The first thing is, don’t get into this unless you have to. I did, and didn’t, so I know what I’m talking about.
Feelings are tender all around, and one is liable to fire off personal attacks without knowing the reason why. [Now how would he know that? -- Ed.] There’s a bunch of us out here wearing our hearts on our sleeves, and that gets kinda tricky. At any rate, I encountered some generational debate today and fell right in. Who’d have thought. It was the usual stuff, younger blogger/activists sick and tired of being put down as an email army that doesn’t really DO anything, or much worse, being lectured from the high and mighty temple of consciousness expansion and exploration of the inner world, vs. the continued tendency of some of us to keep pushing their buttons. In particular, the younger ones — those who could be my grown children and college-age grandkids — feel put down, left out, and abandoned by being told too often that we felt so good to be alive back then and regret that they do not. “No, not in the same way. How could they?” And so it goes.
This is most unfortunate, and I relent.
But as for the ’60s, I was there, and I felt something that hasn’t come again. As I declared this morning somewhere else in cruder terms, to me that means we* have to keep pointing in that direction. Not “back,” but to that psychic space. There is something to pass on, even if we don’t realize it yet. Some of us have substituted homilies from hell for holy imagination, and many of the rest have bought other lies and died inside. It’s all collateral damage from the blowback.
Mostly we forget, but the Universe is still there.
Related posts:
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Each of us who was there will place the golden age in a different time-span. For me it would be 1963 through 1968, commencing with the Freedom Rides, the publication of “The Other America” and “Gowing Up Absurd”, the emergence of the “the Movement”, the songs of Phil Ochs, even the philosophy of Dr. Leary. For me all this expired or turned suicidal soon after 1968. I have lots of good memories of the earlier period, but I have to admit that it all took a very wrong turn, making me wonder if I wasn’t pretty naive about all those notions of human perfectibility that underlay our thinking. Well, of course I was naive. I was just emerging from my teens. Youth is supposed to be idealistic and unencumbered by actual experience of the way the world works. That aint bad. But query whether it’s all that great to persist in the delusions of one’s youth after the golden moment has come and gone. Gone forever, I say, not without regret.
Señor:
by actual experience of the way the world works
I rest my case.
If the choice is between flight from the world and embracing the world, I reckon I know what I’ve got to do, but folks who want to take the other path are O.K. by me. I like it better when they face up to the problems with their path. Mine is not without its own troubles, I grant. The takers of both paths ought to beware smugness – something, however, I would never accuse you of, old compadre, in light of the unsparing honesty of your self-depictions. For these alone I am prepared to dub you a realist of the soul!
Unencumbered idealism has its points. It also has its deficiencies. Same for whatever you want to call its opposite – instrumentalism, realism or – if we want to be rude and reductive about it – materialism. I’m not trying to sell any of that particular brand of snake oil, but one’s personal experience is what it is. You got to ponder thoughtfully what happens in the course of your bleak and brief march through the universe. Otherwise what’s the point of being alive?
“Life is too short to spend it in delusions of vanity and falsehood. Free your mind of cant” (Samuel Johnson). Or another wise man: “Fight the peasant in your soul” (Chekhov). Two talismanic utterances by two guys who lived hard and thought hard, which is the best we humans can expect to do.
I imagine you agree with at least some of that, Johan, but it’s not agreement or conversion that a good discussion is about anyhow, is it?
I can understand how the keyboard army doesn’t get it way you do. It seems the main difference between then and now is the realization hasn’t come upon them yet.
Realization? What realization?
The realization that the bastards making the decisions aren’t just trashing their future liberty and standard of living. Back in the 60′s we knew that too. But we also realized the bastards were implicitly conspiring to kill them for no good reason.
That’s the realization that hasn’t hit home, yet.
(all references to “us” changed to “them” – I’m too old to be considered one of “them” either)