I don't know many boomers with any interest in marching in the streets, but this boomer is sure tired of people beating up on boomers. Sorry. You're stuck with us for the next 50 years. If you come up with some awesome achievements in the meantime, I'll applaud. I'm not holding my breath and if you want my vote, better ask nice, otherwise I may just write in Ted Kennedy.

Fully half of your slight diary lauds what appears to be your politically defining period, the successful LBGT/ACTUP/HIV/AIDS street protests of the '80s and early '90s. Good for you, it was a good thing you did then.

But why do you think they should be preserved forever as the last successful street protests?

You "don't think they are called for just now, for a variety of reasons." What kind of petty, dropshot commentary is that? If you expect to have any credibility here, you can't just leave it at that. What are your reasons?

And who the hell are you to complain, anyway?

Americans are way too fixated on getting their whiskey, sexy, rock and roll to put down the remote, or leave the key boards and hit the streets.

Those of us who do, and will protest in the streets, (and if anyone bother examining these masses, - they are not just socalled boomers). Many Americans will continue, and we know that we will not have the support and that unfortunately we will have the disdain of our fellow Americans left and right, and while mass protests may not be the "best or only way to make social change," history proves protest are one means toward our shared ends.

I am more interested now in diffusing the growing hostility, slime, and venom being poured out by socalled netroots progressives on people who share the exact same concerns desires and determination to see the facsists in the Bush government held accountable, forced to change course, and for many of us hopefully impeached.

If liberals and the netroots movement are so carnivorous and cannibalistic against people who agree 100% with the ends, but hold differing opinions regarding the most effective means to achieve social change, - our hopes and this movement is doomed.

No one is forcing anyone to take it to the streets. We know there will be no support for us this weekend, but no one anywhere, and especially those who socalled netroots liberals who supposedly share the same core values, desires, ideologies and demands have the right to deny, or dismiss your fellow Americans who choose to assemble in public and raise our voices in protest.

Let's end this debate before it drives a wedge or a stake into the heart of a potentially powerfull movement in its' embryonic stage.

I was in the streets (never violently as it was clearly counterproductive) and on the town commons protesting from 1965 through 1972. I'm not particularly nostalgic about it, unlike other parts of my lost youth, and I sure wouldn't like to see that kind of thing happen again. It would be arguably counterproductive in the current situation, unintended consequences would be rife, and, most importantly, such demonstrations have a tendency to encourage self-congratulation among the demonstrators rather than focus on a goal.

As I think about this I think the beginning of the Eric Alterman narrative about the corruption of the mainstream media may well begin with the demonization of the 60's protestors. As one small example, I remember breakfast the day after my college commencement in 1969 when my father suddenly wadded up and threw down in disgust the New York Times because it represented a student speaker (actually performer -- and one I'm pretty sure my father hadn't enjoyed) who had won a college-sanctioned vote to appear at commencement as having set up a loud speaker system to try to drown out the traditional ceremony. An absurd, gratuitous, and pointless lie.

Bush and Cheney have done the impossible: by snatching their long awaited mulligan to replay the Vietnam War the way they wanted, they vindicated everything the hippies said.

Who thinks Vietnam would have been won if we bombed a few more weeks, or escalated into Cambodia? How much more can we untie our hands? Is it coincidence that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissenger, and the rest of those tainted men, cemented their mistakes in history, by repeating them, with twice the enthusiasm, resulting in twice the failure?

Who now doubts we were right to withdraw from Vietnam?

Bluebell

I am totally with you. Virtually everyone I know in their 50s still have both parents alive.

Also there is a movie coming out totally based on the Beatles music. There are too many Baby Boomers too used to shaping the world around them.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Re: Do not storm the Bastille, forget Tiananmen Square.

