The 60's activists made up what percentage of their cohort?

Yes, for the purposes of nostalgia and self gratification they might be taken to represent the entire generation, but how many of them actually were their?

Most 80's kids didn't end up working on wall street and most 90's kids didn't mope around Seattle.

Also - activism comes easier when the alternative is being sent to Vietnam to die.

Bring the draft back.

Then watch them squeal.

The 60s generation was in the right place in the right time, and had more than its share of triumph — or a feeling of triumph, in any case — but by any other standard this generation seems to be doing fine to me.

The generation that was so active in the 60s was by and large made up of baby boomers. I cannot even fathom what befell this group of individuals over the past 30-40 years to cause what I perceive as a drastic ideology shift, but I suspect if asked about their transformation from 'hippie' to 'yuppy', I suspect many would loosely quote a character from the movie SLC Punk - "I didn't sell out - I bought in."

Don't forget the young black activists of the 1950s -- before white kids had thought about sticking a flower in a guardsman's gun, black kids were forcing schools and businesses to integrate. The young white activists of the '60s consciously modeled themselves on this earlier example of civil rights activism.

If they are not spitting mad, well, then they're just not paying attention

No, Tommy-boy, the kids are spitting mad. It's just that they realize how stacked the deck is when the "newspaper of record" continues to publish your drivel. The kids also tend to get even more jaded when people who claimed to have been streetfighers in the '60s become patsies in the '00s.

Kevin, I have to agree with you. Friedman really is full of it. Looking at this generation, many of them are in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting the Islamofascists. At home, many conservative bloggers are fighting liberals who are trying to end the liberation of Iraq by American troops. Conservative bloggers are also trying to get all (non-liberal) Americans involved in Islamofascism Awareness Week and trying to get all (non-liberal) Americans aware of the significance of this point in history.
These are all actions worthy of praise. They are certainly better actions than in the 60's when hippies attacked our troops and had public sex and drugs.

If they aren't mad, they are like little Tommy Friedman, giving the Bush junta another FU.

Just proves that Douglas Adams was wrong, when he said in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the most powerful force in the universe is the Somebody Else's Problem Field.

Actually, it's Boomer narcissism.

You do have to factor in the draft of the 60s. Facing the prospect of being drafted and sent to the war zone focuses the mind real quick.

The obvious fuel for the sixties ferment were 1) the Civil Rights Movement and 2) the Vietnam War. If the Bush Administration were so misguided as to propose a revival of the Draft (and no one is that dumb), we would see a furious revival of "activism." Still, that cheap rent certainly was an inducement to go out and raise hell.

As a 22-year-old white college student, we just don't feel threatened enough. When my dad was in the draft lottery, there was a very real chance that his academic career would be abruptly halted and that he would then be sent to his death. That was worth sacrificing a few hours of lecture at least.

As it stands, nothing short of an attack on Iran might motivate me to, say, march on Washington, even on a weekend. A protest might make me feel good for a week, but a bad grade goes on my Permanent Record. No contest.

Also, I think that people are afraid to say just how pissed they are, mostly because of the growing public acceptance of police state tactics. When my dad started at Cornell, black militants armed with guns occupied the Student Union for a day and a half and walked out alive with amnesty guaranteed. There's no chance in hell that anything like this would happen after 9/11.

As someone who came of age in the heart of the '60's (H.S. grad '64, college '68), I've come to believe that the real, effective activists of that day came of age in the '50's or maybe even the '30's. They were working quietly away at social reform, and circumstances, the civil rights movement and the draft and so on, played directly into their hands. Those my age tended to be their followers, which gave them a real edge. As I remember it, I knew relatively few others my age who were political activist (but perhaps more than there would be now, at least in the dramatic protesting sense), but many more who hated the Vietnam war and the draft with a passion -- mainly because it affected them directly.

I tend to agree somewhat with what Friedman says, and disagree with what Mr. Martin says. I am one of those who was active in the '60's, and am now that age myself. I have a feeling that those of us who were "rebels" back then had a bit better tune on what was going on in the world. We tended, perhaps,(and I know my friends did) to stay in touch with world events. Martin says that young people today may be overwhelmed with what is going on, but I am not sure young people today really know what is going on. I hire a lot of young people and I continue to be amazed at how out of touch they are with the world-and not necessarily because they choose do be so. Their knowledge of world affairs is almost non-existent--a problem I really blame on the media, we Americans have become so parochial. When an person's primary source of news is Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" we may have good indication of the "depth of knowledge" young people have of the world around them. So how can we expect them to be activists?

ROTFLMLiberalAO,

No kidding. 20somethings didn't get active until congress started revoking some of the draft deferment schemes and created the lottery.

Ezra Klein agrees that kids are overwhelmed today because the scale of our problems is so immense. Brian Beutler thinks "We're overwhelmed because we're losing."

Yes and no. Anyone who has had any meaningful contact with the college-aged yoot of today knows that, not unlike my college days in the late 70s and early 80s, some are really engaged and passionate, for at least 30 minutes at a time (the last fifteen or twenty minutes of class can really drag). Oh, and there's the lack of a draft. Nothing like being forced to fight in a foreign war that has absolutely nothing to do with life in these (semi)United States to focus the mind) Oh! Canada.

But I agree that, not unlike many of their parents, they are crushed because just getting on with day-to-day life seems like about all one can cope with. Iraq, global warming, Iraq, Iran, Enron, etc., etc. just seem so far beyond ones control. Remember the collective boner the left got with the 2006 (okay, a bit TMI there)? Well, of course, the Democratic majority has proven to be just as spineless as the Democratic minority. The MSM is still worthless, maybe more so because of the Dem majority in Congress. So, short of a revolution . . . I mean, the U.S. is fucked-up right now, and may be doing irreparable damage in my life time anyway. But it's not Romania circ 1989.

All that being said, I seem to remember an American majority just sick to death of war and completely revolted by Nixon by 1974, and he wasn't half as bad and not really incompetent, unlike Shrub (RIP Molly Ivins).

