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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsYou Tell Us: When Did The Spirit Of The '60s End?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/you-tell-us-when-did-the-60s-end_n_1510682.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=740884,b=facebookYou Tell Us: When Did The Spirit Of The '60s End?
Last week James Franco wrote an anecdotal piece on his experience watching "Gimme Shelter," a film by the Maysles Brothers that involved coverage of the violent incidents that occured at the Altamont concert in 1969. The film, according to Franco, ended up sounding like "the death knell for the flower power of the 1960s." An interesting debate broke out in the comments section of the piece, where contributors gave their own account of the late '60s, and what really marked the end of 'flower power' for them.
Below is a roundup of the most interesting of the differing opinions and accounts. We want to reopen the floor to those who have words to contribute to the conversation.
Tell us in the comments or record a video retelling your experience in the late sixties. What marked the end of the spirit of the '60s for you?
read full comment thread:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/j_w_collins/_1507229_153877924.html
Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)learned their government would kill or wound them if they expressed an opinion.
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)I'm UK and even we were stunned by that incident over here.
aquart
(69,014 posts)Within HOURS without any social networking sites, without even desktops or laptops, every campus in the country was shut down.
That was the day I sat in a classroom of a commuter college and discussed how you make a molotov cocktail JUST IN CASE WE NEEDED TO MAKE THEM.
That was the day very quiet decisions were made to fight back.
A DC protest was scheduled for that weekend. It was huge. And sooooooooooo peaceful.
They scared us? Yes. Then we scared the shit out of them.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)colleges and unis went on strike. No disputing that.
And bravo for your resistance. I salute the contributions and commitment of your generation.
I was responding to the question as posted by the OP: "When did the spirit of the 60s end?" Up until May 4, 1970, youth (the signature demographic of the 60s in the West) knew they would be taunted and even beaten for expressing their dissent (the signature 'spirit' of the 60s after rock and roll). But 'killed' by aimed gunfire from government forces? Anyone protesting after that had to know he or she was taking his or her life into his or her hands by so doing. I would say that was the real end of innocence, not the executions of JFK, Malcom X, MLK or RFK. I'm not sure that death of innocence is such a bad thing, altho my heart breaks for all the innocent victims.
Side note: Despite George H.W. Bush's bragadoccio that we had 'kicked the Vietnam War syndrome' following Operation Desert Storm, Daniel Ellsberg has argued that we will not have truly ended the Vietnam War until a monument is erected in DC to the courage and heroism of the draft and war resisters. I'm not holding my breath.
aquart
(69,014 posts)That's how I went to Washington, by train, not bus. Queens College had a problem with our buses so I went out to Brooklyn in the middle of the night to travel with my sister's school. We sat up packing our disaster backpacks with food and first aid stuff JUST IN CASE.
At the gathering site, Pratt students were handed thick copies of old issues of Vogue Magazine and taught how to wind them on our forearms to protect ourselves against nightstick attacks.
But as we got closer to DC, the protest marshalls were much more interested in handing out info on how to identify the difference between heat prostration and heat stroke.
It was a very hot, very peaceful day. I remember running into a friend of my mom's, a veteran of the Sea Wolf in World War II. He was there with his son.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)since quite a few people were killed in Detroit in '67 by aimed gunfire from government forces?
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)their own government. So many illusions perished in the 60s. So much death and destruction. (Let's not forget the 1,000,000+ southeast Asians killed in the various civil wars in Asia.)
Interesting side note: when various Occupy encampments were being smashed by the pigs and occupiers brutalized and mistreated, some of my African American acquaintances here, while sympathetic, were saying that Occupiers were learning what AAs had long known about whose interests the police actually serve. Kind of echoes your point, I think.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)assassinated. By then most of our leaders had been in one way or another destroyed. I think Bill Clinton and to a greater extent President Obama awakened that hope but it is a very fragile thing now as we are more aware of what we are up against and the weakness of government to be our answer.
I long for that hope but at 70 I may not live long enough to see it.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)never thought I would live long enough to see it either. But then I saw OLA and, for a brief, oh-too-brief, 8 weeks, saw an alternate future of loving, caring, respect and radical egalitarianism. It was quite an eye-opener.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)I am upset about the violence that has begun to happen. No matter who is doing it and what their motives are they are weakening the movement. The only people that violence benefits are the police (by justifying their actions to many) and the corporations who are often the targets (by allowing them to cry victim).
