Re: the hidden cost of Mike's question [6 views] (fwd)

J. S. B'ach (jsb@panix.com)
Tue, 11 Jun 1996 09:18:19 -0400

Mike (mrappe@flash.net):
> More clearly, what I meant to point out was that the changes in western culture
> during the sixties had a cost that was not as obvious (read hidden) as say the lives that
> were lost or wrecked in Vietnam (on both sides) or in any other tragedy that occured
> during that time period.
> As for me, the reason thst my post was prompted by a program on the History Channel
> was because it brought back memories. Having been born Sept. 14 1951 I lived through
> the sixties and did not just read about it. I was eighteen in 1969 and my comments
> about sex,drugs and the like came from personel experience. I did the drugs, I had
> "free" sex, I drank and smoked. I have friends that had abortions. I have friends
> that were incapacitated by drugs. I had friends that who died or commited suicide
> because of these things. The lies that were propigated about being "Free" or dropping
> out were appealing and may have caused some to start thinking about different ways
> of doing things and just may have brought some positive changes but ,it is like
> candy that is laced with a slow progressive poison. The damage to our society
> because of these beliefs has spread out and is a part of the what we see every day.
> The broken families, the explosion of youth violence and such. When I was in elementary
> school in the late fifties and early sixties living in one of the largest cities in
> the U.S. I did not have to worry about being gunned down in school or walking home
> from school even though the city was called the "Murder Capital of the U.S." at that
> time. Now the schools have metal detectors for guns and knives and, though I live in
> a relativly quiet middle class suburban neighborhood, very few of the parents let young
> childern walk to school. Many of the problems we face today were not caused by Nixon,
> the CIA, Watergate but because of morality breakdown that was taking place 30 years
> ago in the society as a whole. The volume of sex and violence that we see in TV and
> movies today is not put there by my fathers generation but by mine, the "Woodstock
> Generation", people who said "If it feels good. Do it!"

You did the drugs? And yet (unless the "hidden cost" to your life is
still being kept hidden) it seems to have left you virtually unscathed.
How do you account for your immunity to the slow poison you speak of?

Are you asserting that the need for metal detectors in schools nowadays
is somehow a consequence of promiscuity and drug taking? That this
loosening of our sexual morality led to today's violence in the schools and
the movies? For, if so, I fail to see the causal chain any more than I
was convinced by the argument that pot leads to heroin.

The volume of sex and violence of which you speak, as long as we get to
choose our own cause and effect relationships based on ideology, is the
result of a loss of respect for those who lied to us, who sent us to
kill for peace in S.E. Asia. So called morality was clearly
bankrupt before the 60s started and we (me and you) noticed its
hypocrisy and rightly rejected it, merely lacking anything clear to
replace it with other than some undeveloped notions of peace and love.
We wanted to expose the lack of love and the "violence inherent in the
system."

If the role of the government is to have a monopoly on the use of force
and the force is seen to be used, not to protect and serve, but to
portect and serve the rich, perhaps the violence which has trickled down
to the disenfranchised could be seen as a democratization of force.
The irrational authority that ruled us in the 50s through force and
fraud has merely spawned smaller scale con artists and bullies no longer
restrained by a myth of the legitimacy of those who ruled.

> As far as programming, look beyond your psychedelic blue blockers and realize that
> "What you sow is what you reap" is as true for a society as it is for individuals.
>
> Mike
> mrappe@flash.net
>
We are reaping the values of the 50s trickled down and shared with those
who had been, because of gender, race, or poverty, told to stay in their
place. Only they lack the organization, coherence, ideology, and political
technique to be revolutionaries instead of muggers.

-- 
	"Support the home page homeless."

jsb@panix.com