Take massive prosperity, a hugely disproportionate number of kids between 17 and 27, and a institutional elite consisting of stodgy old people who made their bones during the Great Depression and WWII. Mix it all up, and you've got the 60s.

It is sui generis, because the massive influx of adolescent boomers and the halcyon days of American prosperity will never happen again.

Of course when kids do protest, Friedman happily stabs them in the back:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1600

What a fatuous gasbag.

It comes down to perception. Friedman, and many many others, are condensing all the outrage, protests, sit-ins, boycotts, hearings, etc. of the 60s and 70s into a dense iconic moment of time. They depict it as a single unit of time and place so of course currently we pale in comparison to the intensity and passions they believe were constant back then. Just because Friedman doesn't know about the protests and marches doesn't mean they aren't happening.

I've got to agree with scarshapedstar - I know lots and lots and lots of folks in their mid-twenties who are furious about the state of almost everything, but just see the inevitable police state repression that's the result of anything stronger than letter-writing as too high of a cost to their future employment.

They - we - also don't see anything short of armed rebellion as having much of an effect past the local level. I'd argue that social activism is still very effective on a small scale, but that national politics has quite effectively insulated itself from any outside influence at the hands of the prols.

Drum: "What's unique was a single period of about ten years from the early 60s to the early 70s. ... It was sui generis, and pretending otherwise is silly.

Ridiculous. As other posters have noted above, one factor -- the draft -- accounts for most of the observed differences in behavior. Unlike during that period, today middle and upper income youth with the most promising futures don't have to worry about possibly dying in a foreign country in a catastrophic war without purpose.

Reinstitute the draft and most differences in behavior will abruptly disappear.

We had the draft and Vietnam to focus our attention.

One thing the 20-somethings today should be mad about is the extraordinary amount of college debt we are saddling them with. College costs have grown 3-4 times as fast as general inflation. I sometimes wonder whether is is a big factor in the resentment I sometimes see in this generation.

You know Americanist, go fuck yourself. Your comment doesn't address the post, it's just another bullshit conservative meme. The boomers were/are hardly more narcissistic than the generations of the past 3 decades.

lso don't see anything short of armed rebellion as having much of an effect past the local level.

And voting with your feet is much safer and easier. There's quite a few other countries that do a better job on education and health, and whose governments aren't massively in debt to the Chinese. f you're young and don't have too many entanglements here (or perhaps, if you have one too many :-) it might make sense to set up shop elsewhere.

I'm not saying that people should or should not, only that there are rational reasons to consider other countries, and that leaving is easier than armed revolution.

Having been very active in the anti-war movement in the 60's and then stunned by my generation's embrace of assholes like Reagan and Bush I will concur with the above.

I was 4-F (spina bifida if you must know) and actually motivated by a desire to end the war. Looking back, many of my fellows only cared about the possibility of ending up in the meat grinder. They didn't care if YOU ended up there or how many 'gooks' died. Not to put to fine a point on it they were (and still are) mostly self-absorbed assholes.

This war is dragging on now simply because it is so easy to avoid. During the 70's I campaigned hard to end the draft & was short-sighted enough to think that without a draft the next war would be harder to make happen.

Bring back the draft NOW!

Al-
"hippies attacked our troops ..." When did this happen Al? Another neo-con who has not read history. Hippies were not aggressive people. Smoke dope, yeah; attack troops, no way. And let me guess Al. You are one of those neo-cons who is not doing the fighting in Iraq.Coward. Plenty willing for others to shed their blood. I would love to see the draft revived just to see what the Young Republicans would do! Would they really fight the police in the streets and risk getting their heads split open to protest the war/draft? Not in a million years. The Keyboard Commandos would be sending missives to Dick Cheney saying: Gee, Unca Dick, how did you get 5 (that's F-I-V-E) deferments? Tell us quick.

When has a conservative ever bled for this country?

They're quiet because they still have more to lose.

Wait until they're starving or being shot.

Friedman lost his effing mind somewhere between Beirut and Jerusalem. He hasn't made any sense for at least a decade.

I've got to agree with scarshapedstar - I know lots and lots and lots of folks in their mid-twenties who are furious about the state of almost everything, but just see the inevitable police state repression that's the result of anything stronger than letter-writing as too high of a cost to their future employment.Posted by: Dap

Other than WTO, which for a resident of Seattle was fucking embarrassing, when was the last time we had a violet protest about anything that involved more than a relative handful of people and/or happened in more than one city about the same issue?

By the way, don't blame today's kids. My son helped organize a sizable anti-war rally that, as near as I can tell, got zero attention (possibly made his college paper).

Just like the young repugs who demand war but refuse to fight it, Friedman can write columns knowing he will never be held accountable for being wrong. In fact, the wronger he is, the more money the NYT makes (or the less it loses.)

In terms of his propensity to be wrong, Tommy is entering Cheney territory.

Looking at this generation, many of them are in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting the Islamofascists.

No such thing as Islamofascism, it is a made up scare-word. And less than 200K is not "many." Less than 1% that is one...O-N-E percent who suit up.

At home, many conservative bloggers are fighting liberals who are trying to end the liberation of Iraq by American troops.

Liberation my ass. Iraqis want us to leave and the troops are ready to bug out too. And the bravery of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders is truly laughable. Dipshit.

Conservative bloggers are also trying to get all (non-liberal) Americans involved in Islamofascism Awareness Week and trying to get all (non-liberal) Americans aware of the significance of this point in history.

Yeah - how is that working out? Even Liberty University withdrew from that freakshow of hate and bigotry.

These are all actions worthy of praise. They are certainly better actions than in the 60's when hippies attacked our troops and had public sex and drugs.