SoCalDem
(103,856 posts)coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)my original response left out the victims at Jackson State U. Easy to forget those who died at Jackson State, because Kent State has become so iconic.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)... in society that came from that movement, and to the activities of those of us who still "carry on".
edit to add, The "spirit" emanates from within, and I know mine is still alive!
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain
aquart
(69,014 posts)And then we got so smug and self-satisfied we let them sneak in and start to take it all away.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)He took the commune ideal to the dark side.
Canuckistanian
(42,290 posts)All of a sudden, communes and other free-living societies weren't cool and were regarded with suspicion by some.
After Manson, you didn't hear of many communes any more.
NOLALady
(4,003 posts)XanaDUer
(12,939 posts)Louisiana1976
(3,962 posts)HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)turn around again. There were signs of life, you'd still hear some of the same rhetoric, POV --
But after Reagan it was like pod people took over the country. Everything changed.
NOLALady
(4,003 posts)I still had hope. Maybe I was just young and naive, but I really believed we could turn this train wreck around.
I remember that election the way I remember the assassination of JFK. When it seemed that he was winning by a landslide, I felt that my country was dying.
loyalsister
(13,390 posts)When former hippies renounced their values of peace and love & replaced pot and communes with cocaine and real estate?
craigmatic
(4,510 posts)For all the sexual revolutions and the drug experimentation as well as the racial issues going on, Reagan came in and killed all of it with AIDS, crack, and cut backs.
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)zbdent
(35,392 posts)frazzled
(18,402 posts)were the events of 1968: the assassinations of King and Kennedy, even the shooting of Andy Warhol, the race riots that followed King's death ... and late in that year, the election of Richard M. Nixon. It was really hard to feel that peace, love, and understanding could prevail after that. Flower power felt like a weak weapon to wield against assassins and racial divisions. And of course, all things related to cultural styles must change.
Certainly, Woodstock would take place the next year, billed as a "Festival of Peace and Music"; and indeed it was the apotheosis of the "spirit of the 60s." We were at the very acme of the flower-power cultural moment. But apotheosis means that it's all downhill from there. By 1974, I remember that my husband cut his long hair. Maybe that marked the end of the 60s!
erinlough
(2,176 posts)Especially the air traffic controller strike.
GeorgeGist
(25,294 posts)Especially the greed.
G_j
(40,366 posts)the Rambo of drugs, aggressive and selfish...and no accident..
G_j
(40,366 posts)Last edited Sat May 19, 2012, 08:08 PM - Edit history (1)
that RW has been fighting against it's messages and influence every single day from the 60s to the present.
stlsaxman
(9,236 posts)proves this point!
To counter that my friend joeyes made this little video:
leveymg
(36,418 posts)stlsaxman
(9,236 posts)After the major success that was Woodstock scared a lot of white upper middle-class folk, the corporations that were at the root of the MIC formulated, produced and promoted a version of "youth culture" that was as safe as mothers milk.
"Up With People!" in turn spawned many other "hip" programs like "The Brady Bunch", "The Partridge Family", "The Banana Bunch" and other dreck which replaced any thoughts of cultural growth or scary "revolution" with products such as timid, bland and "acceptable" yellow and purple sunflower decals or Orange Julius.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)and used the money they made from UWP to party for years.
No more commercial or counter-revolutionary than Hair! on Broadway, really.
KansDem
(28,498 posts)It was a Tuesday...
stlsaxman
(9,236 posts)this is when democracy died-
KansDem
(28,498 posts)...and it killed democracy in the United States.
kentuck
(110,950 posts)When Woodstock concert was over..
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)The civil rights freedom rider '60s?
The Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis '60s?
The Phil Spector wall of sound '60s?
The NY, LA, Detroit race riot '60s?
The surfer music, Beach Boys '60s?
The JFK, RFK, MLK assasination '60s?
The Timothy Leary tune in, turn on, drop out, flower power '60s?
The British Invasion '60s?
The Vietnam War '60s?
The anti-war, demonstrating, draft dodging, move to Canada '60s?
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)the 60s had a single "spirit", as the OP's question implied?
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)Your actual experience of the '60s depended heavily on your age, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and the region of the country where you lived.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)seek to explain historical change by way of 'generations' and that each 15-20 years produces a new generation with its own imperatives and agendas, a sort of genetic determinism if you will.