The storming of the Bastille led to the freeing of four petty criminals and three schizphrenics (who were then paraded in triumph from prsion to mental asylum)-- and to the mob lunching ofseveral innocent bystanders.
Tiennamen Square led to-- what exactly? A new wave of repression in China?
I hope no one thinks either is a good model for US politics to follow. Our government is altogether too tempted by repressive autocracy as it is, and I'd rather not deal with homegrown Jacobins stringing up their imagined foes on every lamppost.

And your point is that boomers are old, and are going to die, so why should we bother?

Well, I have three children, who are all going with me to Washington this weekend. The demonstration happens to fall on my 59th birthday. Yes, I was born January 27th, 1948. I am not eligible for the draft, but amazingly, I actually care about the direction our country is going in, which seems to me to be downhill.

If you are tired of boomers, then fine, do something as generation X, Y, Z, me, or whatever you want to call your selfish self.

If you want to repudiate a generation that saw its high-school class-mates sacrificed to Vietnam for ABSOLETELY NOTHING - fine
!

The reason Bush, Cheney, and their partners in crime never understood this is because they got away (despite their personal fears of soldiering) scot-free. They are the ENTITLED, AND ALL THE REST OF US BE DAMNED!

So screw you; those of you who discount the boomers. There is a new generation coming up. The difference is that they are even braver because they all volunteered. It is they who will have similar memories as we do and you will not be able to answer to them either.
Jan Knaus

But TR's contemporaries weren't fighting the Civil War all over again.

So your point is that because we don't have a draft no one should protest? A more legitimate, and perhaps a more knowledgeable and mature observation would be that because there is no draft, that is why there are no protests.

Reality proves you wrong, and your superficiality is showing, just like my slip did when I was your age.

Well, this "boomer," whom you think is nothing but an anachronism, says you need to grow up. I have never "gotten over" my young friends never coming home after being sent to Vietnam for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Can you imagine 5 of your friends being blown up? Try 55,000 of them! Get over yourself!

You need to grow up. I am mad!

Jan Knaus

EJ,

What is the point of your BS post? Bush is about to start a suicidal war with Iran the blowback from which could destroy us, so there won't be any causes left to fight for because we'll be trying to survive. But you think we shouldn't get off our butts to stop the war machine because you're tired of hearing about the sixties. I'm sure MLK and Gandhi would be proud of you - NOT!

Thanks for suggesting that more people be cannon fodder for Bush's killing machine. What a great way to drum up protests that you think shouldn't be held. Truly a brilliant analysis worthy of the front page - NOT!

Tom

I agree 110%!!

Tom

Ms. Graff asks:

Can we get over the 60's already?

Shorter Amike:

NO!  History isn't something one gets over.

I should leave it at that, but I can't, being one of those "older boomers" of whom Ms. Graff is "tired". 

Twice in the past year and a half that I've been a faithful inhabitant of the TPM Café I've indicated a wish that there was a way to record my evaluation of one of the pieces posted by the generally excellent stable of writers Josh Marshall has recruited.  In each of those cases I wrote that I wished for the numerical system was available so I could rate the piece a "5". 

This time, I wish we had that system so I could rate this a 1.

I've not seen many pieces which have gone out of their way to insult a significant portion of the readership.  I can't help that I'm 65, Ms. Graff, or that in a few months I'll be 66.  Shudder about that, Ms. Graff--I don't.  You can be even more tired of me in April than you are now.  My gray hair signifies something besides a right to be grumpy occasionally...I've not only read about the sixties, I've lived through them.  John Kennedy was shot the year I entered graduate school.  I was in school in Cleveland living in the little island between the black Ghetto to the northeast and the Italian ghetto to the southwest during racial unrest then.  In the sixties I had to get a pass from the national guard whose bivouac was in a parking lot behind my apartment house in order to visit friends living not more than three blocks away.  I cringed and stayed away from windows when I heard gunfire during Kent State.  I have zero nostalgia for that experience, Ms. Graff:  zero. 

