A few nights ago, my mother, my friend Shelley Feldman, and I went to a concert entitled “Women of Woodstock”. I imagined beforehand that the songs would be a nostalgia trip, prompting in me, perhaps the urge to sing along. I did not imagine that the concert would fill me with the passion and tenderness that marked the Woodstock era.* The four singers and three instrumentalists beautifully recaptured the emotions of the time; they sang songs that varied from the loud insistence of a Janis Joplin style, demanding political action, to the soft love songs that epitomized our Utopian belief in human goodness, in the capacity of human beings to love each other and live in harmony.
‘Rise, Ye Oldsters!’ (below)was written some years back, perhaps a decade ago when I feared GW Bush’s re-election, a fear that proved justified. It recognizes the need to stand up and be heard. But it fails to capture the full range of what ‘the 60s generation’ sought. Besides our political and anti-war activism, we had Utopian longings. We imagined, and experimented to bring about, a world in which justice prevailed, in which people were treated equally and well, in which human diversity was acceptable, even sought.
I just read a paper by Marshall W. Murphree in which he roughly quotes G.K. Chesterton: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” This brought to mind my feeling about many purportedly collaborative approaches to international development: rather than fail at implementing a difficult approach, the name was kept but the genuine effort was abandoned. It seems that the 1960s goals have likewise been abandoned, in large part surely due to the difficulty of implementing them. We often acknowledge that anything worth doing requires effort, in this case, sustained effort. We globally have given up, we have been faint of heart. It’s truly time for the youth (and oldsters like me) to raise our voices, and loudly demand a better world. It will not happen without such demands.
An Australian television show brought it all back. In 1972, a photograph that captured the horror of the Vietnam war was widely circulated. It was a little girl, running naked down a road, with arms outstretched, screaming in pain. She had been hit by American napalm a few moments earlier. The TV program featured the girl, now a woman, and documented her life since.
For me, the images brought back vividly the passion and anger of my generation as we saw our government making mistakes that meant death and destruction in another part of the world. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s young people ranted and raved, wrote letters and articles, demonstrated, had sit-ins, and discussed these abuses publicly and privately. And finally, in 1975, the US withdrew from Vietnam.
From my point of view—nearly 40 years later—the same mistakes are being made again, or at least mistakes with similar effects on the ground. People are suffering and dying, their homes and infrastructure are being destroyed because of American bombs, weaponry, funding and policies.
Yet, the youth are silent. Almost everyone is silent. And those who do speak out, complain more about the expense than the death and destruction.
Events suggest that we are needed again. It is time for the ‘60s generation’—now in our 60s—to make our voices heard again. Most of us are still capable of ranting and raving, of writing letters and articles, of demonstrating and holding sit-ins. We can still discuss these issues publicly and privately—and loudly!
An election is upon us, an election that can make a difference if we elect the right people. It is time for us to do a repeat performance. Let’s do it!
Again, in 2015, an election is upon us. This time, if it’s possible, the views expressed by the Republican candidates are even more anti-humanity than those of George W. Bush and his advisors. The hopes and imaginings of the 1960s appear to be fading even further into the background, as those of us now in our 70s move out of the ‘command generation’ even more concretely. There are those, like Bernie Sanders, who speak up for the kind of world we imagined so long ago. I hope that his growing popularity represents an openness in the American citizenry to such humanistic values, that there might grow a movement of people who want and demand (and create) a world of peace and fairness and natural beauty. If we do not, we Americans will not suffer alone; the whole world will suffer with us. We humans are united on one small globe on which the US has inordinate power and influence, for good or ill. Only we can make certain it is for good.
*The Woodstock concert itself took place on 17 August 1969.