[Carolinamom]

The author of this WHINE and any others here who think they're the only ones who've ever lived during trying times need to STOP IT. Get a life.

[RightWingAtheist]

Hey Becky!

http://new.wavlist.com/tv/036/102_syuhip.wav

[Mr. Bird]

We brought you...Rock and Roll...

Hate to quibble, but your generation was a tad young to invent Rock and Roll. Elvis was born in '35. So was Jerry Lee Lewis. Buddy Holly in '36. And Chuck Berry? That very good Boomer year of 1926.

To paraphrase Reagan, you may have observed Rock and Roll, but your predecessors invented it.

[eyespysomething]

We dropped out, grew our hair, dressed, danced, sang, played music, made love, got high and changed all the rules with only one thing in mind… to get your attention and show you that it's possible to end war and live in peace. And when we were done, it was over. We had won.

Um, and what were all the terrorists attacks since then, and especially 9-11. If that's winning to them, I'd hate to see us losing.

[NYCVirago]

Well, we're the Baby Boomers now. And, guess what? We're all grown up and we have money…and not only that, one of us is going to be the next president.

This writer seems to think that Baby Boomers are just now reaching power. Never mind that these boomers are old enough to be AARP members, and soon will be eligible for Social Security. And never mind that we've already had two boomer presidents. In this writers' eyes, it's still 1968, and The Man is keeping them down.

[MissAmericanPie]

Those re-occurances are trippy aren't they?

[weegee]

We dropped out, grew our hair, dressed, danced, sang, played music, made love, got high and changed all the rules with only one thing in mind… to get your attention and show you that it's possible to end war and live in peace. And when we were done, it was over. We had won.

Saying it don't make it so. The war "ended" but the Vietnamese and the Cambodians did not live in peace. They were slaughtered. But the war was over for us, right?

We didn't need to be fighting in Europe. America wasn't threatened. Heck, if America had forgone it's impearlist nature we wouldn't have been in Hawaii or the South Pacific and Japan would have been happy (to conquer the Far East).

South America was not a major battleground for WWII and neither was Mexico or Canada in North America. Why oh why didn't we just wait until the war came to us (or Hitler got his missile technology developed). < /sarcasm >

Do you know who we are? We're Greasers, Hoods, Beatniks, Long Hairs, Freaks, Hippies and Yuppies.

Greasers weren't hippies. Not in the 1950s or in the 1960s. Even today they reject that socialist claptrap. The European greasers (teddy boys) beat up hippies.

Hoods. That means small time crooks. Good to know they count thugs in their corner. I don't think that small time theives and people running local protection rackets and drug runners were protesting the war.

Beatniks. Jack Kerouac was definitely a beatnik only he supported Ike and had problems with the protestors.

Long hairs, freaks. Charles Manson was someone (who was not a hippie or a beatnik, he was not a hipster, he was a "bupskiboo" by his own term). He traced hipsterdom through its different phases. He said that the Beatles were not his band, he liked Sinatra, he says that the Beatles were the 60s children's music. He collected up his long hair freaks (today's gutterpunks) who he said society had "thrown away" (more like the block who took Leary's "turn on/drop out" mantra to heart). That is the freaks. They were against the war but they weren't effective socialists protesting. Their addictions kept them from being a genuine threat to society at large (although they could do some horrible things on a small scale).

Hippies. Yep they sure were hippies.

Yuppies. Well if they want to admit that they left behind all of their anticapitalist claptrap and embraced money, so be it. No lesser hippie radical/Yippie than Jerry Rubin did this. David Horowitz also did it; only he became a prominent conservative writer.

[weegee]

All of these people around the world protesting America's war in Afghanistan. Why didn't all of these same people give a rat's @$$ about Afghanistan when Russia was fighting a war there?

I don't seem to recall the global protests over that war. Did I miss something?

[dave k]

Well, two things I've learned today on this topic...

1. If an X'er is remotely critical of a member of the Baby Boom Generation, we are a shill for the Democratic Party.

2. If an X'er sticks up for their own generation, we are a shill for the Democratic Party.

I've also learned that we are the cause of all of society's ills of the last 30 years, and previous generations have had no contributing factor to them at all.

Did I do good? Can I now go out and play?

[Lee'sGhost]

"So fasten your seat belts kids. It's gonna be a bumpy ride. "

That's right, you insipid POS. It will be bumpy. It won't be like last time. This time the true lies, the lies of the left, will be revealed at every turn. This time there is no question as to who the enemy is, even if your college enlightened brain won't allow you to see him. This time the talk radio, Internet, alternative cable news Truth Machine will expose your liberal lies and deceptions. This time there is much more at stake than a third world country in a far away land. This time it started here at home in the United States. This time it will end with an American victory. So bring on your pathetic anti-American protests and poison. Soon you will be held in less regard than the terrorists you so sympathize with.

Bring it on b!tch!