I respect the great accomplishments you claim for the marches of 1979, 1987, and 1992.  You recognize, I hope, that they were made possible by 1968 and the Stonewall Riots, which in turn were made possible by the courage given to ordinary citizens by the civil unrest in the anti-war and civil rights movements.  I got the courage to come out in the 1960s, Ms. Graff, when it was just as possible for a person to be fired or beaten up.  I marched in Gay Pride marches in the early 1970s, Ms. Graff.  By the 1980s and early 1990s I was mourning the loss of friends and, horrors, students of mine, to HIV.  I lived through the beginnings of the epidemic before it had a name or a known cause, and when it was generally referred to as the "gay disease". 

I have seen little nostalgia here, Ms. Graff.  Remembering the futility and the anger of the 1960s and feeling that self-same anger now does not mean I desire street protests now.  To infer that I do would be a case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, Ms. Graff, and I think you should be beyond that kind of intellectual laziness.  And the intellectual laziness of this piece is what I resent most.  Where is Mr Newberry when we need him?

Most of those who look back to the sixties as their time of coming of age, have no desire or need to come of age again.  What I do see, Ms. Graff, is not nostalgia, but a bleak recognition that what has been accomplished so far may not be enough to terminate this war, and if it isn't who will have the moral fiber to do something further?

Taking 1963 as the benchmark year. . .we're only in 1967 vis a vis the Vietnam experience--before the violence (police inspired, I have to say) of 1968.  Again, taking the Vietnam experience as the benchmark....which year will you say "enough is enough?"  1974 in Vietnam Years equates to something like 2013 in Iraq-years.  One hopes that someone--that many someones--do as Thoreau suggests--vote with their entire influence and not a piece of paper only. 

In the meantime, I pity your tiredness, Ms. Graff, and hope you have time to take a nap.  I'm not going away.

aMike

Well said, aMike! A classic. Now let's get out on the streets to march to stop the madman Bush, for the rights of LBGTQ people, and for respect for all humans including Boomers.

Tom

A boomer calling someone else selfish? ahh, sweet irony.

My point was that boomers won't be around in another 50 years as Bluebell would have it. You're 58. In 50 years, you would be 108. Do you really think you'll make it?

I can't make sense of the rest of your ravings.

So what?

Tom

So figure out how to do something that works.  

I actually think there is an important difference between younger progressives and the old hippies. Sure a lot of the people in whatever upcoming protests won't be boomers. They will be younger people who are emulating boomers.

For a lot of us, though, the hippie leftism that is the legacy of the baby boomers has been largely discredited. While we might share the same goals, we have different reasons for thinking those are the right goals. I hate to say it, but it is not enough that we agree, but that we agree for the right reasons. I don't like right wing ideologues, and I can't see any reason for liking lefties who, just like the rightwingers, hold their beliefs without critical examination.

The fact that there are young people willing to emulate their elders may be a testament to what the boomers did in the past, but most young hippies are ugly caricatures that weigh us down in many ways.

I don't get your sentiment here. I already posted on Josh's thread that I avoid a lot of modern protests (at least in my home city) because of who organizes them. But I don't see cause to just throw the whole idea away.

Nor do I think that the impulse to have a new protest movement can be so easily dismissed as boomer nostalgia.

But the really unfair judgment you make, I think, is that people don't care because there's no draft. To take that line of thought to its logical extreme, you'd have to argue that any US military action is now acceptable, so long as it's undertaken by a volunteer army. I happen to think that Americans are, by in large, more than willing to support and care about those volunteers, especially because we need them so much and we know we need them.

Josh argued that, rather than protest in the streets, people chose to express that concern, perhaps more effectively, by voting the pro-war party out of power last year. He still said, basically, that people care, and he's right.

In your post, you basically associated the will to protest with the will to take personal risk. But even in decades past, the risks of being beaten by police or wrongfully arrested during a protest were statistically small and everyone knew it. These days, with a cameraphone on every corner, they're even less. The lack of a mass protest movement these days, where we all have camera phones and the like isn't due to a fear that could only become by the possibility of being sent to war but by a tendency towards other (arguably more effective) means of opposition.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Good comment

But not always.  It didn't work in 2003.  I'd say it has a minimally better chance of working today.  Maybe in the context of a broad palette of other forms of political pressure, but what are those?  The problem, really, isn't that we've held on too long to protest.  It's that we've forgotten how to do much else.

snivel..whine....'if you want street protests'....

