The “baby boomers”, as those of us born right after WWII, in America, were called, were perhaps the most privileged group of humans in the history of the world. (This might be an over-exaggeration, compared to, for instance, the Royal Court at Versailles under Louis the 14th, but my point is, that compared to the starving, teeming, masses, wherever, in the world, I felt pretty privileged, even as a solid member of the middle class.).
As the historic trajectory of industrialization in the 20th century, and the empirical conquest of the American juggernaut, merged, after WWII, families like my own,(as I said, a solid middle class family, typical, of the 50′s, and 60′s) for the first time were able to draw on the resources of the entire world, to create a life style, hither-fore unknown. The life style even had a name. The name was: the “American Dream”.
≈In the beginning, some of the older of those who lived the dream, marveled, laughingly at their incredible good fortune. Some of those who were older, had lived through and still remembered, the earlier years: the WWI War, the flu epidemic, the Depression, the WWII War,. That generation was in awe, during the post-war boom.
My generation, the ‘Boomers’, saw this “American Dream” as a given. Had not life always been this way? To some like myself, later in life, as awareness grew, it was a rude awakening to find out, that the answer to that question, was a resounding, ‘No’! But that realization, in my own life, still waited to be discovered, while I was still in the middle of experiencing the phenomenon. So privileged and lucky was the middle class in the early sixties, that many, like myself, who were raised in a very narrowly defined neighborhood, in a narrowly defined small town, not obviously connected to a bigger outside world, were oblivious to conditions on the rest of the planet, and to the suffering of those parts of the earth – who, in a sense, paid he price for our luxury, by living themselves in squalor. This realization dawned for me, when I went to Viet Nam, during the war, and worked on the tug boat.
The obvious revealed itself, over time, to many others of my generation, who had also, earlier in their lives, been unaware of some larger, planetary dynamic. As the 60′s merged into the 70′s and 80′s, many, (not uncommonly with the help of the more visionary drugs that earmarked ‘The Sixties’), started to see the world differently, in a broader more global context. A quite different viewpoint was simultaneously emerging from the more entrenched, reactionary sector. It featured different flavors of denial which bolstered a belief, that, we American’s deserved our inflated good fortune as equally, in some fashion, as the poor of the planet deserved their plight. Why else wouldn’t they also prosper like us, the fortunate, if we did not embody a more intelligent, more ambitious, more deserving, and stronger, breed? Did not the the poor deserve their poverty? Was that not, just,”The Way the World Was”, “The Law of the Jungle”, “The Survival of the Fittest”? What could we do to change things even if we wanted? (Which was hard to want, when you were the ones on top).
For a period of time in the 50′s and 60′s our chance prosperity seemed solid as a rock. By the 70′s and 80′s the warning signs, that we lived in an artificial paradise, were obvious. The concepts of sustainability, self sufficiency, and the examination of the sources of our sustenance,(not bell-bottoms and beads) were to me the essence of what I embraced about ‘Hippie’ culture. Of course this same culture was roundly ridiculed in the main stream, but for all the wrong reasons. With the burgeoning environmental movement also came the slow realization that the American Dream, and its other ‘first-world’ counterparts, were fundamental in the wholesale gobbling up of the Earth’s resources, and the resultant destruction of nature. Of course, this is a heavy burden of responsibility to embrace, hence the huge denial factor. And who really wants to argue with a good thing?
What I observed, during the 60′s and 70′s was a social schism, between two groups, over many of the aforementioned issues, and of course the war in Viet Nam. Either you believed, with the “Establishment”, that our military/industrial complex, and our “American Dream”, were somehow involved in a sacred mission to spread our version of freedom and democracy about the planet, and also to defeat the devil’s plan of socialism; or you believed that the “American Dream” had somehow segued into a Hydra-headed nightmare. I thought it an appropriate metaphor of the times, that the reactionary and ultra-conservative were increasingly referred to as the ‘dinosaurs’.
I was, over the next 50 years, to see the dinosaurs become more and more desperate and vicious in their holding on, but also I felt that I saw a real progression of positive evolution in human history. Perhaps a human life is just long enough to see the faint glimmerings of real historic change. For instance, human slavery, once fervently defended by dinosaurs of a previous generation, is now pretty much universally regarded as wrong. This brings to mind a quote that I once read, attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, in which he described the way in which new ideas enter into a culture. He said, to paraphrase, that initially the new idea is laughed at and held up to ridicule, next comes violent opposition, and ultimately, the idea is embraced as if there could be, and never had been, any question of its validity.
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