I am a child of the 60's. I was born in 1979. The dominant paragdigm would have it that my parents are children of the 60's but, in reality, they were children of the 40's. Just as the 20th century really began in 1914, the 60's really began in 1968. In 1968, my father was 22 and my mother was 19. They were brand new adults, former children of the 40's.
The reason that the 60's were so tumultuous was that reality was clashing with the absurdist bill of goods that my parents' generation had been sold by their mother culture. These children of the 40's grew up being told that the United States was always on the side of justice, that American history could be seen as a Manichean struggle between liberty and darkness, and that whenever American soldiers were sent into battle, they did so in selfless acts of liberation, never for venal, Europeanish notions of self-interest or, God forbid, corporate interest.
For a variety of reasons, it had become clear by 1968 that this narrative was grossly oversimplified and self-serving, as well as condescending to the highest virtue of any real republic: an enlightened citizenry; talking about American power without mentioning victims was like talking about the Beatles without mentioning John Lennon It was inevitable that this house of cards should come crashing down, and perhaps the biggest surprise is that it took so long. It is impossible for me to relate with the paradigm of an always-just America that my parents' generation was inured with, but I can see the consequences of their realization that it was, from a certain point of view, utter bullshit.
The problem with holding your country, or your religion, or your spouse, or anything else to such an impossible and ultimately irrelevant standard as total goodness is that, inevitably, dissilusionment is guaranteed. We all go through this process, whether we are children of the 40's or of the 60's. We all have moments in life when we realize that things aren't as black and white as we once assumed. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".
The challenge, in religion, patriotism, and love, is in reacting to this inevitable awakening in a constructive way. This jolt can easily destroy us; we must harness it and use it to strengthen us. Far too many of us, especially children of the 40's, reacted to the rude awakening to America's actual place in the world by rejecting everything that America stood for as inherently agressive, racist, and oppressive. It is as if, upon discovering that the world was not created in a calendar week, they rejected the Bible from cover to cover, Gospels and all.
This is dangerous, and it should warn us of the dangers of indocrinating our youth with absudly unrealistic interpretations of our country's past, which inevitably manifest themselves as absurdly unrealistic expectations of our country's present and future. As a child of the 60's, I was a skeptic from the moment I was conceived, and I believe that this has been to my credit. This is why I am thankful for the 60's; at a great and anguishing cost, the children of the 40's, in the 60's, forced reality onto the American people and, to an eternally debatable degree, the American establishment itself. The cost, however, was the ability of many of the children of the 40's to objectively assess their country's actions.
As a professionally trained historian I am, to say the least, well acquainted with the facts that NO nation has ever acted out of anything beyond some appraisal of self-interest, that ALL nations commit mistakes and, yes, crimes, and that great nations, by definition, make great mistakes. With this background, and without the burden of the 40's paradigm to fight against, I can look at things like the Vietnam War, for example, in a broader, somewhat depersonalized sense.
My parents, for obvious reasons, cannot do this, because they were robbed of an innocence that I never knew in the first place. To stay with the Vietnam example, while I feel, just as many children of the 40's do, that no American soldier should have ever set foot in Vietnam, I hesitate to point to the war as evidence of incipient American fascism, or as part of an intentional campaign to wage genocidal violence against people of color who dared assert their independence from America's imperial sphere. I use language like "criminally negligent mistake, made clearer by the passage of time". Many children of the 40's are more given to language such as "willfully orchestrated holocaust".
The reason that the 60's were so tumultuous was that reality was clashing with the absurdist bill of goods that my parents' generation had been sold by their mother culture. These children of the 40's grew up being told that the United States was always on the side of justice, that American history could be seen as a Manichean struggle between liberty and darkness, and that whenever American soldiers were sent into battle, they did so in selfless acts of liberation, never for venal, Europeanish notions of self-interest or, God forbid, corporate interest.
For a variety of reasons, it had become clear by 1968 that this narrative was grossly oversimplified and self-serving, as well as condescending to the highest virtue of any real republic: an enlightened citizenry; talking about American power without mentioning victims was like talking about the Beatles without mentioning John Lennon It was inevitable that this house of cards should come crashing down, and perhaps the biggest surprise is that it took so long. It is impossible for me to relate with the paradigm of an always-just America that my parents' generation was inured with, but I can see the consequences of their realization that it was, from a certain point of view, utter bullshit.
