Vineland echoes

The Age of Acquiescence
By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON - A friend of mine over the weekend was recalling her days as an
idealistic child of the 60's. Students sitting around the dorm, amid the
water bongs, water beds, strobe lights and Che posters, listening to Led
Zeppelin and Dylan, dreaming about remaking the world in their own image,
trading nightmares about spying Big Brother and soul-robbing corporations.

"We thought America was being run by the corporate-military-industrial
white male power structure," she said. "We were certain there was a
right-wing conspiracy. We thought civil liberties and free speech were
imperiled. We were suspicious of rich people. We had reason to believe
there was corporate malfeasance and Wall Street was bad. We worried that
the government was backing coups in Latin America. We figured the
administration wanted to topple all the overwrought, self-appointed
messiahs who didn't know how to run their own little societies. We assumed
that powerful people were rigging elections. We feared there were people
who wanted to blast roads through forests and rip up the tundra."

She recalled all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret
government plan to suspend the Constitution and declare a national security
emergency and round up people without charges, and that the oil companies
and banks would plunge us into nuclear war.

"And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our worst paranoid
nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our enemies from the
60's have crept back into power. And we were the empowerers, because we've
turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against. We forgot
to be suspicious."

The times they ain't a-changin'. The passionate activists from the Age of
Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent Majority.

...continues at

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/opinion/26DOWD.html