It was the American Legion who spit on and ridiculed GI's returning from Vietnam. I spent the first decade of my life crossing protest lines outside the gates of the various military installations I called home. I heard shouting, I saw signs, and yeah, I saw dope smoked and breasts groped. But I never saw violence. Until I saw a group of Vietnam vets assembled to protest the war - and I saw crutches kicked and people spit on. So take your chickenhawk bullshit elsewhere. you really are an ignorant, warmongering fuckwit, and parody troll or not, you long since ceased being amusing.

Aw, Jim, give Al a break. All he has to offer is aggressive stupidity, revisionist history, and a disdain for any political positions to the left of Mussolini (Hah! Escaped Godwin that time!). Not quite as good as blood, tears, and sweat, but you gotta keep up with the times...

Ah, if only Little Tommy Friedman were to donate some of his family millions -- at least, the ones his wife doesn't control by herself -- to provide a few twentysomethings with the financial security to speak out without fucking over their futures.

That said, you do have to wonder about the efficacy of mass protest against the modern militarised state. Historians are now starting to ask whether the wave of popular protests that liberated Eastern Europe were the culmination of a period that began in 1789.

Also: troll harder, Al, you fucking piece of shit.

It is sui generis, because the massive influx of adolescent boomers and the halcyon days of American prosperity will never happen again.

That's something a lot of people overlook -- there literally are not as many adolescents and young adults as a percentage of the population today as there were in the 1960s. The Baby Boom is a huge bubble that distorts all of the years around it.

Not to mention, it's pretty easy to drop out of school when you don't have to start paying back your $30,000 educational debt as soon as you leave the campus. Older people have no clue just how crushing the debts are that kids today are graduating with.

Oh, my God, it is *so* wearying to read the defensive pieces by the current generation excusing their lack of serious activism by making perfectly absurd and factually challenged comparisons to the '60s.

Look, by all means explain why you're not out in the streets, risking your scholarships and your careers to protest the war in Iraq or whatever, but spare us the feeble -- and often puerile -- attempts to characterize an era you know so little about.

Way too many of you seem to have this bizarre idea that we all floated happily through the period without a care in the world, cheap rent, drugs and public sex, coddled by indulgent parents, and then went cheerfully off to join investment banking firms when it was all over. Total crap.

There are two indisputably major differences between then and now-- one was the draft, and the other that the inspirational leaders who gave us some sense of hope were being mowed down by assassins-- actually murdered, not just symbolically by the Supreme Court.

Another big difference is that the only place you could find like-minded people was in the flesh-- in massive marches, smaller street protests, organizing sessions in apartments and dorm rooms, rather than the comment boards of progressive blogs. Physical presence leads to physical action, and it appears that virtual presence does not.

You literally cannot imagine how it concentrates the mind to be gassed, clubbed with nightsticks and even shot at, never mind being screamed at with real hate on the street by passersby for exercising your right as an American citizen to protest peacefully.

Until you manage to achieve some genuine understanding of the horror of that period, just lay off the comparisons to your own. It seared all of us who went through it, and you will get nowhere by trying to invent reasons why you somehow have it oh so much tougher than we did.

Doesn't Friedman realize that anyone who does get "spitting mad" today is marginalized or sneered at by the chattering class of which he is a part?

Kevin, maybe it's just me, but a "barely" fortysomething would be 40, maybe 41. As Paul Glastris gave your age away last week, even linking it to the fundraising, this seems to be a Jack Benny-ish attempt to deny the obvious.

(Jack Benny? Geez, am I getting old, too?)

I know what you meant, but I still don't think it means what you think it means. Know what I mean?

ROTFLMLiberalAO on October 23, 2007 at 12:04 PM:

Yes, a draft would wake people up. An awful lot of antiwar activists in the 60's went right back to "feed your head" and screw everyone else as soon as their asses were safe from the draft. That so many potential social gains from the 60's have been allowed to dribble away while we sip our Giganto Moccachinos and munch on artisnal bread behind the wheel of our SUVs is the disgraceful failure of the 60's generation.

Also, someone upthread remarked that a lot of the prominent activists of the 60's actually came of age earlier. Someone else remarked that the real pioneers of activism were the civil rights protestors of the 50's. These truths need to be mentioned whenever boomers pats their collective selves on the back for the "achievements" of the 60's. And I say this as a certified boomer.

It was the Draft, plain and simple. Every male between the ages of 18 and 32 knew that they were subject to being killed in a war that--whether you were for it or against it--no one really understood. It tends to focus the mind.

Ummmm, how about the fact that America (and much of the rest of the Western world, for that matter) has become a de facto police state? Look at the intense police measures over the past few years to disrupt protests before they even take place???

Friedman shouldn't be blaming the 20-somethings (of which I am among) for not taking active action-- these days, that's tantamount to career suicide! Back in the 60's, news only travelled so far. Today, in the digitally-connected world, what you do in New York will follow you straight to L.A...

the injustices in Sudan, Iraq, Burma, Pakistan, the Bronx

Americans should focus on preventing/righting the crimes their country commits.

I have written before that most young people today are too busy working. The lack of low cost higher education, as compared with the Sixties and Seventies, grant money for education and low wages for unskilled labor prevent many young people from becoming involved with trying to change our nation's course. Many young people now have a lot of debt, tethering them to jobs that might prevent them from acting politically.

But there are probably other things that also keep young people from participating in political discourse. Electronics has atomized the individual from the larger society, even while making it easier to be connected to their intimates. We are all able to pursue our most individualistic pursuits now without needing to engage with others. The personal politics of destruction probably prevents many from becoming involved. Publicly not accepting commonly held platitudes can lead to attack and isolation, which is probably why so many people make their opinions known anonymously. Anonymity allows for making unpopular opinions, but does not necessarily create popular activism.

Another reason young people may not care to participate in politics is that they know something those activists of the past didn't: it does not matter, nothing can stop the machine that is destroying our world. Rachel Corrie died in vain. That old tree that was saved by that girl was cut down. The president will do whatever he wants. Iraq is Vietnam. New Orleans. All of the fish will die.

When the environment provides only negative reinforcement, the response is to do nothing.