There were millions in the streets before the Decider started his illegal aggression in Iraq. There have been street protests all over the US and the world the last four years. The war would look a whole lot uglier without antiwar activism, both on and off the streets.

Those Americans who are watching want an end to the killing.

Research that Ms. Graff.

Street protests made no difference to Nixon--indeed he relished them-- and they won't make any difference to Bush. Use your time to visit Republicans to urge them cut off funds afer this year.

Do both - only urge Democrats and Republicans to cut off funds for everything except the safe return of our troops now.

Tom

"Duelling," not "Dualing."

Use both.

Tom

Shall I spell it out?  In the 60s and 70s, you managed to mobilize sustained protests and (granting the point for the sake of argument) they acheived a great deal of political change.  In 2003, your descendants mounted the largest demonstrations they could muster against the beginning of an obviously ill-considered war, initiated on false pretenses that looked shaky enough to an objective observer well before they were proven false, to what end?  Not much to claim victory for there.

So what's it going to do now?

You might counter by saying that, sure, anemic protests like what we've seen recently won't do the trick; what needs to happen is the kind of thing we did back in the day.  Fine; in theory, you might have a point.  In practice, that won't happen.  It's time to try something else. 

On February 15th, 2003 millions of people worldwide marched to try and prevent this stupid Iraq fiasco from happening. Bush blew us off. We need millions of people doing more millions of things - marching, blogging, writing letters to the editors, pressuring Congress, etc. or Bush may blow us right of the planet with a military conflict with Iran.

Tom

Obviously, it's important to learn the lessons of the 1860's - for instance England decided to stay out of our Civil War, just as we should get out of Iraq's civil war. It's also important to learn the lesson of the 1960's - imperialist wars are a bad idea and imperialist wars can be ended even when both parties were originally for them if the citizenry rises up.

Tom

Escaping the scene of her crime?

Tom

Well, I'm trying to say that your using a stereotype "hippie" to dismiss serious people who are trying to stop the killing in Iraq. Even the stereotype is dated. Woodstock and hippies - I could see what you mean. 2007 - hippie has no meaning that I can discern. So I really am asking you to think about what you are saying when you apply the term hippie to today's protestors. I don't think it has any meaning.

Tom

Well, in truth, I wish I had a better sense of what the variety was.  But here's hoping that we get there one way or the other.

Tomdispatch.com has a good piece about a study showing how many American deaths in Iraq come from rural areas. I think it somewhat fits in with what you are saying.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=160190

Tom

That's what they call Hit and Run.

My thoughts about the 60's

To those who couldn't understand the struggle of the 60's and 70's Why Ford pardoned NIXON

At least we got up off our behinds, we put down the controller, we put away our pacifiers and tried anything to change the course.

This country was at war in America. People were bombing Draft offices, or other government facilities. It was armed conflict in America. But I don't want to see that now.

If that happened now, Bush would declare Marshall law and then we'd really be ......

But Mass Marches speaks volumes, especially if the government overreacts as it did at Kent State University (our generations Concord Bridge) sitting at home say's your satisfied.

Were these great Heterosexual marches for Homosexual rights in the 1960s and 1970s left out of the history books?

Or do all the decades run together nowadays?

Who's talking about nostalgia for street protests? Hell, I'm nostalgiac for the Weather Underground. And I'm only 26!

Seriously, I am rather nostalgiac for Seattle '99. And it's hard to say bodies were directly in harm's way in that situation.

Rather than Seattle 99, you really could have put your body in harms way to curb the abuses of globalization by attempting to organize exploited workers overseas. But smokin' some in Seattle and getting gassed by the cops is a lot more fun than potentially being a statistic of a human rights violation.

