Revisiting the Sixties

            A few days ago, I volunteered to help encourage Penn State students to register for the vote.  At the start-up meeting, a young woman next to me asked if I had done this sort of thing before.  I answered that my wife and I had gone door to door to promote George McGovern's candidacy.

            "Oh," she said, and then, "I've never heard of him."

            "It was 1972," I replied.  “He was the anti-war candidate against Nixon.”

            "Oh," she said.  "That was before I was born."

            It reminded me of how little people--of any age--talk about the sixties and seventies these days.  When I was in high school back in the early sixties, what did we watch on television?  To be sure, we had our own generation’s icons; there was Star Trek and Twilight Zone and Gunsmoke.  But we also watched movies on TV and, typically, they were movies from the 1940s.  We knew, from television, a lot about our parents' music, their cultural icons, and, of course, their war.  The sixties, though, are different.  They are, for many young people, an unknown place. 

            It is not just politics, of course.  In those days, politics, Vietnam, civil rights, the Great Society program, the youth movement, sexual liberation, music were all intricately inter-connected.  And, as a result, they are all a mystery to many younger people.

            In her new book, Witness to the Revolution,  Clara Bingham notes that “from the start of the academic year in 1969 until the beginning of classes in September 1970, a youth rebellion shook the nation in ways we may never see again.  It was the crescendo of the sixties, when years of civil disobedience and mass resistance erupted into anarchic violence . . .  And yet, the school year of 1969-70 has gone largely overlooked.” (It was, parenthetically, my senior year in college, when student protests brought an early end to spring term at Penn State.) Bingham notes that, in our cultural memory, there is a “mental jump from ’68 to Watergate” (p. xxvi) and, ultimately, to the Reagan Revolution and the nation’s abrupt turn to the right.  Bingham, who herself was born in 1963, notes that “the turmoil and passion of the 1960s was a hazy memory, and even hazier was the understanding of what could possibly have mattered so much” (p.xxxv).

            That may change next year when PBS broadcasts Ken Burns’ new ten-part documentary series The Vietnam War.  The series, according to Burns' website,   "sheds new light on the military, political, cultural, social, and human dimensions of a tragedy of epic proportions that took the lives of 58,000 Americans and as many as three million Vietnamese, polarized American society as nothing has since the Civil War, fundamentally challenged Americans’ faith in our leaders, our government, and many of our most respected institutions, and called into question the belief in our own exceptionalism."

            It should be an interesting year for conversations across generations.  It will be good to see if we, as a society, are able to have an open discussion not only of the war, but of the cultural, social, and political turmoil that was part of the times—a social conversation that we have largely abandoned since the 1970s.

A Lesson from Jane Addams Revisited

I first posted the following item back in 2013, at the beginning of President Obama's second term in office.  I am posting it today for two reasons.  First, it is Jane Addams birthday.  Second, the lessons we can learn from her are as relevant today--if not more so--than they were in 2013:

Back in 1919, at the end of the first World War, Jane Addams published an article called "Americanization" in the Publications of the American Sociological Society.  She focused on the different ways in which the idea of "Americanization" was perceived before the War and after it.  Before the war, she wrote,

"Americanism was then regarded as a great cultural task, and we eagerly sought to invent new instruments and methods with which to undertake it.  We believed that America could be best understood by the immigrants if we ourselves, Americans, made some sort of a connection with their past history and experiences."   

However, after the war, she notes, "there is not doubt that one finds in the United States the same manifestation of the world-wide tendency toward national dogmatism, the exaltation of blind patriotism above intelligent citizenship . . ."

There is a lesson here for our times, when our national politics on almost every front (including, still today, immigration) has become weighed down by dogmatism, leaving us little space to find the middle path that makes democracy work.  As Addams herself noted,

"When we confound doctrines with people, it shows that we understand neither one nor the other.  Many men, not otherwise stupid, when they consider a doctrine detestable, failing to understand that changes can be made only by enlightening people, feel that they suppress the doctrine itself when they denounce and punish its adherents."

 Too often, these days, our elected representatives feel themselves morally bound to adhere strictly to a dogmatic vision, either the one they campaigned on or the one held by the people who funded their elections.  As a result, we have seen a virtual paralysis of government.  American democracy is performed through argument and discussion, but ultimately achieved through negotiation and compromise--finding a common ground on which we can all agree to work together as a community.

As a first step, we need to ask our elected representatives to see their colleagues not as adherents to a different dogma, but as fellow citizens.  In turn, they need to educate the public--and lobbyists--that their job is to advance the total community, not just their partisans.   One place where that job can be engaged is in the news media.  Too often, as has been said before in this blog, the news media serve to reinforce the differences in dogma rather than to help viewers find the middle ground where good policy can be developed.

We just began a new four-year political cycle.  Let's hope that Congress and the Administration can find a middle path and that the news media, rather than simply inviting the dogmatic extremists to butt heads on every issue, will foster a fair analysis that will help everyone educate themselves about what can truly be done to find common ground solutions.