Lies, Lies and More Lies: No Wonder Baby Boomers Have Such a Distrust of Authority

More Notes from Ken Burns' The Vietnam War.

Just as the French underestimated the enemy at Dien Bien Phu, so did the U.S. consistently underestimate the enemy's strength and resolve. Even when we knew it was a mistake to get more deeply involved, we barged ahead anyways.* And all throughout we attempted to conceal from the American public what we were up to.

At first, we only sent advisors. Inconsequential results.
Next, we sent more advisors. Because President Johnson didn't want this fact known to the American people, it was done without fanfare, quietly and unobserved.
Next we sent troops. "They won't fight," they said, but would just stay in the background. Even so, the president didn't want this fact known to the American people.
Next, we're sending still more troops, this time to fight. Again, the president didn't want this fact known to the American people and it was hoped no one would notice.
Even as our involvement mounted, we were losing the war. "Gotta send more troops," went the cry. Simultaneously and privately, "Better not let the American people find out."

As the war went on, it became increasingly necessary to step up our response. It's hard to send 100,000 and 300,000 and 500,000 young men to potentially die without someone eventually noticing at home.

Karl Marlantes: "My bitterness about the political powers at the time was, first of all, the lying." I can understand policy errors and mistakes, if made with noble hearts. "That McNamara knew in 1965, three years before I was there that the war was unwinnable, that's what makes me mad."

Making mistakes is one thing, Marlantes said. Covering them up is "simply killing people to protect your own ego."

It's a famous joke, but so frequently true that it's become cliche. "How can you tell a politician is lying? His lips are moving."

LBJ kept telling people we're all about peace. Simultaneously, we start bombing villages with napalm.

Once LBJ bailed and Nixon took the White House, the same game continued. Tell the people what they want to hear and do what you want to do.

"I have a plan for getting us out of Vietnam," Nixon said. He concealed the truth that his plan was to win the war, which was already proven unwinnable.

According to Albert Einstein the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.

I like the refrain for "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"  It goes like this: "When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"

I am sad for our veterans who lost their lives in this meaningless conflict, and for those who have struggled with lifelong disabilities. Trivia: More than 200 journalists died covering the war.

* According to a recent New Yorker story on Kissinger, he knew the war was unwinnable as early as 1965.

Are You Still Grappling with the Viet Nam War

Carrying wounded soldier through a swamp. National Archives.

What really happened? The Viet Nam War was like nothing we'd every experienced before. It was a wedge the divided many young people from their parents, and others from their peers. Some of us died, some protested, and some left the country to avoid the draft. And many of us wish we'd behaved.

Did you go to Viet Nam and end up with Agent Orange health issues the rest of your life? Did you later regret your decision to enlist? Do you wish you'd done more for your country?

Did you protest the war? How did you first come to believe the war was wrong? In retrospect did you feel you were swept away by youthful idealism? Or do you wish you'd done more and had been more aware earlier than you were?

* * * *

Observation tower in Viet Nam. National Archives

I'm still attempting to understand a history that my generation lived through that remains unresolved. It seems like one of those things we don’t talk about much, like cousin Leah’s family secret.

Many of those who protested the war feel conflicted because they have friends or relatives who served. They don’t know how to place patriotism and feelings about an unjust war into a proper relationship.

We were told to believe what our leaders were telling us, while history has demonstrated and reiterated repeatedly that the war was a crock, a patchwork of lies from start to finish. Documents released decades later via the Freedom of Information Act confirm that the war was not only built on lies, but that the extent of the corruption and hubris was far worse than we imagined.

I recently wrote a poem about the death of a friend at whose funeral I was a pallbearer. Getting in touch with that pain showed me that I’d not yet fully processed that experience. The manner in which I continue to be drawn to reflect on the war shows me that this, too, is unresolved.

Maybe it’s not really possible to neatly package our experiences so we can put them on a mental shelf and be done with them. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I have a hard time believing that I’m the only one who is still struggling to understand what we went through in the Sixties and early Seventies.

HERE IS A LINK to 14 articles I've written in response to various triggers such as Ken Burns' Viet Nam documentary, readings and memories of various memories from my youth.

What's your story?

