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10. AMERICA SHIFTS TO THE HUMANIST LEFT

THE BOOMER COMES OF AGE

CONTENTS

Boomer "Progressivism"

Relating to social issues of the day

The deep split between the Vet and the Boomer generations

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 325-328.
BOOMER "PROGRESSIVISM"

At around this same time, the Boomers were just reaching early adulthood, and eager to become heroes by challenging on all fronts any form of suspicious social authority – something they had been prepared for since their early school years.  Unfortunately, the authority at hand to challenge was not some conspiring Communist intruders into American life. That fear had proved groundless.  Instead, the only authority that otherwise stood before them available to be challenged by young crusading hearts was their middle-class parents' own highly patriotic political cultural legacy.

Boomer Progressivism.  Much had been made publicly about the blemishes afflicting American society – and the need for deep reform.  Clearly to the Boomers, the America that their middle-class American parents lauded as the best of all possible worlds was an idea itself that needed to be rejected as foolish – even dangerous – blind patriotism.  Thus – with considerable encouragement from the intellectuals who commanded the university classrooms the Boomers attended in increasing numbers – virtually in every aspect of middle-class life that was put before the Boomers as traditional cultural legacy they found some element to be challenged, if indeed not even the whole middle class cultural package to be put aside in the name of serious progress.

"Come together."  But this huge emphasis on resisting all forms of social authority did not satisfy the human heart and its natural desire to find its basic identity within some kind of social context.  Communalism thus became one of the forms – if not the major form – this instinct took.  Boomer communes were first modeled by older members of the Silent Generation who returned from overseas service in the Peace Corps – impacted by the communal life typical of the villages they lived and worked in during their two-year time abroad in Third World countries.  Hippie communes thus began to spring up among the Silents – but soon were picked up by the rising Boomer generation as well as an ideal social form.

Hippie communes had very little in common with the American Middle-Class family – but were gatherings where Boomer music, drugs and free sex were readily available. Soon hippie communes became standard as a social prototype chosen by the Boomers in their quest to belong.

The fundamental conformity of Boomer "individualism."  Indeed, for a generation raised to resist all social authority and do its own personal thinking, the Boomers turned out to be amazingly conformist – clothing and hair styles  – even the swaggering walk – as well as music, topics of social interest and even language styles modeled closely on the personal styles of Joan Baez and Bob Dillon – the coolest of the early Boomer social models (soon to be joined by other Boomer social models such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Janice Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, etc.).  This tendency to conformity included even VW minivans decorated with peace and sex symbols – the minivans themselves symbols of the mobility and rootlessness of Boomer life.

RELATING TO SOCIAL ISSUES OF THE DAY

Drugs.  Boomers enjoyed indulging in social drugs, ranging from marijuana, to LSD, to heroin.  It certainly helped them get in the social mood in their communes.  And they enjoyed seeing the shock on the faces of the Vet generation watching this drugged up social development rising among their Boomer children.  Drugs were cool.  After all, this social trend started out at Harvard, the citadel of American intellectualism, with the LSD experiments of Professor Timothy Leary.  And American troops had found marijuana to be very comforting in facing a war that seemed unwinnable – and without any military honors coming their way for their wartime service and sacrifice.  So they brought their marijuana habits home to America with them after completing that service.

Drug usage itself became a key element of the Boomer identity.  Helping to clarify the pattern was the Beatles music group – making the transition from the innocent  "Love, Love Me Do" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (1962) – to the nonsensical "We All Live in a Yellow Submarine" (1966) – to the LSD-inspired "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (1967). Besides drugs, relief from social boredom was offered in what the Boomers had best been prepared for: protest against social injustice – injustice usually in the form of some aspect of Vet society.

Christianity.  The Vet generation's close attachment to Christianity as its fundamental civic religion was not protested.  It simply was not taken up as the Boomer religion – through the simple strategy of Boomers just not bothering to attend church.

Feminism.  Then there was the cause of feminism.  In 1963 Betty Friedan published a book, The Feminine Mystique, one that would not only announce the startup of a new round of militant feminism, but serve as the basic Bible of young college-educated women, instructing them as to how to combat the male domination of the professional world.

Marriage and the family (that is, the fundamental institution of Middle-Class America) took a huge hit with Friedan's call to arms.  In her book she depicted family life not only as the underpinning of male tyranny but also as terribly stifling of a woman's intellectual abilities. Women needed to find escape from the marriage trap – and discover their real purpose in life in the professional world.  Of course they could expect to find sexual discrimination awaiting them there. But this was the point of the book: it was time for women to rise up (like the Blacks) against this world of (male) domination and secure for themselves the right to take as much control of American society as had long been held by men.  And thus the battle of the sexes got underway.

Black civil rights.  Marching in protest against Southern racism certainly stirred the hearts of young Americans.  But it was mostly the older Silents who joined the pastors, professors and journalists who headed to the South to support the social and political rights of Southern Blacks.  Boomers would eventually join the ongoing civil rights movement – sort of – at least from a distance.  Anyway, by the time the Boomers had emerged on the political stage, the Black militants such as the Black Panthers had taken over the Black civil rights movement – and Whites were not invited to become part of their campaign.

Against President Johnson's war in Vietnam.  Boomers did, however, have one great crusade to undertake, one that would put heroic touches to their lives: the need to end the Vietnam War – and the accompanying military draft that was carrying young American males off to a conflict that was deadly – and apparently pointless.

Thus the Boomers were beginning to voice loudly their opposition to "Johnson's war."  Why should America's youth be drafted to serve in a distant war whose morality was questionable?  Boomers were beginning to identify the motivation behind the entire Vietnam venture war as being simply raw imperialism – American imperialism. This was pure evil: the strong dictating their social-cultural organization to the weak – the very thing the Boomers had been carefully programmed to resist – as heroically as possible.

Thus the Boomers began to do what they had long been trained to do:  protest political authority whose actions to them seemed entirely wrong.  In 1967 they gathered in mass in front of the Pentagon to call for an end to the war.

THE DEEP SPLIT BETWEEN THE VET AND THE BOOMER GENERATIONS

The Vet parents were perplexed – even irate.  The Vets were an unshakably patriotic group, standing with the government no matter what ("my country right or wrong").  Anyway – wasn't America trying to bring democracy to Vietnam?  Did the Boomer youth not see the importance of setting up a viable democracy in South Vietnam – one that would act not only as a barrier against Communist expansion coming from the North – but like America itself, serve as a beacon of light, lighting the way to other countries in the region to find democracy for themselves as well?  How in the world could the Boomers be missing the point?

And thus it was that a vicious war of words broke out between the two generations – words mostly of just an emotional rather than truly rational character to them.  Indeed, complex concepts such as democracy, imperialism, Fascism, and Communism became mere slogans rallying intense support or opposition rather than actual argument or reasoned debate that the two generations hurled at each other.

Tragically for America, this Boomer-versus-Vet battle produced a generational division that would never find healing – a lack of healing in part due to the involvement in this Boomer crusade by numerous American intellectuals, individuals who understood the Boomers as valuable allies in their own quest for vengeance for the mistreatment they – or at least their older colleagues – had suffered at the hands of the Vets in the 1950s.  Thus it was that the causes for this generational split were broad and vague in nature – but at times violent nonetheless.



Go on to the next section:  1968:  The Annus Horribilis (the "Horrible Year")

  Miles H. Hodges