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Entry: Forty Years Later, Undoing '68 Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/forty_years_later_undoing_68#25541 Post contents: There's a strong tendency these days when looking back at the 60's to assume that "those longhair radicals" were a unified group. They were not--there were distinct factions, and about the only thing unifying them was discontent with some aspect of the preexisting order. Some of the 60's radicals were political revolutionaries--think Berkeley types, Yippies, SDS. They wanted to an end to the war, redistribution of wealth, and all the other nonsense laid out in the other nonsense in the Port Huron statement. The other radicals, the real hippies, were a purely cultural movement, with no larger political ambition. They really did just want to go to San Francisco, have sex, do drugs, and stop altogether stop being a part of the society which they (mostly correctly) saw as stifling and conformist. They collapsed because of bad economics, but the ideas they espoused have larger lived on, and not entirely for the worse. If you want to condemn the 60's, it's important to deal with each faction of the revolution separately. Of course the entire New Left program is hogwash, as are all leftist economic theories. But do you really want to go back to a time of complete sexual repression, total disregard for the environment, and a musical world without the influence of Hendrix, the later Beatles, and the Dead? I don't. Sent at: 2008 09 07