Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Amod Sandhya Lele's avatar

What was the anxiety and sense of precarity that you saw in the 1968 students? It came as a surprise to me to read that: those of us born in later generations often think of your generation as having very high levels of material privilege in comparison to us, when we hear the stories they tell us about how easily they fell into jobs (and when they somehow seem to actually believe the phrase "do what you love and the money will follow"). But you were there and I wasn't. Was it mainly about the fear of being drafted to Vietnam, or was there something else as well?

Expand full comment
John Hardman's avatar

Yes Tom, I think you are correct in pinpointing a desire for "identity" as the source of the anxiety driving the discontent. I would link this loss of identity to the surge of electronic media replacing much of the one-to-one interpersonal connections before the advent of the internet.

I lived through the turmoil of the 60's and 70's dodging the draft by enlisting in the Air Force spending four years in Germany rather than Vietnam like some of my high school classmates. It was that war that broke the trust of American citizens with their government. The blatant use of lies and misinformation to "sell" the war to the public and then topping off with assassinations, race riots, and criminal behavior by Nixon shattered the illusion that the U.S. government was "for the people" and not "for the corporations."

After three and a half years in Europe, I returned to the U.S. to find a profoundly changed society with a strong desire to shift direction toward a Counterculture free of war, greed, and deceit of those volatile years. We then were hungry for a new identity and the baby boom bulge had the momentum and sheer numbers to be formidable. I remember a lot of confusion, but it was offset by a euphoria of excitement and hope so absent in the protests today.

We were also fighting a domestic problem against our own government with an achievable goal of ending a senseless foreign war. Ever sense, we vow to not get involved in another Vietnam yet somehow we allowed ourselves to be dragged into a series of endless Middle Eastern and Asian wars since then with predictable results.

I returned to college in the mid 70's and got a degree in journalism. There was no internet at the time and I was trained to be a newspaper journalist indoctrinated in the importance of the job of being the "fourth estate" - the watchdog of protecting democracy. It was more important to check facts than to make unrelenting deadlines that the digital "fifth estate" ravenous monster requiring 24/7 feedings.

The internet and social media has dehumanized society to being "avatars" rather than flesh and blood humans. "Quantum media" means that we are drowning in ungrounded, unverified, irrelevant information while thirsting for individual meaning and relevance. Endless wars for nebulous reasons in far corners of the world sap energy away from connection to local social connections and human interactions. "Compassion fatigue" is a real thing and we cope by either obsessing on some safely distant crisis or by simply going numb and angry.

We burned out before we could establish our new counterculture. I don't sense the enthusiasm or focus we had back in the 70's and my hindsight predicts the current student protests will quickly fade into despair and impotence. In my time, I witnessed a hard shift to the right with Regan and the GOP conservatives to follow. I fear the hope of the Obama years will drown in the rage that is feeding the Neo-conservatives and far right Neo-fascists.

Since WWII, the world has looked to the U.S. to provide leadership in modeling democratic humanism. We are failing now just as the world needs the focus we once provided. Let's hope we can prove Winston Churchill right: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."

Expand full comment
32 more comments...

No posts