Those weren't the days:
Garvey, John
THOSE WEREN'T THE DAYS A SIXTIES' RETROSPECTIVE The sixties.. .they're over, we hear, or we are told that it is a shame that the spirit of the sixties is gone, or that we should be glad that it's...
...At the same time, many people who opposed the war did so for reasons of self-interest...
...It was an adolescent time, with lots of energy, moral certainty, self-righteousness, and an anger we were sure was justified by the real horror of the war in Southeast Asia and the forms of oppression endured by black Americans...
...All reasonable attempts to create some calm, to start a discussion, to move through the assigned material-or even to keep students in their seats, speaking at less than a roar-failed...
...Most of us, remembering the time, look naturally to big, common symbolic moments...particular rallies, moments like the Kennedy assassination or the King assassination or the death of the students at Kent State...
...I went upstairs and everything was no holes, no one even awakened by the sound...
...Many antiwar activists did what they did for reasons that were clear and honorable...
...We had much to be angry and unhappy about...
...they're over, we hear, or we are told that it is a shame that the spirit of the sixties is gone, or that we should be glad that it's gone, or that it isn't really gone...
...People almost enjoyed the thought that their phones were tapped, and the local FBI office called in a priest who had been associated with the counseling service to tell him he might be aiding lawbreakers...
...If some antiwar protesters (they were by no means close to a majority) were naive about the benign intentions of the National Liberation Front, if the Pol Pot regime showed the evil side of a messianic Marxism attractive to some of the New Left, then...
...At the same time, I did have to maintain some kind of order...
...A woman who, like her husband, had never been to college phoned me to mourn over the way her son (who was seeking a discharge from the service as a conscientious objector) had been turned by some college draft counselors against her and against his father, and the role of class became clearer, and very painful: they could think only in terms of loving their country and therefore of accepting military service, and from their point of view their son was being urged to find that idea small, if not meaningless...
...That was the sixties...
...It makes me look mildly deranged, and it chose that moment to show up...
...They identified the college he went to, and the people there who had encouraged him to question what he was going through, with hatred for America, and with whatever dark forces there are which separate parents from their children...
...Norman Thomas's wise advice was ignored: don't burn the flag, he said, wash it...
...We were all paranoid then...
...A few left-wing writers have dealt with what class meant during the Vietnam War, but not enough...
...Such insensitive symbolic actions as burning the flag alienated millions of Americans who might otherwise have been willing to listen...
...However you see them, positively or negatively, the sixties have come to symbolize a lot of things...
...They calmed right down, and it was clear to me-it was a moment of satori-like revelation-that I would never teach another year of high school...
...Two of them came back to me when Abbie Hoffman died and the press was full of resurrected stories about his humor, perhaps the most appropriate quality to bring to a time which certainly could not be fathomed rationally...
...But what also struck me when I thought about it, after that class, was how different these kids were from the upper-track kids I taught who were headed for college and were relatively happy and optimistic about their chances...
...I first felt a strange relief, and then, seeing that I felt it, felt really odd...
...The next day I went outside and saw that my next-door neighbor's car had several bullet holes in the front door...
...I realized that the only way I could get any sort of control over the class was to seem crazy and unpredictable...
...this was vengeance, apparently...
...Feeling calm at heart, realizing how ridiculous I must look pretending rage with one fluttering eyelid, I began to laugh, and realized that now I must seem absolutely insane...
...When I am tired I sometimes develop a tic in one eyelid...
...It worked...
...No one was fooled by the tracks...
...For a lot of us they symbolize being a certain age...
...So without feeling any anger at all I grabbed the collar of the student who was temporarily in control of the chaos (controlled chaos, in this case, was not really an oxymoron) and, feeling no anger at all, pretended great rage and told him to sit down and shut up...
...There were generous people at work then, and there still are...
...With the draft in force, this meant that the people in the lower tracks would not graduate into the deferments offered to college-bound students, but into uniform...
...The future looked and felt lousy to them, and they were reacting in a way with which I sympathized...
...For several years I was a draft counselor, helping young men who wanted to get conscientious objector status under the selective service law...
...I don't miss the time at all.he time at all...
...There is another response which is equally naive...
...The people at the top were the smart students...
...the people at the bottom were the slow ones...
...I was very tired that day...
...Others were moral about the war because it was a kind of cheap grace: bourgeois morality (loyalty to friends, fidelity to one's wife, the ordinary difficult struggle for decency) was less appealing and less simply undertaken than the morality of being outraged at something thousands of miles away...
...The war had been going on long enough so that these students knew that a sizable minority of them could be wounded or killed before very long...
...It turned out that he was a member of the state attorney's staff and had a role in breaking up a drug ring...
...The law itself demanded a certain articulateness and an educated person's ability to deal with the system...
...I remember it as an angry, unhappy time...
...Then I felt very stupid: it was probably backfire from a car, and this was paranoid behavior in the extreme...
...In reaction to this, some people have turned to the narrowest sort of conservatism...
...I thought about those moments, how funny and strange they were, and how horrible at their base...
...The other moment which makes the sixties feel like a less-than-wonderful time occurred when draft counselors in a city not far away had been threatened by a right-wing paramilitary group...
...To hate and despise Lyndon Johnson (Kennedy always comes out of this time curiously and unfairly unscathed, maybe because he was killed) proved that you weren't like him, and therefore you must be O.K...
...I taught high school during the late sixties and once had to substitute for a teacher who was ill...
...Much of the imagery of protest was directed against the military, unjustly, and not against a Congress that could have ended the war any time, because it had the power of the purse, but was afraid to do so...
...They were angry and hard to control...
...That is the reaction of those who see the sixties as a better time, who believe that more people-particularly more young people-were generous of spirit then, and had a more positive belief in their power to effect decent changes in society than they do today...
...The class I was called on to teach that day was the lowest track in the senior year, all male, most of the students larger than I. (That isn't difficult...
...This is one not uncommon reaction to the sixties, usually taken by formerly leftish people who were as uncritical of whatever was in the air then as they are now...
...Almost all of the young men who came to talk with us came from the zip-code area where doctors and lawyers lived...
...in a somewhat astonishing leap-Reagan was right to support the contras, and all attempts to create a more just social order are Utopian...
...One student in particular was making this hard to do...
...Notes were sent out: "The crossed hairs are aimed at the back of your neck, traitor...
...I didn't blame them at all...
...What an awful time: I was pleased that they weren't shooting at me for anti-war stuff...
...Very late one night I was lying on a couch reading, wife and children asleep upstairs, and something that sounded a lot like a short series of gunshots made me roll off the couch and turn off the light and hope that it hadn't been aimed toward the rooms upstairs...
...thank God, they were shooting at my neighbor, for breaking up a drug ring...
...or to moments in our own lives which reflect the period with particular force...
...The high school, like many, tracked students...
Vol. 116 • June 1989 • No. 12
