{"id":19208,"date":"2015-02-09T06:34:18","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T11:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=19208"},"modified":"2015-02-09T13:37:20","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T18:37:20","slug":"why-the-groovy-60s-still-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2015\/02\/09\/why-the-groovy-60s-still-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the (groovy) 60s still matter"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"This<\/a>

This year’s Winter Carnival button created by cartoonist Gary Trudeau<\/p><\/div>\n

UPDATE:<\/p>\n

We’ve had some critical feedback about the lack of discussion, so far, of Vietnam, which obviously was one of the major catalysts for all that happened in the 1960s.\u00a0 I think that’s fair.<\/p>\n

We’re trying to establish a balance here between the fun and nostalgia and celebration of a winter carnival and the opportunity to have an interesting conversation about a part of our history that’s still powerfully intimately relevant.<\/p>\n

But Vietnam is just too big and too powerful an event in our national experience not to be front and center in a conversation like this one.\u00a0 Rest assured that the topic will be on the table tonight in Saranac Lake and as we continue our discussion here.\u00a0 Hope you’ll join in with your thoughts and memories.\u00a0 — Brian, NCPR<\/p>\n

Origional Post<\/strong><\/p>\n

This month, Saranac Lake’s Winter Carnival theme is the Groovy 60s<\/em>.\u00a0 One of the coolest parts of Carnival season is always the annual theme.\u00a0 People work wonders finding creative ways to bring the Celts or Space Invaders or Medieval Knights to life.\u00a0 (One of my favorite moments in the Adirondacks was encountering two knights in shining armor on horseback next to the old Dew Drop Inn).<\/p>\n

But this is year is more special than most.\u00a0 This year for many of us, the theme is a blast and a party and a reason to drag out our old tie-dye, but it’s also living history.\u00a0 We were actually there.\u00a0 The last few weeks, my Facebook page has lit up with people sharing photographs of themselves in the 1960s.\u00a0 We’ve been catching glimpses of each other, wrinkle free, with fresh eyes, our gray hair still decades in the future.<\/p>\n

Already as part of this winter’s Carnival we’ve had a revival of “Hair,” the classic 60s musical (which opened in 1967) and coming up this week there will be a revue of music from the period.\u00a0 Also, tonight, a bunch of us are gathering at Historic Saranac Lake (5pm, more information here<\/a>) to talk more in-depth about what that decade meant.<\/p>\n

It should be a great conversation.\u00a0 NCPR’s Ellen Rocco will be there to talk about her work as an organizer and activist.\u00a0 We’ll also hear from George Nagle, a member of Saranac Lake’s clergy who was arrested in the South during the civil rights era.\u00a0 Howard Riley, one of the Adirondacks’ best local historians, will talk about Saranac Lake in the 60s.<\/p>\n

\"George<\/a>

George Nagle was an activist during the civil rights era and will speak this evening at Historic Saranac Lake<\/p><\/div>\n

The goal of the conversation isn’t to set aside the fun and nostalgia.\u00a0 It’s pretty wonderful how the art and music and sense of hope of the 60s still feels alive and relevant.\u00a0 (While writing this, I’m listening to Neil Young’s first album…)\u00a0 But it’s important, I think, to connect the dots between the fun stuff and the big, almost overwhelming shifts that happened between 1960 and 1970.<\/p>\n

A fun decade, but also big and challenging and scary<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the invention of the birth control pill to the first televised presidential debate to the civil rights movement and the rise of environmentalism, we still inhabit the big conversation begun in those tumultuous years.<\/p>\n

We still idolize the Greatest Generation that came up during the Depression and fought the Second World War.\u00a0 But really, it’s not Eisenhower or Truman who resonate and clang about in our lives.\u00a0 It’s Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. who we still grapple with now.<\/p>\n

Here’s why I think the 60s still matter so profoundly.\u00a0 That decade marked the first time that Americans seriously questioned the great consensus of what it meant to be a “real” American.\u00a0 Prior to the movements of that decade, our society tolerated a fair amount of difference.\u00a0 But it was clearly understand what it meant to be “normal.”<\/p>\n

Normal was white, Christian (mostly protestant), English-speaking, and heterosexual.\u00a0 Normal was an America where men held positions of nearly unquestioned privilege, where a husband’s dominant role in religious life, commerce, and in the home was considered as natural as gravity.<\/p>\n

During the 1960s, we started unpacking those assumptions.\u00a0 We started to experiment not just with new kinds of tolerance, but with actual acceptance.\u00a0 We tested the idea that people living very different lives from our own might be, in their own way, just as normal as ourselves.<\/p>\n

It turns out that’s one of the most radical, scary, controversial ideas we humans have ever come up with.\u00a0 It challenges our deep tribal and racial assumptions.<\/p>\n

Half a century later, we’re all a lot grayer, a little bit slower off the bench maybe, but those are still the very questions we’re trying to answer.\u00a0 And we’re doing it in very different ways.\u00a0 Some of us have stuck to a fairly traditional set of ideas.\u00a0 They lament the “real” America and see the 60s as a moment when our society went off the rails.<\/p>\n

Another group of us are angry that the full idealism of the 60s hasn’t been realized yet.\u00a0 Many see that era as a failure because its full promise is still an ideal, and not a reality.<\/p>\n

The American Carnival?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I see it a little differently.\u00a0 I think we live pretty much entirely in the world produced by that revolutionary decade.\u00a0 Even the most conservative of us have passed through a lot of doors, accepted a lot of big new ideas.\u00a0 And the fact that we still argue and debate and yell at each other?\u00a0 I think the loudest voices in the 60s would approve.<\/p>\n

After all, they weren’t fighting for a new uniformity.\u00a0 It wasn’t a new dogma they wanted or a new set of rigid definitions of what it means to be American.\u00a0 They were fighting for the freedom to keep exploring and questioning and rebelling.<\/p>\n

I suspect that there will never again be a great American consensus.\u00a0 The “culture war” that we inhabit is probably the new normal, though hopefully we’ll come up with a new name for it that doesn’t sound so hostile and ugly.\u00a0 (How about the American Carnival<\/em>?)<\/p>\n

In any event, this is the backdrop to the fun we’re uncorking this month in Saranac Lake.\u00a0 And it’ll help frame our conversation tonight at Historic Saranac Lake.\u00a0 I hope you’ll join us and share your ideas and your memories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UPDATE: We’ve had some critical feedback about the lack of discussion, so far, of Vietnam, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19208"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19208"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19213,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19208\/revisions\/19213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}