For me, the mind-set altering event was Kent State. I took from that tragedy that American society didn't want to hear what we (the anti-war, pro-civil rights counterculture)had to say and would kill us to keep us from saying it. The "would kill us" was scary, but the "don't want to hear what we have to say" broke the spirit. In addition to the lack of a draft, maybe the 20-somethings aren't in the streets because they don't have the older leadership. I think a lot more died at Kent State than those four students.

And for all their fire and activism, what, exactly did that 60s generation accomplish? The end of Vietnam, 50,000 soldiers and countless Vietnamese lives too late? Civil rights? OK, I'll give you that one, but this generation has made similar advances in areas like gay rights. Halting the takeover of our government by corporate interests with no respect for democracy or the citizenry? Take a look around and tell me what you think.

One of the most lasting impacts of the 60s may prove to be that they helped to bring us Reagan in the 80s, and it was all downhill from there.

Ok, lets get serious a second, in honor of the Serious Tom Friedman.

How many kids of the 60's really ever did anything in the antiwar movement? A few percent at most. It was major news when they did, because it was almost unprecedented in the US and there wasn't that much news on, anyway. Ultimately, what did they achieve? They got Nixon elected, and the country has pretty much gone downhill ever sense as the Republican party figured out the real power of the Dark Side.

I would bet there are more kids and young adults involved in protest and marches than back in the 70's and politics in general, both in numbers and per capita. But the news doesn't care. There are celebrities and disasters and scandalettes from all over the world to cover that are far more infotaining than another march or protest that will almost certainly change nothing.

The slackers are indeed far worse than they were in the 70's, and a lot of people really have given up. I know I'm pretty close. President Guiliani or Huckabee or McCain will probably do me in. But lets not pretend there once was an america where an entire generation stood up and changed the way the country worked.

"No such thing as Islamofascism, it is a made up scare-word."

Amen. And what makes it worse is that those who toss around the term apparently have no idea that the underlying principle of fascism is the marriage of corporate and state interests, so that government policy is grounded in the needs and desires of big business. In fact, the original architect of fascism, Il Duce, once remarked that it should more properly be called "corporatism." One can justifiaby accuse radical fundamentalist Muslims of many things, but being allies of and enablers for corporate interests certainly isn't one of them.

Al, like virtually every other right-wing troll, thinks that fascism=authoritarianism and that the two terms are interchangeable. The fact is that fascism doesn't require an overtly autocratic or non-elected government in order to develop, nor does every totalitarian or authoritarian state practice fascism. Of course, the term "Islamofascism" does have the advantage of a built-in comparison with Nazi Germany - an implicit evocation of Godwin, if you will, without having to utter the "H-word."

LOL, I see Eddie and I are on the same page.

I would also like to echo what my granddad used to argue withmy dad about - It was because his generation was so successful that his son's generation could afford to go do those things. They could support a family of people going out to rebel. With today's wealth concentration, there are far fewer who can afford that kind of lifestyle, and many of those children are already indoctrinated into the virtues of selfishness and evil.

Hey, Friedman! You're one of the self-satisfied f**ks with the power! If you don't like how that power is being used, why don't you do something about it?

In the 60s the issues were easier to understand and right-wing noise machine wasn't in full swing. In the 60s you had things like the draft, Nixon secretly bombing Cambodia, and Black Panthers being murdered by police in their beds for resisting arrest.

Today the issues are hard to grasp mainly because the right erects so much noise around things they consider negative that the heart of the issue gets lost among the noise. There was a simple rational for why the US was fighting in Vietnam as opposed to why the US is in Iraq (except for those who think the point is to kill Muslims). GWB a chicken hawk? Well raise a stink about Kerry's service. And just try explaining the Plame outing, FISA, politicizing USAs, etc. to an 18 year old in 2 sentences. Much less in the face of Limbaugh style snappy points that claim these are non-issues.

Mutt is offended, and mounts the oooh, aren't we cute defense: "The boomers were/are hardly more narcissistic than the generations of the past 3 decades."

Now, THERE'S a standard to live up to.

The thing about the Boomers (speaking as one born at the peak) is that we generally lack perspective. There's such a wide range of individual experience ya gotta qualify it, but a CULTURALLY-typical Boomer POV is Dennis Hopper shilling for an investment firm, with the classic pose 'back in the day, they laughed at your dreams, but your dreams changed EVERYTHING...'

No, they didn't. In fact, the most typical Boomer culture was pretty antithetical to the actual achievements of "the 60s", as people keep pointing out about the draft: Allard Lowenstein and his followers were EXCEPTIONAL, they weren't the rule.

Most campus protesters only started to care about Vietnam when it threatened THEM; the instant it became unlikely to disrupt their comfortable college lives, they stopped caring and sure as hell stopped DOING much.

I forget who had the insight that virtually all that was good about "the 60s" actually happened between the mid-50s and the early 60s, e.g., the success of the Civil Rights Movement in killing Jim Crow, while virtually all of the iconic "the 60s" happened after '66 or so -- and MOST of the cultural changes happened in the early 70s. (setting up disco, ye gods)

It's a bit oversimplified, of course, cuz JFK's assassination was certainly both bad and iconic, and the Vietnam escalation didn't really get underway until the Gulf of Tonkin in '65, so it's probably a better watershed than most.

Cuz that's the point: Boomer narcissism melds achievements based on self-sacrifice that they had little to do with (the Civil Rights Movement), with self-interested and self-indulgent stuff like campus protests against the draft, and wraps it all in the Monkees-sort of commercialization that is strictly a result of demographics.

Kids born between 1915-25 were far more self-sacrificing than the Boomers: look at WW2. Boomers as a group had little to do with the Civil Rights Movement, which was launched in Montgomery by folks too old to be Boomers and enacted by the same Establishment that gave us Vietnam -- literally: LBJ.