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Revisited

"Falsehood is a recognized and extremely useful weapon in warfare, and every country uses it quite deliberately to deceive its own people, to attract neutrals, and to mislead the enemy. The ignorant and innocent masses in each country are unaware at the time that they are being misled, and when it is all over only here and there are the falsehoods discovered and exposed. As it is all past history and the desired effect has been produced by the stories and statements, no one troubles to investigate the facts and establish the truth."
--Introduction to Arthur Ponsonby's Falsehood in Wartime

* * * *
If reading about the lies and misdeeds of one's own government gives you indigestion, then that is good. It ought to. As Arthur Ponsonby notes, without lies there would be “no reason and no will for war.”

Anne Morelli has summarized and systematized the contents of Ponsonby's classic in "ten commandments of propaganda."

1. We do not want war.   (Both Woodrow Wilson and FDR ran on this platform promise.)
2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
3. The enemy is the face of the devil.
4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interest. (Just War Theory)
5. The enemy systematically commits cruelties; our mishaps are involuntary. (My Lai)
6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous. (Viet Nam War reporting.)
8. Artists and intellectuals back our cause. (Hmmm)
9. Our cause is sacred. (Domino Theory)
10. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors. (Antiwar protesters)

* * * *
Lying, of course, doesn't just happen in wartime, and that governments or people lie should not surprise us. What is extraordinary, he says, is our "amazing readiness to believe. It is, indeed, because of human credulity that lies flourish."

Against this backdrop we visit the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as detailed in Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields.

The significance of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 is this: As a result of two attacks on the USS Maddox by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, Lyndon Johnson successfully obtained unanimous approval from Congress and 88-2 in the Senate to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which gave our country the right to take "all necessary measures" to repel the enemy and "prevent further aggression."

BUT... What really happened?

First, it was not reported anywhere that the U.S. had been assisting South Vietnamese commandoes who were conducting raids on North Vietnamese installations. These raids were controlled by and sustained by the U.S. Navy, "attacking targets selected by the CIA in an operation paid for by the United States."

Second, and more significantly, the second attack on the Maddox never happened. We made it up.

So LBJ announces that these two assaults (the second fabricated and completely fictitious) on our ship were unprovoked. Johnson now had his pretext for retaliation against Hanoi, "an action U.S. officials had been discussing for some time." We soon ramped up the bombing campaigns and in three and a half years dropped 643,000 tons of bombs as part of what was named Rolling Thunder.

The outcome of these two incidents was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for deploying U.S. conventional forces and the commencement of open warfare against North Vietnam.

So, North Vietnam fired a couple torpedos at us, and in return we destroyed 65 percent of their petroleum facilities, 60 percent of their bridges, 9.821 vehicles, and 2000 rail cars. According to Chamberlin, for every dollar of damage inflicted we spent $6.60. 1,000 Americans were killed or captured.

Rolling Thunder did nothing to stop infiltration by North Vietnamese into South Vietnam. It did give justification for Moscow and Beijing to increase their aid to Hanoi.

The saddest part of all this is the "collateral damage," a euphemism for the killing of civilians, 52,000 in this campaign.

* * * *
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Is the U.S. the only country that has ever behaved this way? Hardly. Bullies have always found a pretext for getting what they want. The Soviet Union used the Orzel incident to take over Estonia. During the American Civil War 7 French soldiers were killed on the beach at Vera Cruz, so France took over Mexico and installed Austrian monarch Maximillian as Emperor to run the country (till he was shot and the Europeans expelled a couple years later.)

Don't you just love the way bullies make excuses for their actions? "Might makes right," they say.

The Thích Quảng Đức Episode (A Snapshot from The Cold War's Killing Fields)

In October I read Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War Killing Fields, which I wrote about here. During the time I was reading it I repeatedly indicated to people that it was one of the saddest books I've ever read. The sadness came from two sources. First, because of the quantity of human suffering that has occurred over the course of my lifetime since World War II. And second, my own grief over the role the U.S. has played in contributing to civilian suffering in so many places and in so many ways.

The power of the book comes from the author's efforts to bring context to the manifold stories which may have made national news but which were presented without our real understanding. Many stories show how the U.S. government deliberately twisted the facts in order to achieve its own ends. Eventually, as in the case of the Viet Nam War, the public no matter trusted its government's interpretations and spin.

