2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumThe sixties were a *half century* ago
As far from today as World War 1 was from them.
I swear this is almost like a parody.
If we're actually re-fighting the 60s (and by "we" I mean "you olds who are still stuck there" we might as well just hand Trump the keys to the White House.
Nobody cares.
Let me restate that: nobody under 60 cares. Just like nobody under 60 cares about the 48-year-old song used in political ads.
The Right from the 1960s will never admit that they were wrong. It's not going to happen. You're not going to get that moment of vindication. Welcome to life. Why does it take your kids to tell you this?
nolabels
(13,133 posts)As far as vindication for the past, no need, we have history. The real question you might ask yourself though, is what do you think you know that we do not? We will be listening
Recursion
(56,582 posts)I was -8 years old. I don't care.
That was a shitty decade where the left's stupidity cost us almost as much as it gained us (and that's generous). The Movement isn't our heroes; they're the idiots we're going to spend the rest of our lives cleaning up after.
nolabels
(13,133 posts)So since we both so young we should not try to understand it or figure out what went on back then?
I figure it was a case of three blind men trying to describe an elephant by holding on to different parts of it. Brave, stupid, ignorant and unknowing are four different things
left-of-center2012
(34,195 posts)Fawke Em
(11,366 posts)say people do care.
In fact, that's like new music to young people.
Outside a middle school auditorium in Hudson, New Hampshire Friday night several people stood together in the cold, focused intently on a cell phone video held by a young woman with a blue and white Sanders 2016 button pinned to her parka. They were looking at a commercial for their candidate, a 74 year old socialist from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.
And they were smiling because they felt the 60 second ad was about them. About people working, eating, worrying, gathering, smiling, simply living their lives in a land where change has come quickly and often with unsettling results.
The commercial appeals to the heart and soul of who we really are, a people moved more by hope than hate. A nation where fear of the future is simply foreign to the fiber of the country but has now become part of our politics because we are told over and over by most running for president to be very afraid each day before we ever take to the street.
A Simon and Garfunkel song is heard in the commercial. The song is America and as they watched it on the womans cell phone they smiled, leaned forward, closer to the phones screen and began nodding their heads to the tune as a couple of them hummed along with the music.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/24/bernie-mania-is-real-and-powerful.html
Sunlei
(22,651 posts)MineralMan
(146,317 posts)I remember those years. Civil Rights. Anti-War. Free Speech Movement. You're right, that was 50 years ago. I remember all of it.
This is 2016. Civil Rights are better, but not fixed. We're still fighting in wars, though, and people want us not to speak. The same old shit still needs to be fought against.
Some of us have experience with that.
MrChuck
(279 posts)discern your point.
No one is dwelling on a song or a bygone decade.
The discussion in this primary is focused on progressive ideals for the future of this nation.
That future is not some abstract period of time independent of humanity. It is the very years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds of all of our lives. It's how we spend that time with one another, either waiting for something or making it happen.
We have the past as example. Successes can be lessons and can be celebrated but not relied upon. Failures are lessons that CAN be relied upon.
Youth is desirable for a lot of reasons but ignorance isn't one of them.
Please don't assume that just because we remember something that it means we're stuck on it. Our lives, some of them anyway, are nearly over. All the battles we choose to fight these days are for people younger than ourselves.
All the best to you OP in all sincerity.
FSogol
(45,488 posts)karynnj
(59,504 posts)The time of civil right rallies, MLK, anti war rallies, Eugene McCarthy, RFK, women's rights and on some campuses, the early gay rights movement in the very early 1970s.
America is a great song and it fits now, as then, when we are questioning what America is. This was not the type of song that could have been written in the 1950s when there were only a minority asking questions.
By the way, my twenty something kids liked the Beatles and S & G.