Ted Rall for July 02, 2014

Ted, you’re a Boomer. A self-loathing Boomer, but a Boomer nonetheless.

Sorry the old people keep trying to get you to learn from history. We’re better off ignoring the past — it interferes with our visions of the futue.

By the way, congratulations on the way your pals in the Guy Fawkes masks succeeded in shutting down Bank of America by playing drums and twiddling their fingers. Someday their children will ask them why they even bothered. “Trying to make the world better” is SOOOOOO 20th century!

The cartoon is a very acidic commentary from what I think is a rather narrow point of view. .I kept some personal journals during the 1960s. Although I was in the last years of high school I saw what was going on and felt that only a minority of students indulged in marches and demonstrations. But it was a milieu that affected everyone to some extent, to varying depths of seriousness. .Many of us were merely swept up in the styles of clothing, music, and freedom with sex and drugs. Only a minority of the minority had the innate interest to really push for social changes. Isn’t every generation like that? It may be that the rhetoric was so intense and broadcast on media for the record that we look back and disdain the efforts not achieved, as if we all failed in some agreed-upon generational objectives..I resented that many of the students claiming to do serious things were having FUN! They had PARTIES while kids their own age died seeming needlessly – as they endlessly pointed out. Yeah, in a way I was jealous, torn both ways, and I still feel that my youth was stolen from me with serious issues that I could do nothing about but worry. .Take it from one who was there, among the peasants, a lot of people at that time thought Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were publicity hounds. It’s only from a later historical perspective that we see the good things they tried to do. At that time, they seemed to be making trouble for their own purposes..But, really – didn’t many during the deified Greatest Generation have fun, too? Aside from soldiers, there were a lot of people who stayed home, for various reasons, and made money off the war effort in their jobs and businesses. They just couldn’t spend it on luxury items, at least not unless through the black market. .The war brought wealth and prosperity to the U.S. – and power. The wealth-producing mechanisms brought affluence, and then affluence became the shallow goal for us and now the world in general. My disdain for this excessive pursuit of material goods is probably my attitudinal legacy from the ‘60s and ‘70s. This might be something that the latest generations also disdain while they swim in consumer trinkets..I hope before I make the shift into Oblivion I see Generation X’ers and Millennials experience similar ridicule of THEIR offspring. It’s inevitable, it’s funny, I resign to it with a sigh. The gods must get much of their entertainment that way.

You can never know if you have changed the world because you can never know what the world would have been without your efforts. But, I do know that the world we have today is a whole lot better than the one I entered in 1944. Do you think your generation has done as much?

A very nihilistic view of the world. I agree with the sentiment. I also feel the same way about the present generation. We are all screwed and that is the way it will be, forever!

John Kennedy was the original hippie: he preached peace and worked towards disarmament. This is why the military-industrial complex had him killed.

Some other people decided that peace, love, and understanding were not just biblical constructs to pretend to care about for a few hours on Sunday, and took to the streets. Of course, a lot of it had to do with the potential to be drafted to fight a war that couldn’t be won, that had no possible positives to result.

Even then, though, there were plenty of people who thought that peace, love, and understanding were foreign concepts and that those who tried to practice those were stupid, feeble-minded fools. Much like today. But they got less press because they didn’t march or take over school administration buildings, nor did the Supreme Court tell assure them that they had priorities over other parts of their society. Crowd control at that time was still being developed. Actually, at many student/young-people marches, pickup trucks would suddenly arrive, and bags of marijuana tossed into the crowd.

This is how we went from angry mobs, violence, trashing banks and other symbols of establishment to sit-ins. It worked. But it was illegal. So we tried shooting people at Kent State, and that worked too. The cops in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 were a force unbounded by any rules of engagement, and we learned a lot more about crowd control.

Some of the hippies sold out. After the malaise of the seventies, there was plenty of money to be had in the income-shifting eighties, which was the beginning of the end of the middle class. The establishment became the way, the truth and the light.

Peace, love, and understanding? Just as quaint as signs and wonders. Passe. Today we’re all out for ourselves, as many people think it should be.

Those of us who remember the sixties recognize that no one will consider the first decade of this millennium as “the good old days”, nor will there be nostalgia for anything except what could have been.

Tig, do you live in a small cabin, in the forests of Idaho?