 A
day late for Father's Day, this article is a tribute to my father. Life
has not been terribly fair to him, but he greets every challenge he has
faced with equanimity and grace, and he is kind and generous to a
fault. He taught me to think for myself, and then to fight for what I
believe in, no matter what. I just hope I will be able to pass on a
fraction of the wisdom to others that he has. He has always been, and
remains today, my role model, my intellectual foil, and my inspiration.
Take a bow, Dad.
There are
a lot of people -- seemingly mostly embittered born-again
conservatives, professional cynics, and disengaged academics -- second
guessing the 60s these days, on this the 40th anniversary of Sergeant
Pepper and the Summer of Love. They would have us believe the era was
one of illusory and untenable change, of the co-opting of humanism for
economic gain, and of lazy uncommitted people jumping on a convenient
'revolutionary' bandwagon as an excuse to take drugs or start riots.
I
suppose this was to be expected. The collapse of that amazing social
revolution left many of us depressed, disillusioned and angry. Some of
those who missed out are, I suspect, a bit envious and all too willing
to embrace the schadenfreude
of the revolution's demise. There is no small amount of guilt from
those who, for selfish reasons, abandoned the lofty ideals of the day
to make fortunes in real estate or finance or law -- the slogan of the
day was "If you're not part of the solution you're part of the
problem", and many of us, if we were to be honest, would have to admit
that we have become part of the problem. Easiest, then, to associate
those days with hopeless naïveté and write it all off as a bad trip.
Not so fast.
What was the 1965-1975 social revolution really
all about? It was, first and foremost, a power play -- a statement from
a large cohort of young people (mostly quite well-off but disconnected
from the political and economic mainstream) that the values and ways of
living that were popular in 1965 were no longer acceptable, a
protracted protest that "we weren't going to take it anymore". "It" was:
- conformity
- soulless consumerism
- war- and hate-mongering (notably the Vietnam War)
- xenophobia, racism, and sexism
- elitism and inequity, and
- corporatism (then described as "the military-industrial complex").
The
values that we espoused to take their place were: love, peace, justice,
spirituality, social experimentation, an organic, communal lifestyle,
and "power to the people". This was not that long after the McCarthy
anti-communist witch hunts in the US, and these ideals were extremely
threatening to those who believed fiercely in law and order, in respect
for the "establishment", in obedience to authority, in the endless
struggle of "good" against "evil", and in the ethic of hard work. When
Timothy Leary advised an entire generation to "turn on, tune in and
drop out" this was seen by many as heretical, dangerous, even criminal.
Very few bothered to understand what he really meant.
This revolution had two factions: the political
progressives, who wanted to overthrow corrupt corporatist regimes and
replace them with true egalitarian economies and societies, and the social progressives,
who thought that was a waste of time and felt it was more useful to get
back to the Earth and learn to commune with each other and with nature.
I tried, without real success, to reconcile the two, and so I never
really belonged to either group.
This was the only time in my
life I ever really argued with my father, a lifelong and very
thoughtful progressive: When I started talking about the need to "tear
down the walls", and to organize before "the Man" began to arrest us
and shoot us down, he told me, angrily, that I made no sense, that I
was ignorant of the facts and lacked critical thinking skills, and that
my generation's uninformed and paranoid views threatened to undermine
the credibility of a progressive movement that had been struggling for
lifetimes -- his and those before him, since the dawn of the industrial
era -- to help the poor and powerless live better lives. He told me to
keep my mouth shut until I knew what I was talking about. (He was
right, though of course I did not follow his advice.)
Some of
the things we strove, clumsily, to espouse and create -- the peace
movement, the search for true justice, self-change and spirituality,
egalitarianism, and living healthy, natural lifestyles -- are enjoying
something of a subtle, pragmatic resurgence, and have been since the
1990s. It is a motley crew advocating these things, a mix of 1960s
diehards who have held onto our idealism, and two or three new
generations who seek similar things but are doing so their own way,
with their own cohort, using a somewhat different language to describe
it: Communes are now Intentional Communities, "finding yourself' is now
self-actualization or self-improvement, and Power to the People is now
equal opportunity, equity and heeding the Wisdom of Crowds. I think it
is a bit sad, and illustrative of the degree of fragmentation and
isolation in our modern society, that each generation is to some extent
working towards these things independently, rather than together -- a
series of ironic new unintentional Generation Gaps. Some things never
change.
What intrigues me is trying to understand why some of
the goals of recent social revolution have been substantially achieved,
while others, just as urgently needed and just as worthy, have not.
Here's my scorecard, 1965-2007:
| Significant Change Achieved | Mixed Success at Achieving Change | No Significant Change Achieved | | Opportunities for Women | Rights for Homosexuals | Community-Based Society | | Reduction in Tobacco Consumption | Reduction in Racism | Reduction in Cruelty to Animals | | Easing of Workplace Dress Codes | Reduction in Spousal/Child Abuse | Peace Movement |
|
| NoLogo Anti-Consumerism Movement |
|
| Reduction in Xenophobia |
|
| Reform of Corporatism |
|
| Environmental & Energy Responsibility |
|
| Economic Mobility and Opportunity |
Two things seem to differentiate the successful movements from the failures: How easy it is to make the change, and the number of people who perceive that they have a personal stake
in the change. Communities that are ethnically and racially integrated
have been able to achieve greater cultural harmony than those that are
segregated because it's easier for them (they experience diversity
daily), and because they are more likely to have neighbours of
different cultures and ethnicity, so they have more at stake in getting
along with them. The horrific cruelty to animals in factory farms is
deliberately kept invisible to us, so we have no personal stake in
their suffering, and we've been convinced by the Big Agriculture
oligopoly that small family farms are not viable and that factory
farmed foods are 'economic', so we perceive supporting local,
small-scale, humane, free-range farming as too hard.
The
impact of the political lobbying and massive PR spending of the
corpocracy (with full mainstream media complicity), has ensured that
change that threatens established economic and political interests is
seen as hard to achieve and 'radical', and change advocates have been
deliberately 'depersonalized' so that peace activists, anti-globalists,
pro-immigrant groups, the people of Iraq, environmentalists
and 'liberals' are seen as 'others', and their labels stigmatized. We
are easily brainwashed (by our aversion to change and fear of the
unknown) to see them as dangerous, a bit weird, so we can't relate to
them, or their issues, personally ("what is 'the environment' they are
talking about anyway, and how can I personally get worked up about the
ozone layer and greenhouse gases -- it's just too abstract").
Those
of us who have struggled unsuccessfully for the changes in the right
column above have tended to beat ourselves -- and each other -- up for
our failures, but we shouldn't. We can't care for something we can't
see, and life is challenging enough without being told that we must
make hard changes -- we will wait until we have no other choice,
whether that's too late or not.
This is perhaps why the social
revolution of the 1960s fizzled out in the early 1970s. Our causes were
too hard and too abstract. Once we ended the War in Vietnam (which was
hard but not abstract) we were spent.
So what do we do, those of us still fighting for these causes, and those of us who've just discovered them? Find a way to make it easy. And find a way to make it real, personal.
If you hate factory farming, work to invent plant-based meat
substitutes that are inexpensive and delicious and taste like meat. And
then smuggle a camera into the factory farm your meat comes from and
show the film to your neighbours. Make it easy for them to change, and
make them care.
My Dad told me that, forty years ago. He's still teaching me.
Happy Father's Day, everyone.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