The problem with holding your country, or your religion, or your spouse, or anything else to such an impossible and ultimately irrelevant standard as total goodness is that, inevitably, dissilusionment is guaranteed. We all go through this process, whether we are children of the 40's or of the 60's. We all have moments in life when we realize that things aren't as black and white as we once assumed. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".
The challenge, in religion, patriotism, and love, is in reacting to this inevitable awakening in a constructive way. This jolt can easily destroy us; we must harness it and use it to strengthen us. Far too many of us, especially children of the 40's, reacted to the rude awakening to America's actual place in the world by rejecting everything that America stood for as inherently agressive, racist, and oppressive. It is as if, upon discovering that the world was not created in a calendar week, they rejected the Bible from cover to cover, Gospels and all.
This is dangerous, and it should warn us of the dangers of indocrinating our youth with absudly unrealistic interpretations of our country's past, which inevitably manifest themselves as absurdly unrealistic expectations of our country's present and future. As a child of the 60's, I was a skeptic from the moment I was conceived, and I believe that this has been to my credit. This is why I am thankful for the 60's; at a great and anguishing cost, the children of the 40's, in the 60's, forced reality onto the American people and, to an eternally debatable degree, the American establishment itself. The cost, however, was the ability of many of the children of the 40's to objectively assess their country's actions.
As a professionally trained historian I am, to say the least, well acquainted with the facts that NO nation has ever acted out of anything beyond some appraisal of self-interest, that ALL nations commit mistakes and, yes, crimes, and that great nations, by definition, make great mistakes. With this background, and without the burden of the 40's paradigm to fight against, I can look at things like the Vietnam War, for example, in a broader, somewhat depersonalized sense.
My parents, for obvious reasons, cannot do this, because they were robbed of an innocence that I never knew in the first place. To stay with the Vietnam example, while I feel, just as many children of the 40's do, that no American soldier should have ever set foot in Vietnam, I hesitate to point to the war as evidence of incipient American fascism, or as part of an intentional campaign to wage genocidal violence against people of color who dared assert their independence from America's imperial sphere. I use language like "criminally negligent mistake, made clearer by the passage of time". Many children of the 40's are more given to language such as "willfully orchestrated holocaust".
To take another, less emotional example, when I look back on the moon landings of the late 1960's and the early 1970's, I see the clearest possible manifestation of American exceptionalism, made all the more romantic because no violence was involved. I see the unbounded optimism and romanticism and yes, naivete, of American culture laid bare for all the world to see and envy and emulate. Many children of the 40's see an America that was using the last bottle of water to wash its boots while people were dying of thirst at its heels.
I have the lack of unrealistic expecations that allows me to acknowledge that a strong America is not only not a threat to the world, but is utterly necessary in maintaining some vestige of international peace and order. I have no illusions about America; America is made up of human beings, some of whom are naturally given to dishonestly, incompetence, and discrimination. America as a system, however, is better equipped to dull these tendencies and than any other system we have seen to date.
My lack of illusions about the virtue of America is complemented by my lack of illusions about the nature of America's enemies. Our Vietnamese enemies, who any serious person must respect, if not admire, as the most worthy of adversaries and the most dignified and courageous of people, simply wanted to be left alone. They were the exception, however; most of our enemies would stop at nothing to destroy us, and are only kept in check by our might.
I have the lack of unrealistic expecations that allows me to acknowledge that a strong America is not only not a threat to the world, but is utterly necessary in maintaining some vestige of international peace and order. I have no illusions about America; America is made up of human beings, some of whom are naturally given to dishonestly, incompetence, and discrimination. America as a system, however, is better equipped to dull these tendencies and than any other system we have seen to date.
My lack of illusions about the virtue of America is complemented by my lack of illusions about the nature of America's enemies. Our Vietnamese enemies, who any serious person must respect, if not admire, as the most worthy of adversaries and the most dignified and courageous of people, simply wanted to be left alone. They were the exception, however; most of our enemies would stop at nothing to destroy us, and are only kept in check by our might.
