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Ideas. Hope. Confusion. Infiltration. Assassinations. Those things happen all the time... Maybe what changes, besides the inevitable progress of technology, and the resulting effects on society, isn't so much a matter of how good or bad things are, as a matter of how much or how little people feel it's possible to make the future better. A lot of people... getting really immersed in politics; other circles of people not overtly political but attempting to set up communities that ran according to ideals often quite similar to those of the more-political folks. The difference between those two groups is, I suppose pretty parallel to what is happening today among many anarchists: The people who would have been SDS or whatever back then are participating in things they call class struggle now, organizing workers, etc, whereas maybe the modern-day equivalent of the less-politically-active counterculture would be the anarchists who the more overtly class-conscious ones pejoratively refer to as "lifestylists".
I think that a lot of the mockery and vitriol directed by "Gen-X"ers towards what was going on at that time comes from a number of sources. One, I think, is that they themselves are the children of people of that generation, and if they have bad relationships with their parents, that, in their heads, becomes a problem with a whole broader group of people. Two, I think, much of it they pick up on from older people who may have actually been around at that time.
That in itself is a complicated thing: Some of those people are of the ruling class, or right-wingers, or otherwise invested in the corporate culture disguised as "individualism". In previous years, they may have been attracted vaguely to the counterculture insofar as they themselves wished to avoid being drafted, or enjoyed the drugs, music, or other consumables that could be detached from the vision of radical social change, but now their main vested interest is in defending exploitative, capitalistic aspects of the status quo, and shitting on anyone's attempts at collectivism, community, or moving towards a more sustainable or egalitarian culture. To get legitimacy in doing this, they will take those surface-level interests they had in the counterculture or political resistance long ago, and pretend that those qualify them to speak on behalf of all dreamers and strugglers of the era, saying, "Oh, yes, we tried the peace-and-love thing and it didn't work, so now it's time to drop the woo-woo and get behind (insert rightwing talking point here)."
But others of them are not. Other people who have participated in the mockery genuinely once felt themselves to be part of the creation of an alternative. I don't pretend to be qualified to explain this, or judge- No judgment, but I will just say, if this does the phenomenon any kind of justice, it may be a bit like this: If your wife leaves you, you're pretty much obligated to say terrible things about your wife, right? And those things won't necessarily be true. After Kent State, Altamont, etc, I'm not judging anyone.
When it comes down to it, I think that basically, people are just people- Damaged, beautiful, self-interested, fallible, hopeful, benevolent, unaware of many of their own motivations, and driven to do terrible things to stay alive- and many of the terrible things they do to others are really extensions of terrible things they've done to themselves- In the interests of self-preservation, we may kill off the best parts of ourselves- The parts that are sensitive, the parts that are ethical and loving, the parts that perceive divinity and nobility in the world. I use the word "divinity" in a somewhat unusual way, perhaps- I don't believe in any kind of God, but one thing I know from my own experience is that atheism and mysticism are not mutually exclusive. I am an atheist, but I have experienced sacred beauty, have seen it in other human beings, because even without a sentient Creator, we are holy on our own merits, holy because we experience pain but strive for beauty and are willing to sacrifice for love.
And as for the word nobility, yes, I think there was nobility. One impression I've gotten is that when people talked about a song at a concert- say, by Joni Mitchell or Janis- or something that happened at a protest- it was often as though they were speaking in code. That is, they were talking about an event or an idea- politics, music, sex, hallucinations- but there was sometimes a sense that this individual thing was just a point plotted on a much broader curve, like you were describing pieces of driftwood as a way of talking-about-without-talking-about the arch of a vast wave that they were all being carried on, so what was lost was much more than what was actually lost in terms of concrete lives and tangible events. I can't understand what forty years are. I can't understand what twenty years are. But I can tell you that the Wave Speech in Fear and Loathing made me cry. I can understand why Hunter Thompson killed himself, I think. I'm sorry that y'all had to live through the 1980's.
Again, I believe there was nobility. There is nobility now, too. And when people feel connected, it courses through them like electricity, and they can use it to power beautiful things. But when these connections snap, it is as though the people instead become terminals for all that electricity, and it fries them, and when people are burnt they can no longer be conductors for such marvelous voltage. Not everyone had good intentions, of course- There were then, as now, the self-serving, the fair-weather, the deceitful. But I think a lot of people who ran away, who retreated back to conventional lives, weren't "selling out," but calculating their losses and counting it as a victory if they could escape with their lives and enough love left in the unburnt parts of their hearts to connect with a few people, have a family, and hopefully bring some joy to the people around them.
I will take your word for it if you tell me that the reason you dropped out into the world of hitchhiking instead of hooking up with some political organization to fight the existing order is because you did not believe there would have to be a fight. And I've heard of the factionalism, the mis-interpretation of ideas like free love into a caricature of mere anti-monogamy, within SDS, etc, and the people who got caught up in the crossfire- I'm sorry if this was you. Or if you were an unwilling soldier who never even made it that close to the resistance, trapped in the vast military industrial complex. But I do think that just because people, being unable to look at their former dreams, their former perceptions of divinity, without wincing, feel compelled to mock them instead, as silly, dramatic, naive, does not mean that these things actually were silly, dramatic or naive- Just because you cannot deal with the nobility of an idea does not mean it was never holy to begin with. And I think that broad-based political struggle and counterculture are compatible- As long as the latter is not insular. There is nothing wrong with forming a community of likeminded people, as long as you keep trying to reach out to people living more in the mainstream, who still have to work day jobs / drive cars, who are less politically conscious, who don't consider themselves activists but would still benefit from changes in the status quo.
If you actually read all of this, I love you. I am also fighting. Don't worry- I know a fair number of beautiful, pot-smoking dumpster-divers. We know how to find thrown-out, disregarded, spat-on things and put them to good use.
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