[Publius6961]

Saved for later reading. I can only surmise that it is ironic that the "luckiest" generation in our history should be the most unconscious, irresponsible, pampered, ignorant and angry. Having lived through all of it, I easily can separate fact from fiction and hyperbole from reality and intelligent analysis from an acid trip...

[mabelkitty]

They are also the reason the next President I vote for will be a veteran of Desert Storm (2008).

[Helms]

Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

Courtesy Office of Sen. Tom Hayden.

THE PORT HURON STATEMENT OF THE STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introductory Note: This document represents the results of several months of writing and discussion among the membership, a draft paper, and revision by the Students for a Democratic Society national convention meeting in \cf2 Port Huron\cf0 , Michigan, June 11-15, 1962. It is represented as a document with which SDS officially identifies, but also as a living document open to change with our times and experiences. It is a beginning: in our own debate and education, in our dialogue with society.

published and distributed by Students for a Democratic Society 112 East 19 Street New York 3, New York GRamercy 3-2181

INTRODUCTION: AGENDA FOR A GENERATION

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb,

Lie #1:

The Soviet Atomic Bomb: 1939-1949

The most significant early work on fission in the Soviet Union was performed by Yakov Zel'dovich and Yuli Khariton who published a series of papers in 1939-41 that laid the groundwork for later Soviet atomic weapons development.

The Soviet weapons program proper began in 1943 during World War II, under the leadership of physicist Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov. The program was initiated by reports collected by Soviet intelligence about the rapidly growing Manhattan Project in the U.S. It remained largely an intelligence operation until the end of the war, but it was a highly successful one, due to sympathies of many for the wartime Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany; the socialist political sympathies of some; and the weak security screening program necessitated by the hasty assembly of the vast program. Klaus Fuchs, an important physicist at Los Alamos, was by far the most valuable contributor of atomic information. First Lightning/"Joe-1": The First Soviet Atomic Explosion

Test: First Lightning/"Joe-1"

Time: 07:00 29 August 1949 (local)

Location: Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan

Test Height and Type: Tower

Yield: 22 Kt

The first Soviet nuclear test, code named "First Lightning", detonated a plutonium bomb, the RDS-1. The code designation RDS was actually arbitrary and meaningless, but various people on the project gave it a variety of interpretations, one popular one was "Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina" (Stalin's Rocket Engine), another was "Russia Does It Alone". The whole focus of the Soviet program at this point was to set off a Soviet atomic blast at the earliest possible time whatever the cost. At Beria's insistence, this device was an exact copy of the U.S. Gadget/Fat Man design.

the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people -- these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America. The declaration "all men are created equal . . . rang hollow before the facts of Negro life in the South and the big cities of the North. The proclaimed peaceful intentions of the United States contradicted its economic and military investments in the Cold War status quo.

We witnessed, and continue to witness, other paradoxes. With nuclear energy whole cities can easily be powered, yet the dominant nationstates seem more likely to unleash destruction greater than that incurred in all wars of human history. Although our own technology is destroying old and creating new forms of social organization, men still tolerate meaningless work and idleness. While two-thirds of mankind suffers undernourishment, our own upper classes revel amidst superfluous abundance. Although world population is expected to double in forty years, the nations still tolerate anarchy as a major principle of international conduct and uncontrolled exploitation governs the sapping of the earth's physical resources. Although mankind desperately needs revolutionary leadership, America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than "of, by, and for the people."

Not only did tarnish appear on our image of American virtue, not only did disillusion occur when the hypocrisy of American ideals was discovered, but we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. The worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism, the entrenchment of totalitarian states, the menace of war, overpopulation, international disorder, supertechnology -- these trends were testing the tenacity of our own commitment to democracy and freedom and our abilities to visualize their application to a world in upheaval.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority -- the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will "muddle through", beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity -- but might it not better be called a glaze above deeplyfelt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.

[Pagey]

In college we learned that people like you are called sociopaths but we think you're just plain evil.

Boy, Talk about Calling The Kettle Black Ms. Becky "Sycophant to Bill and Hillary Clinton" Burgwin. LOL at her feeble attempt to distract attention away from her Saul Alinsky Tactics.Nice try though Beck.

[SaveTheChief]

I hate hippies. They want to save the earth but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.

[Pagey]

Military Industrial Complex

Blah Blah Blah, how misguide coud she be? Try this one on for size Beck:

Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation January 17, 1961 (excerpt on the Educational-Research Complex)
>Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

The actual problem is the Educational-Research Complex, but Becky could never comprehend it.

[TADSLOS]

It's unadulterated crap like this that makes me ashamed to be associated with the baby boomer generation. Collectively, we're a bunch of whiny, pansy a$$ed, spoiled brats who can't or won't grasp the reality around us. I'd much rather hang with the current crop - a damned sight better adjusted group of people, by in large, and many of whom are thoroughly fed up with boomers.

[martin gibson]

ms burgwin is just another pig...

[jwalsh07]

I was a hippy once, and then I enlisted in the US Army and became a man.