Age and experience

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y'all
War, huh (good God)

              The Temptations, "War," 1969 

The War in Vietnam created the Anti-War movement, which coincided with the young adulthood of the Baby Boom generation, which coincided with the flowering of the Black Civil Rights movement, Women's Liberation, The Pill, Marijuana, and the Counterculture. It also coincided with the music of Motown, the California Beach Sound, the Beatles and the British Invasion generally, Bob Dylan, protest songs, and overall, to my ear, the greatest popular music of all time.

Trigoboff, in graduate school

People who were young and politically active in marches protesting wars in 1969 are in their 70s now. We are witnessing from our homes a military invasion of a smaller country by a larger one. In 1969 the USA said it was engaged in a preventative war, to stop communist dominos from falling, holding the line at South Vietnam. Russia now asserts theirs is a preventative war, to stop NATO encroachments, holding the line at Ukraine.

Michael Trigoboff was young in 1969. He teaches Computer Science at Portland Community College. He has changed as he got older, but he remembers the music.

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

Trigoboff, recent

We Boomers were young once, and very idealistic. Our parents had just won World War II and their message to us was that everything was going to be wonderful from now on. We bought it. Then we reached adolescence, and began trying to put our idealism into practice. I organized a local group of SANE (Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy) when I was in high school. An organizer from the group came to our meeting and I asked him what specifically we could do to end the possibility of nuclear war. I will always remember what he told me: “If I knew the answer to that, I would be out doing that instead of being here at this meeting.” That was one of my first clues, but I was too young to pick up on it.

Later on in the 60s, I became a hippie. Long hair, bell bottoms, marijuana, the whole nine yards. Those of us boomers who had musical talent wrote songs that expressed our idealism. One of those was Wooden Ships, about the aftermath of a nuclear war:

Horror groups us as we watch you die,
All we can do is echo your anguished cry,
Stare as all human feelings die,
We are leaving, you don’t need us. . . .

Another song, Goodbye and Hello by Tim Buckley, expressed our generational idealism much more explicitly. Here’s how it starts, but it’s worth reading the whole thing:

The antique people are down in the dungeons
Run by machines and afraid of the tax
Their heads in the grave and their hands on their eyes
Hauling their hearts around circular tracks
Pretending forever their masquerade towers
Are not really riddled with widening cracks
And I wave goodbye to iron
And smile hello to the air

They were the obsolete, old, antique people. We were the new children. We were leaving, they didn’t need us.

But you know what happened to those of us who managed to survive long enough to get older? Experience.

The 1970s came along and nine out of ten of our hippie brothers and sisters who were going to help us bring a new psychedelic cosmic consciousness into the world were suddenly doing cocaine, dressing up in polyester leisure suits, and dancing in discos. The Vietnam War we were opposed to came to an end, and the North Vietnamese took over with such authoritarian communist brutality that they produced a huge wave of Vietnamese “boat people” refugees.

The Chinese Communist “cultural revolution” sent intellectuals and graduate students (which I was at the time) “down to the farm” to be “educated” by the peasants. I remember being at a party back then. I was saying what a crime this was and some SDS type turned to me and said, “Maybe come the revolution, we’ll have to send you down to the farm.” And I thought to  myself, “Maybe come the revolution, I’ll have a sniper rifle and I’ll put a bullet through your fucking head.”

Those of us who were capable of learning from experience were starting to see that idealism had its downsides, and the “antique people” actually knew a thing or two, and that not only did they need us, but we needed them.

It’s the function of young people to bring new ideas into the world. It’s the function of old people to act as ballast, to introduce enough friction into the process that the young people don’t end up performing their very own version of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields or the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

We boomers were karmically blessed by not having our “revolution” come to pass. There’s no telling what horrible crimes we might have committed if our young idealism had been given free rein.