It's my hope to produce a series of blog posts highlighting several examples from our recent history so that we understand more clearly why there are such divergent views and attitudes about who we are as a nation.

The story of Thích Quảng Đức begins on page 201 in Chamberlin's book. It produced one of the most memorable images from the conflict in Southeast Asia, a Buddhist monk self-immolating. What was less clear to most Americans was the reason this man burned himself to death in the middle of a busy intersection.

Quảng Đức was protesting the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngô Đình Diệm. Viet Nam was between 70 and 90% Buddhist, but the U.S. backed President Diem was Catholic. The sacrificial death aimed to draw attention to the persecution and policies of the Diem government.

Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo. Browne and David Halberstam of the New York Times were present because the day before someone notified the press corps in Saigon that "something important" was going to happen outside the Cambodian Embassy the following morning. Most of the reporters ignored this information,

The incident sparked protests throughout the country. In response President Diem declared martial law and claimed the protests were stoked by the National Liberation Front (NLF). The First Lady remarked that she "would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show."

John Kennedy and his administration were at odds as to how to respond to these events. Diem had to go but would the next puppet president be any better? Ultimately our government solved the problem by supporting a coup that began on November 1 with U.S. government approval and on November 2 Diem, having surrendered, was shot inside an armored vehicle while being taken into custody. 20 days later the U.S. president would likewise be on the receiving end of a bullet in the head.

* * * * 

The incident that triggered this unraveling of the Diem government took place on June 11. On June 12 another significant event occurred. NAACP leader and civil rights activist Medgar Evers, was shot from behind and killed as he walked toward his home in Mississippi after a long day's work. The incident was one of many that strengthened the resolve of civil rights leaders across the country and especially throughout the Jim Crow South.

Two powerful songs were written in response to this cold-blooded murder, Nina Simone's Missisippi Goddam and Bob Dylan's Only a Pawn in Their Game, which he sang later that summer at the Washington D.C. March for Civil Rights, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963. 

* * * * 

Grief is a process that though hard to go through is intended to result in acceptance and measure of healing or inner resolution. Those stages are (1) denial, (2) anger, (3) bargaining, (4) depression, and (5) acceptance. What I have learned over the course of a lifetime is that the grieving process takes time, sometimes years and sometimes decades.

Is it possible that moving from innocence to maturity is a process similar to grief in which we have to come to terms with lost innocence. We know the Peter Pan Syndrome is about boys who won't grow up. Is it possible that we have over-believed in the goodness of our government, America the Beautiful, beacon of light to the world?

Marvin Gaye nailed it when he sang, "What's Goin' On?" in 1970.  And the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes seems to have had all this in mind when he wrote,

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; 

 the more knowledge, the more grief." (Eccles. 1:18)

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS STORY 

1. Chamberlin's book provides context to help us understand many of the news stories we heard about or observed during our lifetimes.

2. Events of 1963 became a critical turning point in both the war in Southeast Asia and in the Civil Rights movement in America.

3. American power has not always been used benevolently or wisely. The attempt to help people gain a more realistic picture of our nation and its abuses of power should not be taken to be akin to "hate America first." There are reasons people distrust power. We need to understand where people are coming from in order to be bridge-builders instead of wall-builders.

Related Links
My initial review of  The Cold War's Killing Fields
Everything Is Broken
The 1971 Concert for Bangladesh

1964: No Question About It, The Times Were A-Changin'

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’
--the prescient Bob Dylan
First performed live: 26 Oct 1963

We were just kids.

I just finished watching the American Experience documentary about 1964, the year America split. It was a year of racial conflicts, generational conflicts, gender conflicts and political conflicts. It was a year in which significant changes were beginning to take place, foreshadowing the turbulence to come. What follows are some notes I jotted as the program covered events from January to December of that year.

“People who grew up with outhouses in their back yard are now taking their children to vacations on a lake,” said Rick Pearlstein in the documentary. This was my experience precisely. 

When the year opened, it had only been five weeks since the Kennedy assassination. LBJ had only been sworn into office weeks earlier, but at the outset he was determined to take advantage of the office, declaring an unconditional war on poverty in his January 8 State of the Union address.

On January 20 my family moved from Cleveland to New Jersey, an incident without any media notice whatsoever, but it was a move that made a significant impact on my life personally.