Those like myself who missed out on the 60's by a cat's whisker (born in 1959) experience the 60s as an 'absence'. If I tell you I cast my first vote proudly for Jimmy Carter in 1980, that should tell you all you need to know Or maybe that's . Beats me.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)Upper and middle class white kids from the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West who were born between '46 and '55. The same class that wore saddle shoes and poodle skirts and white bucks and kahkis a decade earlier.
Kids from the bible belt, the deep south, and mountain west or minorities, low class greasers and rural kids experienced the '60s differently.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)'absence' in my life, though.
Another interesting side-note: it's estimated that as many as 2 million Americans experimented with some form of communalism during the 60s and 70s. Granted that's only 1% of the population at large but, even so, the raw numbers are simply staggering.
Taverner
(55,476 posts)Paladin
(28,202 posts)Greybnk48
(10,148 posts)IMHO, Kent State, Cambodia/Laos, Martin, Bobby, etc., only strengthened our spirit. WE stopped the war! THEY would love for our spirit to be currently out of commission. Fuck that! Power to the People!
WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)Zorra
(27,670 posts)You can find us at various Occupy actions.
Swede
(33,143 posts)"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Erathe kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run
but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the timeand which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nightsor very early morningswhen I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket
booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.
You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
And that, I think, was the handlethat sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didnt need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fightingon our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water markthat place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Response to Swede (Reply #39)
ozone_man This message was self-deleted by its author.
pa28
(6,145 posts)My parents lived in San Francisco in the late 60's and went to Altamont with their friends. When I was a kid I was interested in San Francisco in the 60's and alway used to ask my mom about it.
It's kind of funny to see this as she always pointed to Altamont as some kind of change. She would tell the story about how dark and awful the whole thing was but it always seems to build up to this moment where a stray dog walked across the stage.
Next time I talk to her I'll tell her about this thread but I think she'd say the moment the 60's died had something to do with that dog.
FSogol
(45,357 posts)FLAME ON!
johnnie
(23,616 posts)Sancho
(9,065 posts)and a thousand years from now the 60's will go down as one of the decades of all time...
Response to G_j (Original post)
Warren DeMontague This message was self-deleted by its author.
braddy
(3,585 posts)Raine
(30,540 posts)which stands still for no one. It's been like over 40 years, I wouldn't want to be the same person I was 40 years ago. That's seems more like the way reTHUGs are, always stuck in the past.
Blue_In_AK
(46,436 posts)albeit way in the back away from all the excitement.
I think it was a combination of things that ended the original "flower power" era -- Altamont, the Manson murders, Kent State, just a whole series of events. After Kent State, I dropped out and moved to the country.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)getting shot..taken out. I think that with the FBI/CIA Infiltrators...that it became too hard for the "youthful enthusiasm" to continue much longer once the first changes had been made.
The "Movement" (Women's and Environmental) did continue well through the 70's when the Media finally allowed more Women into reporting and Environmentalism (Grow your own, HomeMade, HandMade, Natural Fibers and give your kids Wood Toys from "Creative Playthings" were all the Rage amongst those 60's folks now having children and wanting them to have "natural everything." The first Natural Baby Food, Natural toys, clothes, etc. took hold at that time and many parents who weren't "hippies" were following that movement for "Natural."
It was when Reagan became President was when I noticed the change. He was the first financial De-regulator since FDR and he loosened much...which freed up money for Wall Street...and times got better for some...and it caused a shift that took awhile to get going. But, it was Reagan that opened the "GOOD TIMES of GREED and Self Satisfaction" and then Poppy Bush opened the door for the Chinese Imports and everything went downhill from then on.
But...really it was the failure of the Carter Administrations goals that set us down the Reagan Path and it was the NeoCons who did Carter in.
(This is a very quick...off top...reply from someone who lived through that time.. It's not an academic essay that has links and quotes and verification from other sources.
I wish I had time to go into more detail... But, it was the Open of the Floodgates of Chinese Goods to America that was our downfall after the late 60's-70's move for Independence, Creative Crafts, Grow your own food and Make Your Own Stuff or do without...that the Chinese Imports crushed...and we've not recovered our independence since then.
Whatever..I'm not going to waste time giving facts or statistics because few folks read what anyone says here when they do that. It's just my synopsis.
