Well not I normally agree with Skyfire but in a way he's right.
There was a good deal of burn out. That kind of passion is hard to keep going, especially intergenerationally.
There were activists that went from casual drug use to hard core drug use, of course. It's intellectually dishonest to ignore that at least some people are going to develop a drug problem.
As for sex, I don't think it was the "free love" that was the problem so much as the free and unprotected love. This goes especially for the Gay community which was finally coming into it's own at a time when there were no STDs known that couldn't be treated or dealt with.
By the time AIDS was discovered, a large number of the really active gay leaders were infected and dying.
Yeah, one can say that the 60's had consequences. But every period in history has that. The societal rebellion and change of the 60s was a natural and probably necessary result fo the repression that proceeded it. And one cant' talk about the negatives of the period without also acknowledging the good. (or vice versa)
No, actually, Skyfire was wrong in everything he said.
The protest period started in about 1961 with Northern students heading south to work with the civil rights movement in the south. Here, after a short time, many of the students were radicalized by the violence of the authourities.
Then JFK happened, the Warren Commission, Johnson's escalation in Vietnam and the expansion of the draft. The antiwar movement started on the heels of the civil rights protests, and had a radicalized element built in, due to their experiences in the South.
Drugs and the use thereof; the vast majority of young people experimented with marijuana, and a much smaller minority tried LSD, mescaline, peyote and other hallucinogens. A very tiny minority of "protesters" did any injectable drugs, ie heroin or used cocain. Some entertainers did, but in general, the youth movement's drug of choice, by overwhelming majority, was the herb.
By 1973, the war in Vietnam was winding down, Nixon was chased from office, the draft was also winding down, and protesters also wound down. The reasons for many of the protestors activism were eliminated. The real "protest movement" had ended by 1973.
The gay rights movement came along quite late in this period, becoming noticeable by 1972. The "women's lib", later simply the women's movement, began in 1968, reached its peak just before the defeat of the ERA.
Aids was an 80's phenomenon, and actually revitalized the Gay rights movement. The murder of John Lennon ocurred long after the protest movement was over and being subject to revisionist history.
The societal rebellion, as you refer to it, was never that. Most of the youth were radicalized initially by the JFK assassination, and Johnson's escalation of the war. We saw that our institutions could not be trusted.
Look, I'm not trying to glamorize the 60's, there was lots of fucked up stuff happening, but the idea that we, collectively, could change the world, was true. Attitudes did soften, racism did decrease, the war was unpopularized and was ended. Evidence for this can be seen in our current president, and with our short toleration for unjust war, ie Iraq.
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OF course getting back to the original question, the biggest reason that protests don't seem to happen like that anymore actually has more to do with the simple fact that that society is not the one we live in now.\
This is true, due, in no small part, to the events of the period from 1961 to 1973.
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Today much of the protesting is profesionalized. Especially among Gays. Not that having skilled activists can't be useful. But too often al the work was left for a small core of people to do.
Also governments have gotten better at stemming dissent. And the media often downplays or misrepresents protests (the anti-War protests before we invaded Iraq being a great example. Time after time the numbers of people were not only undercounted but often represented as violent anarchists outside the mainstream). Dissenters and those who try to quash it are in an arms race. Each ha sot outsmart the other. For a god while, the people protecting the status quo were simply better at what they did.
On a similar note, the right got better at propaganda and building coalitions. The left meanwhile, atomized into small single issue groups. During it's height, every con could see how free markets and Christianity and any number of other conservative issues were all related. Meanwhile environmentalists and gay activists and black civil rights leaders rarely seemed to find any common ground. The left seemed to forget one of it's core principles.. that we are all related and interdependent.
And there was 9-11. That sure didn't help. Come to think of it, the conformity of the 80s wasn't so great either.
And there was complacency. Sad to say, I think too many underestimated the right, thinking that living one's own life was hard enough. WHy get involved in activism?
However, on the plus side, I think this too is changing. Prop 8 was a wake up call. So was the Shrub admin.
Sorry to be so long winded about this[/quote]
We have been heading toward our current state since 1980. Even Clinton's administration was not able to completely reverse the negative trend following the Reagan/BushI years. BushII made it worse, and here we are, fucked again.
I agree with you about complacency. Hell, we all got old and had kids of our own. The reality of earning a living sets in at some point. My point is that the protest era, 1961 to 1973, was complex, but important in changing the general direction and softening the attitudes prevalent before those times.
I speak of these things from personal experience, as a Vietnam draftee (who enlisted in the Marines after receiving my draft notification), class of '67. I came back from Vietnam radicalized, too, and was a part of that movement. It wasn't at all like the TV series' that depict the era. The "free love" movement, ie, the sexual revolution, was a 1970's phenomenon, an extension of the wider rebellion of the 60's, a time when we all moved toward personal growth and experimentation. "Free love" is a footnote to the protest movement, an adjunct to it.
The movement was about ending the war, mostly. Once that battle was won, the raison-d'etre of the movement was gone. That is why the protest movement ended, because the war and the draft ended. We won, we ended the war, influenced the country enough to get rid of Nixon, and overt racism became unacceptable.