Where Have We All Gone?

i agree with the other poster that the sixties was a time we were asking people to step out of their pigeonholes and join together in common cause as human beings. the crux of the civil rights movement was that all people are to be valued regardelss of race. the peace movement said that the lives of all people mattered. i felt the antiwar movement was the paradigm of what would be a new world order - people joining together in caring, friendship and support to work for the common good. and i did expect it to be a second american revolution. the voice of the people would replace formal democracy with real democracy and give life to the bill of rights by exercising them.

even the sexual revolution seemed more of a celebration of our human capacities and ability to connect with one another than the hedonistic orgy that it is commonly portrayed as these days.

and as long as the focus was on ending the war, this all seemed possible. the movement kept getting stronger, and people began to feel strong because of the impact their work was having on the public perception of the war, and the sense that they were actively engaged in making the world better. people in the antiwar movement felt almost like an extended family. there was a sense that there were a lot of good people out there who were ready to help you if you needed it. there was also a sense of what nowadays we would call empowerment: that people could shape their own lives.

against this came the violent backlash from the establishment (haven't used that term in ages :-) ). i remember thinking with the kent state killings "my god, they really will kill us if they have to". the increased viciousness of the repression was truly frightening. there was the sense that all existing powers of the state would be used to quash the movement. it felt like a real betrayal. here we had been told all our lives about what democracy meant and what america stood for, and when we actually bought into it and tried to make it a reality, we were condemned and killed. i think the combination of fear and disillusionment was what led a lot of people to drop out.

also, once the primary focus on ending the war was over, many divisions began to surface. as the women's movement blossomed, it became plain that the guy who stood next to you on the barricades would be just as willing to view you as inferior as the guys on the other side. radical chic - what we now call political correctness - became the rage. i remember going to coalition meetings where men from the gay men's caucus would not talk to me because i was female. i remember going to meetings of the women's center where we argued over whether women who dated men were betraying the sisterhood. i remember being criticized for taking a physics class because the professor had gotten funding from the defense department. actually, my favorite memory is when the october league, a now long defunct marxist-leninist movement, outlawed oral sex among its members because it was anti working class.

and the mass movements became victims of internal power struggles. i was at the meeting of sds where it was formally dissolved. pl, a marxist-leninist group, had decided to infiltrate sds to use the mass support for their own agenda. as it became clear that the sds membership had less and less say in actions, people left, until the only folks left in sds were the pl infiltrators. when they finally got tired of talking to themselves, they disbanded.

the group that i was in, the new american movement (also long defunct), spent all its time squabbling about which chapter should be designated the national headquarters. the end result was that those chapters doing serious organizing left to pursue their own course.

it was very discouraging. i must say, however, that the original peace group which got me involved in high school, wilpf, kept a pretty clear head through the whole thing. i remained a member of that group and used them as my primary organizing forum until 5 years ago, when i joined the international humanist movement. i still believe in the wilpf ideals, though i think they have not been successful at incorporating younger generations in the struggle.

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