We Live In The Emotional And Economic Wreckage Of This Broken Home....

[bigtree]

108. can't help replying, Mr. Magistrate

. . . at the risk of belaboring your astute and valid impressions of that era.

I think Vietnam was the initial link that our generation made with whatever the Cold Warriors were trying to convey, and, we found both superpowers engaged in a futile and contradictory proxy war there which belied any notion that the weaponry which was touted as our defense had an unassailable relationship with keeping the peace.

'Freedom' for our generation did indeed mean a separation from those flawed motivations of the generation preceding ours in defining our nationalism in terms of our antithesis to rival nations. Freedom meant a separation from the authority which dictated our allegiance to all of that on our behalf, and which demanded fealty to that exclusionary doctrine as a condition of our citizenship.

I remember that our focus was on eschewing the notion that our futures were tied to an economic track which promised a sort of indoctrination into a cadre of authoritarians. The dearth of focus on economic issues likely had a great deal to do with a disillusionment with the power structures themselves, who, some felt, could not be trusted to provide opportunity or successes which fell outside of their own realm of influence.

There was a lot of effort to establish separate communities and collective enterprises which aspired to transcend the traditional economic structures and provide for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Much of the collapse of that ideal came from the eventual intrusion of everyday problems and concerns about sustaining one form of escape from the establishment or the other.

Many drop-outs from society were compelled by economic realities to drop back in. Still, there was much gained from that pulling away as elements of that independent and innovative spirit were meshed with other more traditional economic visions. I think we see a lot of that reasoning in our modern labor movements today.