The 1960s Redux

The 1960’s Redux, but this time we have a reason.

The 1960’s were a specific moment in history that brought about the winds of change to wipe the world clean and bring forth a new beginning. Time was sitting on a cusp of a rudimentary stage in history that was evolving, and it was going to evolve with or without input from humans. It was an infant and like all children born onto the world it required direction. The change was there, hidden, lying dormant, in a state of semiconsciousness waiting to usher in a new way of thinking, a new way of life. Technically that is called a hypnopompic state, and like it or not, it was about to be heard with a vengeance.

We had gone from Camelot to waking up and seeing the truth of our times. As young, impressionable individuals we grew up during an undeclared cold war. Our home activities filled to capacity with back yard bomb shelters and discussions of the Berlin Wall. Our minds overflowed with visions of bombs falling from the sky. All the while African Americans in the south were banned from sitting at the front of the bus, had to use their own drinking fountains and public restrooms. The news media plied our organized conscious thoughts with the Soviet menace and filled our unconscious adaptive mental activity with attending weekly air-raid drills in school, kneeling against the wall, hands over the back of our heads.

We saw Gary Powers, the U2 spy plane incident paraded on Soviet television. The Bay of Pigs debacle as America underwrites a coup then changes their mind leaving those brave freedom fighters to the whims of Castro. We watched Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the UN podium, screaming, “We will bury you!” We sat together as a family, filled with trepidation and fear of the unknown as we watched the Cuban missile crises unfold before us. We all cried one brief moment as history stopped, our very lives stopped as we saw the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We watched with wonder and doubt as Lyndon B. Johnson takes the oath of office. Jackie Kennedy, our beloved first lady standing next to him.

Our generation was different. We too had evolved. We thought differently than our parents and grandparents. We worried about civil rights, and we wanted change. We wanted all men and woman, no distinction between races, living together as one. We watched in awe as Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream.” Speech. It moved us, awakened some and yet in the south, enraged others; it was definitely time for a change.

The anger of Malcolm X, and then his acceptance of brotherhood brought about his death by those who disagreed. The peaceful attempt to march on Selma, songs of “We Shall Overcome”, got them as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back. The Vietnam conflict, The Watts riots, The assassination of Robert Kennedy, the presidency of Richard Nixon, The White House Plumbers, Watergate, The resignation of a president. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Civil unrest, Civil rights, Political upheaval, Cultural divergence. The wrath of injustice was swinging its arm and laying devastation to all it touched. Something was destined to stop it. We had grown up and were tired of the injustice, tired of the lies, deceit, tired and determined to do something about it.

The 60’s not only represented the hippy movement, but a fresh outlook on humanity. The flower power generation was born out of the frustration of the Vietnam War. It provided the perfect catalyst for an imperfect time. If the war had not existed it would have been something else. We had so many injustices to choose from. But we had our banner to wave. The war was so misreported by the biased media that it was made for us. For every one truthful, good reporter wanting to write what was really happening, there were five more who wanted to write their view; slanted, biased, untruthful. For every Joe Galloway writing about the hell the 7th Calvary commanded by Lt. Colonel Hal Moore went through when in November 1965, 450 U.S. soldiers were dropped into a small clearing in the Ia Drang Valley. They quickly discovered 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers surrounded them. It did not matter that these actions at landing zones X-Ray and Albany constituted one of the most savage and significant battles of the Vietnam War. What mattered to America were the dozen reporters willing to show the death and devastation we caused in winning that battle.

If U.S. forces took a village, fighting courageously, loosing lives, the media did not cover that. The media covered the people hurt, misplaced, out of a home. Never mind those three days before our attack a Viet Cong commander had tied the village mayor to a pole, cut his stomach open while he was still alive letting the intestines fall to the ground where the pigs could eat them. Then his entire detachment raped and killed the small girls and women in the village. See, that was not the news. The news was the military burning the village so the Viet Cong would not return. Wide-angle shots of homeless Vietnamese families standing there watching their huts burn. Never mind the fact that we moved them to a new village. Or even that the times we built them a new one. No, can’t report that. Not news, only tears were news, our demeaning, dehumanizing methods were news. The radical arm of the movement loved it. They reveled in it. They rolled over the news like a happy puppy marking its territory. It was custom made for them.

I was never a hippy in the visceral sense of the term. But I was a part of it, I was a retuning vet disgruntled and disturbed over the way the war was going. Like my brothers in arms, I had seen first hand that we really had no plan. We really had no idea what to do. This was a different kind of war; it took a different kind of tactics and the military refused to acknowledge this. This was not a war of attrition, we were trained to win a battle sending the enemy home and this enemy was already home. After much thought my voice was with them and like so many others my age; we changed the course of a few moments in history.

There are those today who think they can do the same as we did then. It will never happen, not in this time and generation. The people are gone, the profits, the songwriters, the singers, the feeling, the times they were a changing and they will not change again.

This is a different war; it is not a war on a given enemy, fought with fronts and tactics. It is a war on terrorism and as long as one person is willing to strap a bomb to their chest, walk into a crowd and blow everyone up, our way of life is at risk. As most people, I feel something needs to be done about Iraq. But the fact of the matter terrorism will continue. And as Americans we tend to forget things. We tend to forget our losses. But, I will let you in on a little secret. The military men and women never forget. Each man and woman can tell you with perfect clarity what happened. Perhaps that’s the distinction between us. They remember and fight to insure it is never repeated. We put it in the back of our mind and think it will never happen again.