Many of the children of the 40's and the 60's point to Europe as a model for the United States to emulate, since it has renounced war. I love Europe, I consider America to be a European nation, and American architecture and cuisine will never touch the hem of Europe's garment, but European pacifism is not necessarily something to romanticize. While I applaud Europe's renunciation of colonialism as well as great power war and agressive war, I personally have the very sincere fear that they may also have renounced their right to defend themselves, apparently hoping instead to stop having children and to allow millions of Muslims into their countries and just tolerate themselves to their hearts' content. I take a genuine comfort in the fact that America has not done so.
Europe had its own children of the 40's, only they were children of the 20's; Europeans realized a full generation earlier than Americans that they were capable of unambiguously terrible things, only in Europe's case, their awakening was caused by widespread conduct that was the most obscene and pornographically violent spasm of inhumanity ever seen. All condensed in the cradle of modernity too boot. So, just as my parents were learning that America could do no wrong, Europeans were convinced that they could never be trusted to use force, for any reason, ever again.
I also take a genuine comfort in the fact that, when America was attacked on its soil by Islamist terrorists, it had the capability and the will to at least attempt to hunt down and kill the people responsible. Most of our reaction to 9/11 has been a cosmic clusterfuck, but I'm glad I live in a country that is not so guilt-riden that it won't seek vengeance against nihilistic mass murder without apology. When Great Britain was attacked on its soil by its own Muslim citizens, its government responded by rushing to the mosques of London and assuring London's Muslims that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. As opposed to war as I am in most practical or theoretical cases, I am proud to live in a country that is civilized, but not to the point where we won't fuck your shit up if you attack us.
To put it bluntly to the disillusioned children of the 40's and their offspring, my peers, I say this: if you want to live in a country without sin, go start your own country and don't let anybody live there, including yourself. This is not to be glib, it is to be honest. It also, however, raises the danger in this line of thinking, which I fully acknowledge as being as dangerous as the 40's delusions.
The understanding that mistakes and selfishness are inherent in any foreign policy must not mutate into a vehicle for excusing blatant crimes of commission, as opposed to inevitable mistakes. For example, after Abu Ghraib, the only "defense" of the Americans' actions ran like this: "If Saddam Hussein still ran those prisons, the torture would have been way worse". To put it diplomatically, Fuck That. I am not a naive idealist, but neither am I willing to downgrade our expectation of moral conduct to the point where anything more humane that Saddam Hussein is excusable.
This is, of course, a very fine line, and one that requires eternal vigilance and introspection. We must not let more realistic expectations about the nature of American power devolve into acceptance of American crimes as the inevitable byproduct of exercising that power. The more important task, however, is for the children of the 60's to thank the children of the 40's for making the 60's happen, and to then convince them to come back into the fold.
To put it bluntly to the disillusioned children of the 40's and their offspring, my peers, I say this: if you want to live in a country without sin, go start your own country and don't let anybody live there, including yourself. This is not to be glib, it is to be honest. It also, however, raises the danger in this line of thinking, which I fully acknowledge as being as dangerous as the 40's delusions.
The understanding that mistakes and selfishness are inherent in any foreign policy must not mutate into a vehicle for excusing blatant crimes of commission, as opposed to inevitable mistakes. For example, after Abu Ghraib, the only "defense" of the Americans' actions ran like this: "If Saddam Hussein still ran those prisons, the torture would have been way worse". To put it diplomatically, Fuck That. I am not a naive idealist, but neither am I willing to downgrade our expectation of moral conduct to the point where anything more humane that Saddam Hussein is excusable.
This is, of course, a very fine line, and one that requires eternal vigilance and introspection. We must not let more realistic expectations about the nature of American power devolve into acceptance of American crimes as the inevitable byproduct of exercising that power. The more important task, however, is for the children of the 60's to thank the children of the 40's for making the 60's happen, and to then convince them to come back into the fold.
I can only imagine how much it must have hurt to realize that the myth of universal American benevolence was a lie, but the answer is not to reject the entirety of what America is. The answer is to come back to America, to come back and love America not as you loved your mother as a child, but as you love your spouse. Come back to an adult relationship, acknowledging the possibility of heartache while also acknowledging the reality of love and the fact that, all things being equal in an often scary world, there's noone else you'd rather be with.
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