I know of just three prominent Boomer voices against Vietnam who continued to give enough of a damn to do any meaningful work about Southeast Asia after Saigon fell and America got bored: David Hawk (who was one of the three organizers of the Moratorium in 1970), Bruce Cameron and Joan Baez. Where was Abbie Hoffman? Jerry Rubin? Gone to drugs and the stock market.

No wonder Mutt wants to compare the Boomers to the generations SINCE, who have obviously learned from the great ones.

I haven't read the other comments here, so I don't know if anyone else brought this up. But after Thomas Freidman's "Suck on this!" comments, how can anything he ever says ever be taken seriously?

"We don't have...the cushion of cheap rent,"

Can you believe a man who is married to the daughter of a billionarie had the cojones to say this? Good God.

I think you can't look at the "worth" of the 60s mass activism and popular political culture without looking at the backlash and the fallout. Lots of lost souls, lots of sellouts, and a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy were the cost of Civil Rights and a Sexual Revolution (gains that are even now eroding). Two steps forward, one (hopefully only one) step back.

I think you'll see quite a lot of interesting activism over the coming years from Millennials. Not all of it -- or even the majority -- will be pitched toward national electoral politics.

I think also one of the problems activist today have (and I've seen it griped about more than often enough) is the idea that 'even if we do try and take the streets, it's too easily ignored now'.

The media nowadays is a lot more vast, and that simultaneously means more crap gets thrown at you all at once, and tighter control about what people see on what given channels and such. Add in the idea of reporters who are willing to downplay any serious displays of activism, and it makes for a lot of ways that the normal average joe will never see the outrage of activists.

It's apathy fed not by lack of motivation, but the feeling of a lack of a voice Many of us flock to blogs and online communities because it's easier to be heard there, through the virtual written word, then on the street where you can either be easily drowned out or simply overlooked, actively or passively. All the protests against the war and such we've seen over these years have been successfully marginalized, because outlets underreport them by the thousands, where a protest of over tens of thousands of people are simply in the mere 'hundreds' when put out in the news.

There's a serious lack of representatives too who are allowed to speak in favor of a lot of those positions too. When O'Hanlon and Pollack are puffed as the most serious of 'war critics', there's a distinct problem, and it's not all about getting the voice out there. It's also about people who are willing to let it be heard these days, and there's not enough of that anymore outside of the online enclaves we have.

What's unique was a single period of about ten years from the early 60s to the early 70s. The kind of activism we saw from young people during that decade hadn't been seen for a century before that and probably won't be seen for a century after it. It was sui generis, and pretending otherwise is silly.

I don't think it was all that unique. It might have seemed so. Those pointing out the draft as an issue here are probably hitting most of the mark (those advocating a draft are revealing a bit too much of their own real motivations).

There's other issues, too. These were the first protests that got TV coverage. Not a lot of that during the early 20th century labor protests and others.

And finally, until this period in our history, most kids of this age were working for a living, either on farms or elsewhere. They were immersed in the real life from which college students are largely insulated, and which they discovered the hard way after they graduated (whence the conversions from hippy to white-collar worker). You should see my college daughter running around her apartment turning off unused lights.

There's one problem about putting up the '60s kids (my cohort) as an idol: the one chance that it had of really taking power was the McGovern campaign, and this was not only a loss but a crushing defeat. McGovern was antiwar, which gave him majority support there. But Nixon stole the issue by withdrawing all combat troops by a month or so after the election. As for the rest, long hair, drugs, activism, sexual adventurousness, women's liberation -- the bulk of voters were decisively not having it. The big issue had been the war and the draft. They both ended. Some of the causes continued to live, and some died a horrible death. And that was it. What did we get? The Nixon Impeachment, and Jimmy Carter.

gyrfalcon: "Way too many of you seem to have this bizarre idea that we all floated happily through the period without a care in the world, cheap rent, drugs and public sex, coddled by indulgent parents, and then went cheerfully off to join investment banking firms when it was all over."

To back up your point, that pretty much sums up my extended adolescence in the late-80's/early-90's (minus the cheap rent). We even had the Grateful Dead.

Most of the above posters nail it right on. It's a combination of pressures that keeps the people in line. Everything from long hours, to massive debt have kept us right where we are supposed to be: working.

Everytime some CEO realized he could squeeze a bit more out of his employees, his company became that much more competitive. But the downside of course, is that if said employee had to work 50+ hours a week just for the bareminimum slice of the American dream, well, the results are before you now. The wealthy and privledged have looted and pillaged our once great country. Back in the 50's a highschool graduate could hop into the industrial workforce and make enough for the minimums. A house, car, doctor visits, etc. Not anymore. My family is a two-person earner with two young children. We make 10 and 12 dollars an hour. We work full time. And yet, we can barely afford all the things we need just to survive. Amidst all this, there is no time to gather with others angry about whats happening in our country. And no place to do it in either.

I have come to believe that the American dream is quite dead. The lower class are being strangled slowly to death, and yet we still believe that at the last moment, our new masters will show mercy. When the dust settles from this in twenty years we will find out we have mortgaged everything we ever had just to stay afloat: Our homes, our honor, our future, and our children. Where will we be then?

Tom Friedman is concerned that 20-somethings today are a little too quiet.

Personally, I think religious and community leaders are more than a little too quiet. Age isn't really the issue; sure, Dr. King was in his late 20s when he was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association—but many of the other, but many of the other important leaders of the movement were not. And the Civil Rights Movement is the really substantial post-WWII activist movement in the U.S., the others were largely drawing from its success and trying to reproduce them.

What did we get? The Nixon Impeachment

Uh, no, we didn't get that.

I'm really looking forward to the day when the successes and failures of people from my generation aren't held to the standard of what baby boomers did when they "were my age". Enough is enough!

We even had the Grateful Dead. Posted by: Gen X/Y?

Didn't learn nuttin' from the mistakes of yer elders, did ya?

(There aren't any real "Baby Boomers". That's just an abstraction.)

Kids aren't demonstrating now because they don't feel the need: the news is filtered, there's no call for sacrifice from up top, and there's no draft.

