David Brooks, a columnist of considerable repute,
wrote a column in which he compared the student uprising
of the 1960s to that of the Tea Baggers at the present time.
The column amazed me!
I was already of middle age during the 1960s,
and I recall that, with a few exceptions, mostly from academia,
the people who raised hell were young. They hated war.
They were angry that universities were cooperating
with the military to conduct war, and to draft young people
to fight the wars the young thought were insane.
The movement quickly merged with the struggle against racism.
The movement found synonyms for the terms used in the French
Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity; nobody refused to eat
French Fries. Muhammad Ali refused to go to war.
The guns were all on the other side. Lots of guns.
Because conventional Americans defended the war,
and the government that conducted the war, young people
in the 1960s rebelled against lots of things conventional:
sexual mores, racist attitudes, dress codes, and any conventional
authority that tried to defend what had gotten us into that fix.
Today, Tea Party participants look like the parents and
grandparents of what they still call "hippies". People
bring guns to Tea Party gatherings. They don't sing
Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger and Joan Baez songs: they curse
and shout "Fuck you!" to the people they scorn.
Tea Party gatherings are embarrassingly white, and most
of them look as if they are almost as old as I am now.
Nobody would describe the protesters of the sixties
as in a rage. They were angry about war and repression
and injustice, but they were not carrying guns and screaming.
I tried to get into Main Building and my office
when students had closed down the college.
"I'm sorry, Conrad," one of the students said.
"This isn't personal. You can't go in there."
Nobody threatened me. Nobody shouted at me.
The only angry shouting I heard was done by a Chemistry prof.
He wanted to get a bolt cutter and storm the building.
His office wasn't even in the building.
He was born fifty years before his time.
wrote a column in which he compared the student uprising
of the 1960s to that of the Tea Baggers at the present time.
The column amazed me!
I was already of middle age during the 1960s,
and I recall that, with a few exceptions, mostly from academia,
the people who raised hell were young. They hated war.
They were angry that universities were cooperating
with the military to conduct war, and to draft young people
to fight the wars the young thought were insane.
The movement quickly merged with the struggle against racism.
The movement found synonyms for the terms used in the French
Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity; nobody refused to eat
French Fries. Muhammad Ali refused to go to war.
The guns were all on the other side. Lots of guns.
Because conventional Americans defended the war,
and the government that conducted the war, young people
in the 1960s rebelled against lots of things conventional:
sexual mores, racist attitudes, dress codes, and any conventional
authority that tried to defend what had gotten us into that fix.
Today, Tea Party participants look like the parents and
grandparents of what they still call "hippies". People
bring guns to Tea Party gatherings. They don't sing
Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger and Joan Baez songs: they curse
and shout "Fuck you!" to the people they scorn.
Tea Party gatherings are embarrassingly white, and most
of them look as if they are almost as old as I am now.
Nobody would describe the protesters of the sixties
as in a rage. They were angry about war and repression
and injustice, but they were not carrying guns and screaming.
I tried to get into Main Building and my office
when students had closed down the college.
"I'm sorry, Conrad," one of the students said.
"This isn't personal. You can't go in there."
Nobody threatened me. Nobody shouted at me.
The only angry shouting I heard was done by a Chemistry prof.
He wanted to get a bolt cutter and storm the building.
His office wasn't even in the building.
He was born fifty years before his time.
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