Hello EJ Graff:

You asked: "Can we get over the 60s already?"

You can if you wish ... I won't until I die...

Seriously though ... I respect and appreciate your position on this issue. We boomers sure can be a pain in the ass. I know I was to my mother. She's 87... and still loves me.

Don't worry now, I'm getting somewhere with this ramble by using your loose term, nostalgia.

My mom was at Pearl when the Japanese attacked. My father and mother had married 6 months previous and were on their honeymoon. My father had been ship's company aboard the USS San Francisco (CA-38) for 5 years at that time and served aboard till the end of the war and cashed out in May of '46. Let's just say he saw quite a bit of action and leave it at that. Now that was a little bit of my family's background while growing up.

Now about my reasons for keeping the history alive and participating in active non-violent demonstrations and all...

Bear with me ... On September 4, 1966 at 12 AM I celebrated my 20th birthday, standing at the state-line mid-river on the Memphis-Arkansas bridge sharing a beer with a fellow Navy friend of mine that was a classmate at Millington Naval Air Station.

John Pollock was his name. We both had enlisted and been in the service one year.

I was an active-duty conscientious-objector due to religious belief. The draft notice came and I was allowed to enlist in the Navy due to my short period of education in aeronautical engineering. John was what I describe as a true believer in the military efforts in South East Asia. He was from Brooklyn, New York. Real street-tough kinda guy with a great heart. I was born and raised on rural ranch property in the middle of the San Fernando Valley in the Los Angeles region. The first time John and I met, his accent was so thick I thought he was from another country. We were young. You wouldn't find two more dissimilar fellas. But the Navy made us inseparable teammates.

To make this short, and to the point:

I made it through the Vietnam era .... John didn't! To this day I still keep in contact with his mom in Brooklyn, someone has to.

By the way EJ ... where was it you were at on September 4, 1966?

Never again ... on the basis of lies, half-truths and disinformation!

~OGD~

ps: Not one car passed over that bridge that night the entire 4 hours we walked the bridge ... Can that be said today?

Great point Tom,

I agree that working together in a variety of ways is the key. I get quite bemused by reading the stance against this idea, and that idea, or this way, or that way... Just for the hell of debating. When all one has to be able to do is chew gum and walk at the same time, and juggle a variety of ways to work out a problem. Too much of "looking through the straw" leads to the Land of Myopia.

~OGD~

Whose "them". You still haven't defined your term. I'm saying you can't because it's not an accurate description of today's reality.

Tom

A useless post from EJ Graff. Is the point that "'60s style" street protests are ineffective (they aren't--the March On Washington by King and his followers galvanized public opinion in favor of civil rights in the US) or uncalled for by the current situation?

Graff merely has a chip on her shoulder against "older" baby boomers, for some reason. She doesn't even make a concrete suggestion for alternatives to street protest rallies. This was a waste of space.

Did it ever occur to anyone that the reason we have no draft is because of the street (and other) protests of the sixties? It is simply inaccurate to say as someone did above that Nixon "relished" protests. He was in fact very disturbed by them.

Mass protests are arguably less effective now because the people who have stolen and are looting our government are unethical thugs without consciences who have from the beginning tried to take preemptive measures against dissent, such as shipping soldiers' bodies home in secret, etc.

The way protestors were treated at the GOP convention, the sweeps that included bystanders, holding people overnight in outdoor pens with no place to sit down, etc. was designed to discourage more protests -- and it was to some extent effectve.

Protesting is not a lark.

What is your definition of ugly?

Jan Knaus

wmd, What in your "vast" geniusness, causes you to rate this very sincere and eloquent post a "1?"

You obviously disagree with amike that his experiences have any relevence to this original post, which happens to be about exactly what he addressed, by the way.

Go ahead. Please justify your rating. If you don't, then please don't bother to keep rating at all. Because your only reason for doing so is "unhelpful" and thereby, deserving of a "1" -- and that is probably 1 point more than you actually deserve!
Jan Knaus