Boomers to the Barricades
We do love anniversaries here in the USA. This year it was the 40th anniversary of 1968, one of those years like 1776, 1860, 1929, 1941 and 2001 where we stood at some kind of societal crossroads.
Of course the problem with anniversary history is that the only time we’re supposed to think about our history is when the Corporate Media waves its digital wand and provides us with a safely sanitized version that doesn’t threaten the present Established Order.
Fortunately, I’m not a part of the Corporate Media so I can think about history any damned way I please. So can you. Like the t-shirt says,”Think, while it’s still legal.” So I’m going to refer to the events of 1968 in a way that I sincerely hope will contribute to the overthrow of the present Established Order.
Full disclosure: I was 21 years old when 1968 began on January 1. If you are really curious about what I was up to then you can read about it here. At the time I thought 1968 was going to be the birth of a revolution. What kind of revolution? Who the hell knew? That’s what’s so interesting about revolutions. You never know when they will break out, how they will proceed or what you will end up with. I just knew that the violence and oppression flowing from our nation had to be stopped no matter what. If it took a revolution, well so be it.
I was wrong. I was not at the beginning of a revolution. I was at the end of one…that long labor-civil rights struggle that began in the Great Depression and put young people like me into college during the 1960′s. From the New Deal to the Great Society wasn’t such a long time really. Radical groups of the 1960′s like SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) started out with demands that any good Popular Front CIO striker dodging bullets and tear gas bombs would have recognized.
We were just trying to finish the job that a previous generation of radicals had started, but had been forced to leave unfinished because of the Red Scare, the Cold War and the resurgence of US imperialism. We were inspired by the civil rights movement, (many of whose older militants had been New Deal-era activists) and by the revival of the women’s rights movement( many of whose early militants had also been New Deal-era activists). We set out to achieve the kind of social democracy that had been denied to our parents generation because of the political repression of the 1940′s and 1950′s. We actually weren’t asking for much more than European countries like Sweden regarded as quite commonplace. Read the SDS Port Huron Statement for the details.