18 days later, on February 7, the Beatles planted their feet on American soil bringing a sense of joy and hopefulness, while simultaneously sowing seeds of rebellion in a somewhat harmless way as boys began avoiding barbershops. Parents didn't like it.

The documentary showed a photo shoot that brought together the Beatles and Cassius Clay. Clay, who would soon become a Muslim and change his name to Muhammed Ali was not yet champion of the world. The Beatles' handlers sought to pair them up with Sonny Liston, but Liston was too serious and declined the distraction. Cassius Clay found it to be just another audacious "day in the life."

The Clay vs Liston fight took place on Feb 25, and we all know what happened next. Clay, who had won Olympic Gold in 1960, scored an upset.

* * * *
1964 was a presidential election year which ultimately pitted Barry Goldwater against LBJ. Goldwater's rise was considered the birth of the modern conservative movement.

* * * *

Photo released into public domain by Ron White.

The World's Fair in New York was given a brief nod, in part for having been the launching pad for the Mustang. Many people remember the Unisphere as symbol of the World's Fair. My neighbor's father was a union welder who worked on the construction of that iconic symbol. What many people forget is how it was a two-year World's Fair. Because of our proximity, we hosted a family reunion in our new home, which became a springboard for many relatives to attend the Fair.

* * * *
The documentary zeroes in on the impact youth were beginning to make. More kids, and more kids with Money. The theme of Youth would be woven into the fabric of this documentary several times.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

* * * *
It was in 1964 that President Johnson introduced new phrase: The Great Society, which would included a promise to end racial injustice and bring an end to poverty.

Civil Rights protests were continuing in the South where civil rights activists were striving to register black voters. There was new legislation to end Jim Crowe rules in the South, but efforts to pass a Civil Rights Bill in Congress was met with the longest filibuster in U.S. history, two months duration. Ultimately the revolutionary Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.

* * * *
Snippets in passing included young fans' extreme emotional craziness for Ringo, Andy Warhol's Cambell's Soup cans and Ken Kesey's LSD-infused madcap cross-country adventure with the Merry Pranksters.

* * * *
Freedom Summer in 1964 brought manifold college students to the Deep South as part of the effort to end discrimination against blacks. On June 21 three young Civil Rights workers --Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, Mickey Schwerner -- came to Mississippi as volunteers in this effort. When they came South they had been warned to be careful about being out after dark. When they got arrested, purportedly for speeding, they were held and then released... after dark, never to be seen again alive.

* * * *
Republican National Convention took place at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. In his acceptance of the nomination he famously stated, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice..." Mad Magazine would soon feature a mushroom cloud in one of its cartoons expressing concern about what this really could mean.

* * * *
"Summer's right for Dancing in the Streets" -- Martha Reeves and the Vandellas hit song played against scenes of violence in the streets. It was apparent something was cooking...

* * * *
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident puts Viet Nam on front page of newspapers. In truth, Johnson and high government officials distorted the facts in order to escalate his powers. Johnson retaliated against the North Viet Nam by seeking and obtaining from Congress a blank check to expand the war in Viet Nam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the Southeast Asia Resolution, Pub.L. 88–408, 78 Stat. 384, enacted August 10, 1964, was a joint resolution that the United States Congress passed on August 7, 1964, in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

This legislation was of historical significance because it gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

* * * *
Under Johnson there was an emerging sense of betrayal by our own government, -- faultlines around politics, race, gender, and what is status quo began to appear. When the Warren Report declared Lee Harvey Oswald to be the sole gunman in the Kennedy Assassination it only exacerbated our sense of distrust in our government.

* * * *
Free Speech Movement in Berkeley led to a campus demonstration that would foreshadow many years of student protests. In Berkeley 800 demonstrators arrested. Though charges were dropped it was labeled as the beginning of the Student Movement, which would shape American politics for years to come.

* * * *

The Johnson vs Goldwater election in November pitted to very different visions.

Johnson made this promise: "Everyone can have a job. Every kid can have an education... in time we can have the Great Society we're all entitled to."

Goldwater came back with: "We can prevent depression. We ca have full employment. I've heard there pipe dreams for the mast 30 years and I've never seen one of them come true."

