Tom DeVries

(A flier for a college course about my younger days. Kind of tripped me out.)

You’re gonna study the 60s?

First, ‘oh, good.’ The 60s were everything you could hope for in this world. Probably more. They were just wonderful. Enjoy them vicariously and recreate as much of them as you can, or as seems wise.

Second, ‘oh, dear.’ The 60s may break your heart. They certainly did mine.

For this discussion Boomers are the American kids who were not messed around by World War 2. So, more or less they are those of us born in the 1940s or 50s. We’re now in our 70s and older. Especially if you were white male, those years were golden. The economy was great. Ike was a nice safe person, John Kennedy was a movie star. College was cheap, travel was safe, there was money. And it got better — birth control pills, Elvis, weed. A future so bright, as they say, ya had ta wear shades.

In short, what was not to like? There was – and this is me saying this – there was literally nothing to limit the optimism, nothing really to worry about. In the early sixties I can tell you, I thought my friends and I were going to save the world. Wasn’t even gonna be all that hard.

[Here somebody probably asks, ‘so what went wrong?’]

On November 22, 1963 somebody, probably Lee Oswald, murdered President Kennedy. If you are younger now than we Boomers you probably wonder why that was a surprise. But honestly, until November 22, 1963, that shit didn’t happen here. Now we’re kinda used to it. Since then we have seen two attempts to murder President Ford in a single week, and a darn-near-successful attempt to kill President Reagan. You know now – which we did not – that Bobby Kennedy would be murdered in Los Angeles, and Malcom X, and Martin King. And really dozens of others – Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, three in Philadelphia Mississippi, many, many more. So maybe Boomers didn’t experience a World War, but political murder became a reality for us.

And then we got our war. Stupid, murderous, evil, racist, pointless, deadly, wrong, hopeless, endless, useless, goddamn Vietnam. And it ruined everything.

Without belaboring the point – I am arguing an alternative history so I really can’t be challenged – I like to believe that what I know personally about what was going in our country before Vietnam would have played out to a more just, healthier, happier, safer, more beautiful society. Studying the 60s, you presumably will hear a great deal about dope, sex, and rock n roll. True things. But much of the energy, resources and optimism of the Boomership in the early 60s was applied to making a better world for ourselves and, well, for you too. There was a lot of attention to what we now call Social Justice.

On the ground in the early 60s that meant beginning to confront racism, particularly anti-Black bigotry and repression, America’s Original Sin. There was a burgeoning Women’s Movement, Second Wave Feminism – a real thing, look it up. College enrollment boomed with kids who had time to go to college and the luxury to afford it. Plus Congress freaked out over the Russian space program and pumped billions into higher education. SDS for example, the later-notorious Students for a Democratic Society, was largely focused on economic justice and poverty. The coolest thing a Berkeley or Stanford grad could join was the Peace Corps, not JP Morgan. There was a robust international movement for peace, and against nukes. Rachel Carlson’s ‘Silent Spring’ was published in 1962 kicking off the first wave of the modern environmental movement. The first wide-spread open Gay-Lesbian organizing I saw was in the mid-60s. The Cold War hegemony – reflexive anti-communism – was under fierce attack by a New Left that saw, for example, the Cuban Communist revolution as quite reasonable, admirable even. Spiritual explorations went well beyond the traditional Judeo-Christian. I could go on.

Then came the war. Nurtured and financed and lied-about by four Presidents, Republican and Democrat – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. From secret advisors in 1955 until full-blown catastrophe by, say, 1966 when the number of American soldiers in Vietnam passed a hundred thousand. I recall 1966 as the year of the body bags. 6000 Americans left Vietnam dead in 1966, more than 16,000 in 1968.

For all practical purposes Vietnam dominated our lives. Almost everything else we were doing faded and stopped. Campuses split; frat boys supported the war, hippies opposed, none of them went. Middle class white boys stayed in college deferred, Black and poor served and died. You can look it up. Families fractured, old folks gung ho, young enraged. People I know left the country. People I know went underground. People I know went to prison. People I know served. From 1966 or so, for ten years, Vietnam was what was going on in America.

The Vietnam war was fought not just in South Asia. That ten years is when organized political violence in America became a regular thing. Seemingly sane people (cough-cough) discussed the efficacy of guns and bombs. Politically targeted bombing in the United States! became almost normal. Ten years.

I could go on.

America bailed in 1975. By then the Boomers, who had planned to remake the world, were old and exhausted. The 19 year old hippie had become a 30-something with two kids, a mortgage and a job. The work that was supposed to end economic injustice or racism or workplace discrimination against women or Gays was diverted to war. And most awful of all, it didn’t even work. By 1968 wide-spread resistance to the war was everywhere. President Johnson was forced out of office by it, and Nixon elected with a promise (and a lie) that he would end it. The war just went on. It killed 55 thousand Americans, it killed maybe two million Vietnamese (and secretly, sinfully, unnumbered Laotians and Cambodians too), and it left our country broken. Certainly in the minds of millions of us, it destroyed the credibility and legitimacy of our government.

Personally, I think we have not recovered and I’m not sure our country ever will. The course, angry, divided America of now was born there. All the dope, all the sex, and all the rock n roll aren’t enough to put it together again. There was a generation that was broadly committed to a more perfect union and a kinder, more peaceful world. Its waste was a crime and a tragedy. And a heartbreak.