I came of age during the most vibrant, colorful, metaphysical, creative, intellectual, spiritual, musical, stressful, liberating period in our young country’s history.
Some called it the Age of Aquarius. Others say it was b’shert, Yiddish for “meant to be.”
My generation, the baby boomers, were welcomed into the world as a Madison Avenue concept and shaped by young post-World War II married couples from what was being billed the Greatest Generation. They couldn’t wait to move into the suburbs, start having us, and give us everything we needed to “make it” in our chosen careers. In that way, many of us were blessed.
But those benefits came with a cost.
We were called upon to embrace a war with a country that had never harmed us and, in fact, wanted to be like us. Supporting the war, we were taught, would demonstrate our patriotism.
Not supporting it made us traitors.
Our mandate, unfortunately, became to change society’s self-perception. But how do you tell a generation of heroes, still basking in the glow of being democracy’s savior and thinking they can do no wrong, that they are now the bad guys?
You build a broad-based long-term movement with support from all generations and you create your own media. Everyone’s story matters!
Like the darkness that has descended on the landscape since Trump was re-elected, conditions were right to create the largest antiwar movement in our country’s history, and launch some of our country’s most important social movements at the same time. Baby boomer activists came to our activism from every suburb, ghetto, barrio, reservation, campus, and military base the country had to offer. Some of us, the “red diaper babies,” had radical parents, including members of the Communist Party. By the time they got to college, they already had read Marx and Lenin and had developed a political analysis.
Others of us were radicalized by personal experiences that forced us to question everything we knew and open ourselves to new conclusions. These were the accidental revolutionaries.