Ted Rall for July 02, 2014
Transcript:
It's been 50 years sicne the best/biggest/mostest decade ever (The sixties, as decreed by our noble boomer cultural overlords). Here's a preview of the next ten years in media: A look ahead at the looks back. August 7, 2014: It's been 50 years since the Tonkin Gulf Incident- which didn't actually happen- that sparked the Vietnam War. Boomers look back at the war that shaped their politics, their music, and their movies. August 11, 2015: It's been 50 years since the Watts race riots in Los Angeles. Thanks to boomers, blacks no longer live in slums patrolled by violent cops. (Barack Obama: I'm president. And I'm black. So we're good.) April 14, 2018: Martin Luther King was assassinated 50 years ago. Still sorta sad, boomers kina think about carrying on his Dream. May 2018: 50 years ago, leftist Boomers took over college campuses around the world and almost overthrew the government of France. Then they graduated. June 5, 2018: RFK assassinated 50 years ago. Boomers muse about what might have been, if not for the fact that he didn't have enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. May 4, 2020: It's been 50 years since 4 students were shot at Kent State. Due to Boomers' relentless activism, police treat protesters with dignity and respect.)
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.