Johnson took his landslide as a mandate, but 27 million people voted for Goldwater and this became the foundation of a conservative movement that would find resurgence. Young Republicans regrouped...

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Young people would grow to be a force. Sam Cooke's hit song at the end of '64 announced "Change is gonna come..."

The events of 1964 revealed a new mix of idealism and outrage. Though hindsight is 20/20, very few people at the time really saw what was about to come down.

If you get a chance, it's a surprisingly insightful assessment of the time...

One More Thing To Worry About

"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." ~ P. J. Plauger

In late May North Korea tested a nuclear device.

A May 31 story by Time journalist Robert Baer began, "It's not what we know about rogue states and their nuclear bombs that should scare us — it's what we don't know. North Korea's test of a nuclear device on Monday may not have come as a surprise to Washington, but only in the sense that Washington knew Pyongyang was defiant enough to set one off. Beyond that, truth be told, Washington is completely in the dark about North Korea's intentions. It can only expect the worse and hope for the better."

Then there's the nuclear activity in Iran. In recent speeches President Obama has defended the right of Iran to have nuclear power, despite fears in some camps that they are simultaneously developing nuclear weapons. Some paint this picture with very dark pigments as if it were something new, but remember that it was the U.S. that helped the Shah develop nuclear power during its "Atoms For Peace" program in the 1950's. This was long before the Ayatollah threw out the Western blasphemers during the Carter era.

I do not know what to think about the North Korea news. The news that did scare me last week was that the Taliban army was approaching Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. It's hard, from this distance to know what these news accounts mean. Pakistan's President, Mr Asif Ali Zardari states that it is a real threat only if the West does not help Pakistan keep democracy stable over there.*

In other words, send money. Are we being extorted? Is this a bribe? "Help our country and you will be able to sleep better at night." That's what it sounds like to me.

Then there are those Pakistanis who are still bitter that they lost their three wars with India. Most Americans don't even remember those wars because two (1965 and 1971) were during our own Viet Nam distraction. Today both nations are armed with nukes. And with the Taliban army apparently eyeballing the Pakistan arsenal, there really might be something here to worry about.

For now, I have plenty of other things on my plate, and there's nothing I can do about it anyways. It kind of makes you wonder how many other threats there are out there that we don't have a clue about.

* "Nukes could fall into hands of Taliban if democracy fails" HinduTimes Online

The Fighting Never Ends

"I don't think this is a very bright page in American history." ~ Robert Kennedy

I've been reading a biography of James K. Polk called... Polk. He's not someone the average citizen really knows much about, despite being a U.S. president. He pretty much gets lumped in with a host of other unknowns like Harrison, Tyler, Taylor and everyone's favorite unknown Millard Fillmore.

Polk really did make some significant moves, nearly doubling the size of the United States through aggressive negotiations with England to take Oregon and a dubious war with Mexico to secure Texas to California. The book is loaded with anecdotes and details which I certainly have no space for, but the net net is this: Polk, the book, is a worthy read.

In my junior year in high school we had a great set of team teachers who provided a more complex view of U.S. history than we'd previously encountered. Our studies of the Mexican war were especially interesting, told from the point of view of Mexico. It wasn't pretty. Especially when the philosophical underpinnings were melded with the religious notion of Manifest Destiny. It is God's will that we steal these lands, because we will put them to better use than they can.

As the war drums began to sound, a homely looking skinny representative from Illinois stood up in Congress and called the president on the carpet saying this war had no right to be. Mr. Lincoln's arguments failed to win the day, and the war was carried to its ignominious conclusion.

Like many wars, the Mexican war continued to be "fought" long after the bullets stopped flying, hence Bobby Kennedy's comment during a trip to Indonesia in 1962. Upon hearing this remark, Vice President Lyndon Johnson released his own volley of venom, defending the history books by calling our Texas land grab "a bright page indeed."

Ironically, the former Texas senator helped immerse us in yet another controversial war, this one in Southeast Asia, a war that nearly split the country. More than forty years later, this war too is being debated, its motivations and costs and value heavily examined and re-interpreted. Unpopular war, yes. Yet many still defend its ends, despite the manner in which it was executed.

