As to when the right wing surge began...at the end of the 1940s, in Washington DC, I could not wait to get to 5th grade, as that was when, on May 1, we girls would get to wear beautiful white gossamer dresses and dance around the Maypole (younger classes did miscellaneous skits, I think). But then, sometime early that spring, we were told--there would be no Maypole; there would be May Day in the public schools there, any more, because May Day was (guess what) a Communist thing. Even in college, after anti-nuke demonstrations and support actions for the Freedom Rides, and so on, I was, in a gut way, shocked when a friend said, over coffee, "I'm a socialist"--as if she had said "I lie, cheat, steal, and cannot be trusted." To say nothing of how we thought about ourselves, the effects of so-called "Freudian psychology," etc. Could we say the rightward surge was more an attempt to keep the status quo, the left and variations more a MOVEMENT--that is, we had so much farther to go? And in many ways, we have won. Marty mentions disability rights. Until sometime after 1969, no one did. For instance. Paula
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 10/01/00 EDT