It had a lot to do with the fact that during the 60s and 70s, the BULK of the population was college age. The baby boom skews everything.

Econobuzz:today middle and upper income youth with the most promising futures don't have to worry about possibly dying in a foreign country

They seldom had to worry about in the 60s either. How else to explain the waiting lists for the National Guard or why MLK Jr. met with LBJ to protest the disproportionate representation of black Americans in the dead in Viet-Nam.

Kryptik certainly hits on another problem,'even if we do try and take the streets, it's too easily ignored now'. It's not too easily ignored, the papers and TV just plain ignore it. Republican convention in NYC coverage?ZZZZZZZZZZZ, none to speak of, yet lots of arrests.

Making a difference can occur in other ways than political theater, volunteering for social causes for example, these 'kids' today do good work.

As is almost always the case, we can dig deep into the works of George Orwell to find an apt comment. This, from the introduction to a collection of British essays published in 1948: "The most encouraging fact about revolutionary activity is that, although it always fails, it always continues. The vision of a world of free and equal human beings, living together in a state of brotherhood—in one age it is called the Kingdom of Heaven, in another the classless society—never materializes, but the belief in it never seems to die out."

So... Revolutionary activity never really dies out. It just takes different forms at different times in history.

gyrfalcon: "Way too many of you seem to have this bizarre idea that we all floated happily through the period without a care in the world, cheap rent, drugs and public sex, coddled by indulgent parents, and then went cheerfully off to join investment banking firms when it was all over. Total crap... It seared all of us who went through it..."

Fascinating thread, and I agree with gyrfalcon. It was a rotten period, and I look back on the 60s and 70s with no nostalgia. In terms of why it happened, certainly the draft and the success of the Civil Rights movement, with its use of the tactics of non-violent resistance, provided motivation, leadership and models. It was easy to be anti-establishment then, when the government was out to kill the young. Whatever.

I think that today's under 25s are less active because they lack leadership and community and because the whole society is shattered (aka, "multi-cultural".) In addition, they have not yet been able to speak for themselves. The dominant culture still imposes its old paradigms and the cultural battles that were engaged then continue to define American politics: Although Terrorists have replaced Communists, political battles are still being fought over Abortion, Women's liberation, Homosexuality, the Corporate machine, Social Justice for the poor and people of color. Even the Iraq War was launched because wacko Conservatives are convinced that we could have, should have won in Vietnam.

When someone like Thomas Friedman asks, "why are they not demonstrating?" he is assuming that the outrage of the under 25s should take the form of street demonstrations because that is how it was done back in the 60s. We have a woman running for President and the 60s feminists are thrilled because A Woman Will Be President. That's the old paradigm talking and further evidence that liberals have learned nothing during the last four years.

What I think will happen is that we will have another four years of transition, and in 2012 we will see a dramatic realignment. The under 25s will start to define a new paradigm, and the old post 60s thinking will no longer define the problems and solutions.

As anyone who has spoken to the Vets from Nam know, the fear of the hell those guys endured is what
caused that activism. Bush never went, he never will.

Al, you are a deuchenozzle.

Yea but what happened to the young people of the 60's? They are still around and of voting age. Many if not most, got old and complacent and helped usher in an era of conservative rule. Kind of disappointing. Remember many of us 20 somethings like myself were not old enough to vote in the 2000 election that brought Bush in. And yes I know he technically wasn't elected but it never should have been that close to begin with. And as far as the college crowd is concerned, college is increasingly the province of the priveleged b/c of its enormous costs. Why would children of the privileged rebel against something like Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy or an illegal war that is of no consequence to them personally or health care reform when they are insured?

To the world,
there is nothing more to be discovered, no new world to concur. It is so foolish to assume now that there is a supreme culture, because we all are from planet earth. Our boundaries are merely lines in the sand, recorded on a piece of paper, we must try to overcome ourselves in order to achieve greatness. Let it go to the record that we tried, to the record.

"Many if not most [of the 60's kids], got old and complacent and helped usher in an era of conservative rule. Kind of disappointing."

Christina. Many of them complacent at the time, or would have been if they weren't facing being shipped off to Vietnam. Believe me, I was there, and I saw many who wouldn't have given a damn about the war if they didn't have to go (see Dick Cheney, e.g. (five deferments), or George Bush (national guard service)). They just reverted to form when the heat was off.

Go with "feeling of triumph," Kevin.

was going to comment at length but adam pretty much nailed it on the first post.

the 60s were indeed unique. but "the 60s generation" was not. just as with each subsequent generation, the vast VAST majority of them merely looked after their own interests.

and maybe it goes without saying but tom friedman can "suck - on - this."

A favorite term of the sixties was 'plastic' to refer to those phonies who talked the talked, wore their hair down and pretended to be involved. As the years progressed, it became increasingly clear just how plastic this entire generation was. I recall a conversation I had with a friend circa 1970, where we talked about our pride in our generation, because "we changed the world." It is embarassing for me to now recall this conversation, when I see how this plastic generation sold out America, by voting in the fascist troika of Reagan, Bush, and Bush. These votes were not idealogical, that can be forgiven. No, these votes were based on portfolio maintenance, I got mine and I'm going to protect it, the country be damned. My father's can be called the 'greatest generation,' but I shudder to think what my generation will be called. The boomers have trashed this country for their own small-minded benefit (and Friedman could be their poster child). I can think of many adjectives for them, unfortunately every adjective contains the word "sh!t", because no other word will do. The group Chicago had a hit in the sixties called Lowdown, with the lyric, 'the country I was brought up in fell apart and died.' The lyric was about 30 years too soon.

As a pre-boomer who fell in with the sixties crowd in grad school, I'm no expert on the current generation. But I recall an awful lot of people back then, before the lottery, who lived under the umbrella of what seemed like reliable student deferments, and who were active anyway. The draft isn't the sole difference.