G_j
(40,366 posts)Thanks for yours, a good read.
bhikkhu
(10,708 posts)where you might say the "spirit of the sixties" was anyone, anywhere, being the equal and brother or sister of any other, where you could walk down the street with that open familial feel among strangers, as if the world welcomed you...or I could go on and on. I know I never felt alone then, and felt like things were going to be better every year as they went along (like Thompson's "we were winning" riff) This video as well always brings it back -
&feature=related - the look on his face as he sings.In any case, there was enough anxiety and doubt at one point to turn the whole tide, and with the "landslide" election of Reagan, a very real nationwide turning back into the security of judgmental hierarchies based on wealth, status, birth, etc, and away from the freedom of equality. Elect a Big Father and we can all be safe and ignorant again, turned off and shut down, or something like that.
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)And then everyone went out and got a job and a mortgage and a new car.
It wasn't supposed to happen like that, but it did. And we bought MTV. Fine wine. Fast cars and fast women. Nuclear power became acceptable. Drugs expensive. Retirement became more important than taking care of now. Capitalism won.
Stinky The Clown
(67,676 posts)A small plane crashed. It was carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and JP Richardson (The Big Bopper), and their pilot.
This predates the 60s but colored the era, to some degree. Older Boomers, for sure.
nolabels
(13,133 posts)The music never died it just got more convoluted. Now if i could just find some speed-metal that sounds good
btw, if you were a recording artist that went to grand jukebox in the sky would you want people to stop listening
bluestate10
(10,942 posts)They keep the modern republican party alive. Those conservative voters were sixties late teens and young adults. I wasn't a child of the sixties, but when I study that period, what I see is groupism that largely took place without a sustained core principle driving it.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)I'm 63 and still fight the fight. And everyone I know who is my age are the most informed and active political junkies and believers in universal rights and still have a voice and use it. The Teabaggers you seem to want to lump us into are a decided minority who were always the way they are today. They've just come out of the closet with the permission and on the dime of the 1%.
Stinky The Clown
(67,676 posts)so true
fishwax
(29,146 posts)Well, that's Hunter S. Thompson's take, rather than my own, but it's a good passage:
ozone_man
(4,825 posts)Altamont December 6, 1969
Kent State May 4, l970
Jimi Hendrix September 18, 1970
Janice Joplin October 4, 1970
Jim Morrison July 3, 1971
Woodstock was fantastic, but by the end of 1969, it was all over. The 60's were only a decade after all. But, a tumultuous one.
Selatius
(20,441 posts)I'm willing to bet some sick fucks on Wall Street were laughing their heads off as these people were being gunned down, assured in their office towers and private country clubs and gated mansions that their power and wealth would never be threatened again by people who believed in social justice and equality and giving everyone a fair chance.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)But we're about to rectify that within the next decade. It won't happen overnight, but then, it didn't happen overnight in the 60s either.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)a reputation as a nasty little son of a bitch, Joseph McCarthy's staffperson and JFK's enforcer. But something happened to RFK after November 22, 1963 and it is indisputable that he had evolved into something truly awesome by the time of his New York Senatorial campaign. (There's this wonderful anecdote somewhere about how he and his aides were touring Bedford Stuyvesant and his aides did not want him to go see a really bad building there. RFK over-rode his aides and went over there to the building in person. When I read about that little gem, I started weeping and immediately forgave RFK all his previous sins and hubris.)
RFK may have personally kept Indianapolis from going up in flames after MLK was assassinated, such was the moral authority he came to wield among the nation's dispossessed.
lunatica
(53,410 posts)They were the right men at the right time. Unfortunately they made enemies because of it.
slackmaster
(60,567 posts)The concert at Altamont Motor Speedway in California.
On the Road
(20,783 posts)and the incoming freshmen were more conservative than the departing seniors. The year the campuses started to turn is when I personally date the end of the 60s spirit.
H2O Man
(73,323 posts)were four events that brought the curtain down. Most have already been mentioned. Here goes:
(1) The Manson Family murders;
(2) Kent State;
(3) Frazier vs Ali ("Fight of the Century" ;
(4) The 1972 presidential election.
former9thward
(31,802 posts)The biggest and most powerful student organization the U.S. has ever seen split into sectarian frenzy. Within months it was effectively gone from the scene.
marlakay
(11,370 posts)And once Reagan came in the 80's everything changed with his war on drugs.