The 21st century introduced yet another controversial war. Just last week I saw an article saying this war, maligned as it is, will look different fifty to a hundred years from now. I do not wish to comment on that. My only comment here is that I'm willing to guess that fifty to one hundred years from now, we will still not have consensus, and somewhere someone will be arguing about it with someone else who disagrees with them.

Oh well...

One more trivial piece I learned from this biography about our second president from Tennessee. He was a slave owner. Almost immediately after leaving office he died, probably from the stress of this demanding occupation. In his will he freed his slaves... which would go into effect when his wife passed away. Unfortunately for the slaves, his wife lived 42 more years. Fortunately for the slaves, that skinny fellow from Illinois became president in twelve years, and declared those slaves free men in 15. Such are the twists and turns of history.

Reclaiming the Sixties

The Sixties, like all periods of our history, cannot be lumped into one homogenous experience. Yes, some things were shared universally. Our president was assassinated in 1963. Our values were challenged. Our cities burned. Viet Nam and the Deep South racism, so highly visible through the medium of television, scarred our national conscience. The values of the American Dream were called into question.

But as time has elapsed the Sixties became more associated with hippies, drugs, psychedelic music, and dropping out… all having the appearance more of faddishness than significance. The sense of hippiedom being a fad was reinforced by the rapidity with which Seventies youth embraced the Yuppie values of high fashion and glitz.

For the record, I became depressed by the new wave of Yuppie values. Perhaps because I truly bought into many of the key issues that had been brought to the forefront during the Sixties. These are the primary values that resonated with me, and which I still hold as valid.

1. Question authority. In other words, don’t accept everything you hear, wherever you hear it from… including here. Think things through, make your decisions because you have weighed things out for yourself. Even the Apostle Paul in the Bible said that his words should not be taken as authoritative until his hearers checked things out with the Old Testament truths that had been handed down.

This idea flew directly in the face of the prevailing attitude of the day, “My country, right or wrong.” No wonder the “hippie philosophy” created so much ire.

2. There is more to life than the material world. More than anything, the youth of the Sixties were especially misunderstood on this point, and in retrospect misunderstood their parents’ generation. We did not know what it was like to be raised during the Great Depression. When our parents gave us clothes and stocked refrigerators and gifts, they were doing something for us that seemed meaningful. My mother remembers living on navy beans for a while in West Virginia. Grandpa would come home with a hundred pound sack of navy beans. That was all they had, all they could afford.

And so, many young people in the Sixties had large homes in suburbia, surrounded by manifold blessings of the good life, and still felt empty. They learned through experience that there was more to life than things. Without love, even a castle is little more than collection of empty rooms.

And so, there was a reaction against materialism, against “things.” There have been many misunderstandings on this matter, but the message remains true that life is more than gadgets, toys and things. “Love is all you need” is a bit of a simplification, since I can’t pay my heating bill with “love.” But love for my family will sufficiently motivate me to do what it takes to provide for my family, which includes paying those nasty heating bills.

3. The “Beautiful People.” I remember sitting in the donut shop in Athens, Ohio with some other Ohio University hippie-type students and thinking, “These people are so beautiful, but in the ‘success’ world they would probably all be rejects.” The one fellow’s beard concealed a weak chin, another girl did not fit the Barbie mold, yet each was a person, a human being with special value. To the degree that we determine value based on outward appearance, race, economic earning power or social status, to that very degree we have become impoverished as a culture.

4. Increasing awareness of the power of the Military-Industrial Complex. Might makes right was not a value of the hippies. Flower Power, which is looked back on as something of a joke today, had at its heart a seed thought: ideas have power, too. Yes, there is evil in the world, and naivete was certainly part of the reason the seeds of Flower Power found such fertile soil in our hearts. But there were real issues being raised as regards what war and the military-industrial complex was doing to our humanity. On this, there is more to say, but we’ll follow up on that tomorrow.

Here’s a song from Bob Dylan’s second album which became somewhat of an anthem for that era. I remember singing it as part of our youth group at First Presbyterian Church in Pluckemin, NJ. Its questions still beg for answers today.

Blowing In The Wind

How many roads must a man walk down, before they call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand?
How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they are forever banned?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist, before they're allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?
How many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

NOTE: The image at top left, titled Reclaiming the Sixties, was created by Susie, the Down Home Creator. Please click to enlarge.