The sheer number of people drafted might have been more important in the early stages. Even those of us who had no reason to believe we were in imminent danger of being forcibly enlisted had relatives and high school friends who had been. There were just plain a lot more soldiers in Nam, voluntary or not, than the handful who've been recycled over and over again into Mess o' Potamia, so even absent a draft the pain would have been spread more widely.

Count me with those who think economics is a sounder explanation. In the sixties, we'd seen rising prosperity all our lives, expected it to go on, had good reason to expect an abundance of pretty good jobs waiting for us no matter what maverick roads we traveled through our early twenties. And with our crushing college debts coming to a few thousand, not a hundred thousand, economic issues were easy to defer.

We could afford to protest, in short, afford to tweak the nose of the System. Today's kids don't have that luxury. What makes it worse is that nowadays permanent electronic records of virtually everything make it much harder to live down or outrun a youthful indiscretion - including the indiscretion of behaving more morally than future employers might cotton to.

If there are islamo-fascists, there also must be corporate-fascists. Why aren't we hearing about the corporate-fascists in the MSM?

Start drafting these kids and sending them to Iraq to die, while giving the affluent, well connected kids a pass. Then you might see 'em spitting mad.

If there are islamo-fascists, there also must be corporate-fascists. Why aren't we hearing about the corporate-fascists in the MSM? Posted by: slanted tom

Probably considered poor form to report on your employers.

This is a fascinating thread. I really like the blend of comments from twenty-somethings and aging boomers. Two quick thoughts: one thing that motivated us in the 60's was rock and roll music. What a great sound track for marching. When I think back to things like the Moratorium march, I hear rock music in my head, even though there probably wasn't actually any music playing. An interesting reality of today is that hard-core, angry rap music is not a sound track for white middle class people to march to.

Second point: The "politically aware" and the "vanguards" of the youth protest movement in the sixties were all hard core leftists. At that time is was still possible to believe in communism or socialism as the goal of politics. Whatever serious revolutionary energy there was; was directed that way. It's interesting to me that no one in this long thread, boomer or youngster, has mentioned, as a difference between now and then, the fact that the most positive, wonderful, and significant moment of 20th century history happened in that interval: the non-violent fall of communism and its complete repudiation by the people of those states.

By the way, in that column Friedman was not complaining that today's youth isn't having enough anti-war demonstrations. (How could he, since he supported this war).

What he is complaining about is that there are not enough street demonstrations about three things: the budget deficit, the "Social Security deficit", and environmental policies.

Subtly, in all this, he is saying that the war is not something one should be demonstrating against.

Exile,

"We don't have...the cushion of cheap rent,"

Can you believe a man who is married to the daughter of a billionarie had the cojones to say this? Good God.

Courtney E Martin is a man, and married the daughter of a billionaire?!

I think you need to figure out who said what to who.

Foucalt posts a pretty fair example of being wrong: "The "politically aware" and the "vanguards" of the youth protest movement in the sixties were all hard core leftists...."

The ACTUAL leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were folks like King, Abernathy, and John Lewis, with a strong dose of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Hardcore leftists, my eye.

The ACTUAL leadership of the anti-Vietnam War movement began with Allard Lowenstein, a classic NY liberal (and a one-term Congressman from Long Island). He was (literally) to the right of Barney Frank. Lowenstein was the guy who persuaded Ivy League divinity school folks (like David Hawk) to go South for Freedom Summer, and later, went back to those same guys to persuade 'em to oppose the war in Vietnam. (Most of the civil rights folks were against the anti-war movement as a distraction at first; it wasn't until MLK, Jr. turned against the war that the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement became congruent, and they were NEVER parallel.) Lowenstein was the guy who started the Dump Johnson movement (in 1966!), and he talked McCarthy into running after failing to get RFK to do it. (Very nearly RFK's last words were "get Allard Lowenstein on the phone", cuz he'd just won the California primary.)

Foucalt sorta exemplifies what I mean about Boomer narcissim: it's not what ACTUALLY happened that counts, it's the media IMAGE of it, which is always much more favorable to Boomers than history will be.

There is some silly stuff on this thread. How many people actually opposed the war in the 60s? Well, for starters, about 500,000 who moved to Canada and never came back.

Anybody who thinks the boomers didn't make any changes should get in the closet with some tv from the 50s for about a week, and then spend a few days wondering if JFK has launched all our missiles and life on earth is about to end.

And you don't think that protesting in the 60s blackballed your corporate future? Oh, that's right, young people may not know that every major city used to have a Red Squad. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Get used to it.

"Other than WTO, which for a resident of Seattle was fucking embarrassing, when was the last time we had a violet protest about anything that involved more than a relative handful of people and/or happened in more than one city about the same issue?"

Jeff, the HUGE antiwar protests in all major US and European cities in 2003 were not violent perhaps but did show strong political sentiment.

"Many if not most, got old and complacent and helped usher in an era of conservative rule."

Christina (and Annie Christ), Please don't blame the 60's protest generation for Reagan and Bush. Remember that the liberal political views of us old hippies were shared by probably less than half of our age group. I can assure you that none of my old friends would have voted for either Reagan or Bush.

I was at Columbia University for the building take-overs in the Spring of 1967. I can attest that they started as a racial justice issue, with black activists the first into the buildings. (The issue was the "white" institution of Columbia building a new gym in a Harlem neighborhood park.)

The takeover was soon co-opted by the anti-war kids, mostly white.

I was unpolitical in terms of right v. left at the time, although I was very committed to civil rights. Then I watched from the roof of my dorm as mounted police started beating on kids, most of whom were just out to see what was happening. It was the police riot that made me "anti-establishment" and turned me to the left.

I was hard-wired there as my friends were caught in the draft or fled to Canada to avoid it.

So, sure, reinstating the draft would energize American youth, but without the civil rights issues, which affected all age groups in the country in the 60s, would the times in general be the same? It's hard to say.

