FIVE STAR PIECE FIVE STAR PIECE Maureen Dowd is one of the pre-eminent voices of our day. She's eloquent here – she melted my heart, and that's a good place to engage one another. Treat yourself to this rueful reminiscence about where the flower children have gone. "...we've turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against." June 26, 2002
-Suzanne-
The Age of Acquiescence
Maureen Dowd
A friend of mine over the weekend was recalling her days as an idealistic child of the 60's. Students sitting around the dorm, amid the water bongs, water beds, strobe lights and Che posters, listening to Led Zeppelin and Dylan, dreaming about remaking the world in their own image, trading nightmares about spying Big Brother and soul-robbing corporations.
"We thought America was being run by the corporate-military-industrial white male power structure," she said. "We were certain there was a right-wing conspiracy. We thought civil liberties and free speech were imperiled. We were suspicious of rich people. We had reason to believe there was corporate malfeasance and Wall Street was bad. We worried that the government was backing coups in Latin America. We figured the administration wanted to topple all the overwrought, self-appointed messiahs who didn't know how to run their own little societies. We assumed that powerful people were rigging elections. We feared there were people who wanted to blast roads through forests and rip up the tundra."
She recalled all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret government plan to suspend the Constitution and declare a national security emergency and round up people without charges, and that the oil companies and banks would plunge us into nuclear war.
"And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our worst paranoid nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our enemies from the 60's have crept back into power. And we were the empowerers, because we've turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against. We forgot to be suspicious."
The times they ain't a-changin'. The passionate activists from the Age of Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent Majority.
"Our young hunches are now becoming mature realities," said Bobby Rush, the Black Panther who became a Chicago Congressman. "Yet we are paralyzed in the headlights. We don't know exactly how to react to the right wing trampling our Constitution and dictating to the world who their leadership can be. The American people have been scared beyond all imagination because of Sept. 11. But now we are getting to the point where we can't use a library card without opening ourselves up to Big Brother."
Ralph Nader said the phrase he coined in 1970, "corporate crime," is the new catch phrase in business magazines.
Three and a half decades ago, the mantra among young people who railed against capitalist pigs and government lies was "the fix is in."
"The fix is now institutionalized," Mr. Nader says. "When Congress won't double the S.E.C. budget in the middle of a corporate crime wave, it shows that the system is irreversibly decayed. As Brandeis said, we can have a democratic society or we can have a concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both."
Of course some Democrats regard Ralph Nader as part of the problem and not part of the solution.
People used to be shocked when a member of an administration said that what's good for General Motors is good for the United States. But with the Bush administration, the sinful synchronicity of business and government is just a day's work, and nobody is reeling from the spectacle.
Some convictions of the love-bead era have been turned on their heads. The police are not regarded as "pigs" anymore. And, given their woeful performance, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. are not seen as scarily omniscient anymore.
And it is not going to be so easy for women to get as much power and sexual freedom as men. Alpha women, like Martha Stewart – who got rich being an über-hausfrau, just the image women were running away from in the 60's – are crashing and burning out every day.
Those who came of age in the 60's and lived through the plum decades of the 80's and 90's gave up a long time ago on John Lennon's wish that they could "imagine no possessions . . . no need for greed or hunger in a brotherhood of man." (Even Mr. Lennon, in the bosom of the Dakota, found his own fantasy hard to live by.)
And now, faced with the evil of Osama bin Laden, they can no longer imagine there's "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too."
These utopian sentiments were buried in the rubble in Lower Manhattan.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times Op Ed section: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/opinion/26DOWD.html. We found it on truthout.org at http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/06.27E.dowd.acqui.htm.
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