It sounds like your familiar with some corruption in the Government, so we are trying very hard to go back to the Basics, “The Constution”please help US.
The following petition will be presented to the US. Congress during the “Freedom Rally”
on April 15, 2008.

The Petition URL is:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/USRC01/petition.html
We need everyone to sign on in order “To Restore the Constitution”

The Ron Paul Revolution lives on Victory comes in many forms. Help shape what the Ron Paul started A Revolution to become our Future

I lived near Watts with my uncle, aunt and cousins while the fires were burning and the first of William Parker’s helicopters
began circling overhead. It was the second major ambushing of my innocence (the first being the Kennedy assassination).
I knew from the panic-stricken faces of my aunt and uncle that I would never be safe in this world.

But then there was all that music! What would we have done without the soundtrack?

This is a terrific piece you’ve written. I’m glad I’ve found you.

My grade school literary magazine has extraordinary poetry by young children writing about war and the end of the world.

Onduma – thank you for reading and for continuing the conversation, and for your compliment on this group blog effort. It’s very much appreciated. I hope that after you leave your friend’s place you can find a way to continue your tour of blogs and that you’ll be back here often. Your contributions to the conversation will always be welcome. We especially want to foster a dialogue that includes voices from around the world, not just present-day Americans and English native speakers. Ex-patriates, immigrants, and people from world cultures need to be talking with each other and building understanding. This is one small way to encourage that.

Good luck with this collaborative publication, Beth, et al. It’s a pleasure to encounter such thoughtfully articulate prose. An associate with whom I’m residing for a few days gave me an enlightening tour of the blogging universe (I’m using his computer to write this), and your group’s pages stand out as the most remarkably enjoyable to read. Many thanks to all of you.

You express something which is probably true for all tumultuous times: our perception depends on so much more than the shared, large events. I lived in a family sympathetic to the liberal political cause and attended a university that was a hotbed of political activism; my boyfrend at the time as a child of New York, Jewish, working class intellectuals who had been socialist party members…so those aspects were at the forefront for me, while for many others, the “turn on, tune in, drop out” and free love culture were the big things, alogn with the long hair, army jackets, and tie-dye. My husband’s brother served in Vietnam so his family was very affected by the war at the time, and its effects continue in that family down to this day. Plenty of other families and people remained relatively unscathed and untouched.

The point you make about “self-conscious image-making and hormonal adolescent rebellion” and its translation during the 60s into the marketplace of consumerism is right on the money, so to speak. The number of people who were really committed for the long haul – to a lifetime of rebellion against the status quo and making real sacrifices once the romanticism was over – that number was small, and nearly all of us made compromises. Part of what I’m doing now is trying to extricate myself from some of those compromises – but more along the lines Dave suggests in his very thoughtful final sentence, just above.

If elements of the countercultural movement in the 60s were shallow, what can one say about someone capable of advocating, with no apparent irony, “Ban Beatniks, Not Liberty”?! I am close to someone in the John Birch Society, and it’s interesting to see how far these folks have come in the intervening decades. The JBS philosophy is much more libertarian now, and in some way, I think, that demonstrates just how pervasive have been the changes in perceptions originally spearheaded by those very beatniks the paleo-conservatives once so vehemently deplored.

I came of age in the eighties, as a metalhead with many punk friends, and I think the issues of rebellion versus commodification were very much alive for us then. We made endless cynical, self-deprecating jokes about rebelling in step, anarchy MY way, etc. Looking back, I would say that that cynicism itself was the worm in the apple. It’s the cynicism that allows us to live with the hypocrisy of continuing to consume while decrying the culture of consumption. I would like to think that I am much more committed to radical vision now that I have shed most of the overt trappings of counter-cultural rebellion and endeavor instead to live each day in the fullest awareness I can muster, to practice radical empathy and hospitality, and to question that most tyrannical of authorities – myself.

Because these are historical as well as personal milestones, let me just mention that Dylan wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in 1963 and the Watts Riots occurred in 1965. John Lennon was, in 1964, not yet inspiring us with his poetry, powerful or otherwise, this being the period of “Please Please Me,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “And I Love Her” — ordinary pop rhymes, in other words.

And by 1966, Dylan had abandoned his strum-a-ching pickety-pluck acoustic tunes about cultural values and social alienation and instead was exhorting, in full electric glory, “Everybody must get stoned!” Lennon graced us with lyrical descriptions of his LSD trips. Paul Simon was writing about a “Red Rubber Ball” and “Feelin’ Groovy,” while Sly and the Family Stone were preparing to take us higher. Not exactly bardic stuff, but what the hell.

The explosion of the new notwithstanding, it all felt very shallow to me *then*, and I was there, too — enrolled full-time in ’66 at a commuter university in a large midwestern city, working part-time during the school year and full-time every summer, watching friends and fellow students don political activism along with their surplus-store army jackets, hand-tooled leather sandals, and Silvertone guitars from Sears. It was the genesis of the mediated, counter-cultural fashion-statement as identity-marker (“Commodify Your Dissent”).

Of course, we were more innocent (or naive) and less calculating than today’s reality-TV wannabes, but certainly no less motivated by self-conscious image-making and hormonal adolescent rebellion than any subsequent generation. And once we saw footage of ourselves on the six-o’-clock news and photos of ourselves on the cover of Time, we realized that our facile iconoclasm and instant-karma social protests had won us not the political arena but a far more powerful prize: the marketplace.

So yes, Dave, it was the (first) decade created by mass consumers for their own mass consumption, and they/we are still buying the re-re-remastered CD boxed sets and the enhanced special-edition DVDs with commentary, and the never-before-shown PBS documentaries, and the crunchy granola breakfast bars, and the natural herbal remedies, and the recycled toilet paper and, and, and…the beat goes on.