctified and called, “The movement,” with its causes became a justification for throwing off the restraint of the Fifties with a warped sense of mission and dignity. All the fun was just a perk for doing what’s right. It was a sort of hippie version of the affluence of the Fifties. One of the most sobering testimonies to this truth is contained within the pages of Bob Greene's book, Homecoming. It contains letter after letter from returning Vietnam vets who were spit upon, cursed, and made targets for flying garbage and soiled diapers. My own brother was one of them. One of the first experiences he had after six months in military hospitals in Asia, was to be spit in the face by a young coed who called him a “baby killer.” All this creates the stark realization that the "peace movement" was not committed to peace, and surely not to shalom, but only some idealized notion of peace. And, pushing a little harder on that bruise, that some of the "anti-war" pathos was simply the fear of being drafted.

We had deep feelings for our causes, but were deaf to accusations of irresponsibility. This is still true today. If you read the memoirs of former Sixties radicals, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything even remotely resembling remorse. Former radical Tom Hayden, in his autobiography, Reunion, boastfully proclaims: "We of the Sixties accomplished more than most generations in American history."  Hayden's statement is true. But one could just as easily say that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima "accomplished" more than any bomb in history.

My generation had played catch with a nation. But by the decade's end that nation lay shattered like a piece of mishandled china. With the unguarded honesty that permeates Destructive Generation, their recollection of the Sixties, Peter Collier and David Horowitz admit:

The Sixties might have been a time of tantalizing glimpses of the New Jerusalem. But it was also a time when the "System"—that collection of values that provide guidelines for societies as well as individuals—was assaulted and mauled. As one center of authority after another was discredited under the New Left offensive, we radicals claimed that we murdered to create. But while we wanted a revolution, we didn't have a plan. The decade ended with a big bang that made society into a collection of splinter groups, special interest organizations and newly minted "minorities," whose only common belief was that America was guilty and untrustworthy. This is perhaps the enduring legacy of the Sixties.

I have migrated from uneasiness, to disgust, to anger over the edited and romanticized versions of our era, written and propagated by those who feel no responsibility to try to clean up the debris from our "party." The three generations since — Gen X, the Millennials, and iGen — inherited the miscarriage of the Aquarian Dream. And I'm embarrassed by my own generation's refusal to own our contribution to the dismal moral and spiritual environment our own children and grandchildren are growing up in. And to face up to the pivotal role they are now forced to play in the future of our nation.

We of the Sixties need to recognize the consequences of our past actions. For they created the near perfect storm of conditions nearly fifty years ago, the long half-life of which has put the generations since at risk. 

The collapse of the Sixties social agenda polluted the watershed out of which three streams flowed and grew—three paths Middle America traveled on its emotional and intellectual exit from the collateral damage of the decade of illusion. And those three streams have grown into raging torrents in which the youth of today are struggling to find an anchor. We’ll jump back into that water in the next episode, when we look at how Middle America and its Christian sector responded to the Sixties failure. See ya then.