\u201cBe realistic. Demand the impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future <\/i>is my current morning read, that\u2019s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968.<\/p>\n
Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I\u2019m sure even Parisian students in the Sixties would use French for their slogans on account of they are, in fact, French, and French people care about their language, even the radicals.)<\/p>\n
It certainly reminds me of my experiences back in those days that we label the Sixties even though they extended into the 1970s. And it\u2019s yet another reminder that much of what underlies progressive work in the United States (and other places, but I know the U.S. stuff) today is built on what we did back in the 1960s.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason I\u2019m writing about this is that I\u2019m really, really tired of the \u201cOK Boomer\u201d nonsense on social media, a phenomenon that is inaccurate and ageist and shows a true lack of knowledge about recent history (which makes me worry about the lack of knowledge of history going back more than my lifetime).<\/p>\n
But this is not a \u201ckid\u2019s today\u201d post accompanied by headshaking and tut-tutting. From my perspective, the kids of today are great, and I suspect a lot of the generational name-calling is produced by bots and provocateurs.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just that a lot of what the extremists running our country right now condemn as \u201cwoke\u201d and \u201cDEI\u201d grew out of work we did toward making the United States a better place, and I\u2019m damned if I want to let them destroy it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m talking about the Civil Rights Movement, which actually started quite a long time before the 1960s (there\u2019s some fascinating history of the legal strategies that led up to Brown v. Board<\/i> starting in about 1920, just as an example) though a lot of things came to fruition then \u2013 some laws on equal opportunity and voting rights with teeth in them, plus some significant activism with groups like SNCC and the Black Panthers.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m talking about second wave feminism, which also owed quite a bit to the suffragists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m talking about Stonewall and the gay rights activism that developed from that.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m even talking about hippies and the Summer of Love and Woodstock. <\/p>\n
You can find flaws in those things, if you want to. I don\u2019t particularly want to be stuck in hippie reality myself, though I\u2019m not sorry I got to spend some time there. There were principles there that were actually important.<\/p>\n
It is kind of disconcerting to have reached a point where marijuana, at least, is legal in a lot of the country but the peace, love, and understanding doesn\u2019t seem to have come along as well.<\/p>\n
Too many woman took for granted the changes that opened up the professions for women and didn\u2019t keep pushing for such things as universal child care, not to mention the Equal Rights Act, plus we kept being over-careful about abortion and other reproductive rights.<\/p>\n
And, as usual, white women benefited a lot more than Black women \u2013 something that the decidedly white women working in the current regime make clear in a distorted funhouse mirror sort of way.<\/p>\n
(I mean, they\u2019d never have those jobs without feminism, because the extremists would never have bothered to put women in such positions if so many women hadn\u2019t ended up in all kinds of powerful jobs over the last 50 years.)<\/p>\n
Too many supposed progressives right now are throwing trans people under the bus instead of recognizing that they have always been part of both the feminist and gay rights activism.<\/p>\n
You can legitimately criticize those various movements for not doing a lot of things, but we did lay the fucking groundwork. We did help make the country more fair.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, there\u2019s been a backlash against what we did ever since.<\/p>\n
Still the years of work for civil rights paid off despite the laws currently being dismantled because there are a lot of Black people in positions of authority who are speaking out and being heard, despite the \u201canti-woke\u201d nonsense. In the Sixties, they\u2019d have either been labeled as dangerous radicals (and killed, as far too many were) or laughed at.<\/p>\n
Likewise there are a lot of women with platforms and the ability to act. They don\u2019t even have to wear the \u201cdress for success\u201d crap that was all the rage in the 1980s and there are a whole lot fewer patronizing pats on the head.<\/p>\n
I find it telling that so many of the women speaking out and taking the lead are Black despite running into crap on account of both race and gender.<\/p>\n
The change work didn\u2019t stop in the 1980s and beyond, of course. We had the good work of the Occupy Movement. Young people stopped letting themselves be stuffed into rigid gender roles. So did a lot of older people \u2013 I know a lot of trans people in their 60s who only transitioned over the past five years or so.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m not arguing that we old folks are all the good guys. There are a lot of people glued to Fox \u201cNews\u201d and a lot of old people who have too much power and money and too little vision.<\/p>\n
But I am saying that what we did helped set things up, and that a lot of what we\u2019re seeing is still backlash, rooted in racism and misogyny, from people who don\u2019t want to see real democracy.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all part of the ongoing struggle. We can\u2019t quit now. My fellow boomers aren\u2019t quitting \u2013 I see them at protests all the time.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re still here, being realistic and demanding the impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cBe realistic. Demand the impossible.\u201d According to Rob Hopkins, whose book How to Fall in Love With the Future is my current morning read, that\u2019s something people said on the barricades in Paris in 1968. Since he quoted it in English, it must have spread far beyond Paris .(I\u2019m sure even Parisian students in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,17],"tags":[1136,1137,332,1135],"class_list":["post-4259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-experiences","category-rants","tag-boomers","tag-civil-rights","tag-feminism","tag-the-sixties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4260,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4259\/revisions\/4260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}