On another issue, above a self-described 22-year-old says "As it stands, nothing short of an attack on Iran might motivate me to, say, march on Washington, even on a weekend. A protest might make me feel good for a week, but a bad grade goes on my Permanent Record. No contest." and BABY BOOMERS are denigrated as narcissistic! Give me a break. I marched against the immoral war of the 60s and 70s not because _I_ could drafted, but because SOMEBODY could be drafted, and because then, like now, our country was acting against its ideals.

Further, there were simply MORE young people at that time than most other comparable times in American history. They didn't call it the baby boom for nothin'. So while the percentages of activism may have been the same, the numbers were undeniably greater.

Boomers now run most of the political and media structures, too, so they're naturally dismissive of different efforts to engage in activism, because they "changed the world, maaan."

Econobuzz: today middle and upper income youth with the most promising futures don't have to worry about possibly dying in a foreign country

They seldom had to worry about in the 60s either. How else to explain the waiting lists for the National Guard or why MLK Jr. met with LBJ to protest the disproportionate representation of black Americans in the dead in Viet-Nam.

Posted by: TJM

I get your point: there were exceptions, including the poor who couldn't afford college and also couldn't find work.

But EVERYONE I knew then, regardless of family income, was scared to death of the draft and today NO ONE is. We have what some researchers refer to as a "natural experiment": draft vs. no draft. Sure there are other factors that must be controlled, but this is as close as we get in the social sciences to a natural experiment, including an unpopular war.

My point is merely that, before we attribute differences in "commitment" between the youth of today and yesterday, we consider that the "apparent" lack of attention to the war of today's youth may be almost fully explained by the lack of a draft. Put another way, if there were a draft today, I think the protests would be much larger and more frequent. I have friends with teenagers who would move to Canada rather than have their kids fight in Iraq.

The attitude that I can serve my country just as well in an MBA program, or writing a blog, is a conceit of a generation who simply can do so.

Well, Americanist, I'm happy to argue with you. When I referred to the "youth protest movement", it is obvious I was talking about the anti-war movement, which YOU admit is in no way the same thing as the civil rights movement. I think that is obvious from context. Rock and roll had nothing to do with the civil rights movement and communism didn't have anything to do with it either [at least if you look away from the issue of Stanley Levison].

I'm willing to stipulate that Allard Lowenstein was not a bad guy, but I'm talking about self-professed vanguard elements like: Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Cathy Boudin and many more. You know, SDS and the Weather Underground. You've heard of them, haven't you? If you were at those marches you saw the well organized marchers of the Spartacist Youth League, didn't you?

The ACTUAL leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were folks like King, Abernathy, and John Lewis, with a strong dose of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Hardcore leftists, my eye.

Perhaps not all, and certainly not the cartoonish communist stereotypes the right-wing likes to paint of "hardcore leftists", but certainly whoever said this was near the far left of the political spectrum in 1967, and if someone expressed similar sentiments as to where the nation should be heading in 2007 would be considered far off the left of the spectrum:

Now what has happened is that we've had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Now we must develop progress, or rather, a program—and I can't stay on this long—that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in the century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We've come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.
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Now, our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two feet right here on earth.
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I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here?" that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that's two-thirds water?" These are words that must be said.

"Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Cathy Boudin" Two ineffectual assholes and a copkilling criminal.

Meanwhile, I named the folks who actually killed Jim Crow and the guy who got LBJ to give up re-election.

And I did NOT say the anti-war movement was "in no way" the same as the civil rights movement.

In fact, I actually named David Hawk, who had been a divinity school student recruited by Allard Lowenstein (a key link between the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement) into Freedom Summer in 1962, who went on to organize the largest and most successful anti-war demonstration, the Moratorium in 1970, and finally (and laudably) was one of the first to document the Khmer Rouge genocide. (I helped him display his pix in ... 1981, I think it was.)

See, Foucalt, this is why I tagged you as an exemplar of Boomer narcissism: the ACTUAL accomplishments aren't as important as what YOU identify with.

The two big issues of the 60s and 70s were Vietnam and Civil Rights.

Vietnam was different from Iraq in that there was a draft and so many more casualties. Thus, more activism would be expected.

Civil Rights addressed an issue so black and white (sorry, but intended) that even prejudiced people could understand the issue. A high level of activism was a matter of time.

Now black people can live in any neighborhood and attend any school. Voting is also much easier, although due diligence is sometimes necessary to overcome Republican shenanighans.

EVERYONE...was scared to death of the draft and today NO ONE is.

I fear conscription because of what W. Bush and Cheney would do with it. A draft would not have prevented W. Bush from invading and occupying Iraq. A draft would enable W. Bush to occupy Iran. Regardless of how many people marched or protested against any of W. Bush's wars, W. Bush would still start them. The lack of a draft prevents W. Bush and Cheney from doing everything they want to do.

If nothing else, what the anti-war movement of the '60's Era accomplished was keeping millions of American conscripts from being sent to the Middle East. Thank you.

The two big issues of the 60s and 70s were Vietnam and Civil Rights.

But they weren't really simultaneous. They overlapped, but the Civil Rights Movement erupted in a big way in the mid-1950s, the Vietnam anti-war movement wasn't a big deal until the early-to-mid-1960s.

Vietnam was different from Iraq in that there was a draft and so many more casualties.

It was also different in that it occurred during the time of the Civil Rights Movement, which was a model of a powerful protest movement.

And look at what a great job that 60's generation did when they got some real authority ...

I can't wait to be past it.

So, why did those kids of yore have "the cushion of cheap rent" and we don't anymore? Just asking.

Hey Americanist, it doesn't really matter, but when I said: "I was talking about the anti-war movement, which YOU admit is in no way the same thing as the civil rights movement", I was referring to your earlier comment: "it wasn't until MLK, Jr. turned against the war that the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement became congruent, and they were NEVER parallel".
It is not clear exactly what you mean here by the distinction between "congruence" and "parallelism" but is is indisputable that things which are either congruent or not congruent or parallel or not parallel are certa