To some people spiritual freedom is the most dangerous freedom of all.
Many of us loved the 1960s. Out of the turmoil, anti-war protests, rioting, bra burning, and wars of liberation the world we now live in was born. Those who lived through the injustices of the old world saw our aspirations embodied in a group of programs called The Great Society
We thought that once the promises of The Great Society were fulfilled there'd be no more white America and black America, no more man's world and woman's world, no more colonial overlords who could kick a "native" out of the way in more than three quarters of the nations on earth.
For us it was progress in the same way that landing a man on the moon was progress, or the manufacture of the first minicomputer was progress. For many of us hippie culture, summers of love, flower children, and milestone events like Woodstock, The Beatles, and "Hair," were the spiritual by-products of our progress.
These by-products gave birth to the New Age Movement, which further changed the world from the one we grew up in to the one that you, the grandchildren of our revolution, now own. The biggest danger to your world come not from the 1%ers but the .001%ers who feel that our revolution destroyed America's chances of ruling the world, destroyed their chances of running everything.
No, grandchildren, you are not hippies, your music is not "The Age of Aquarius" from "Hair," but you would not be who you are if they (the flower children) had not been who they were. They were the "one love" people of universal tolerance. They led us to "A Course in Miracles" and The Foundation for Inner Peace.
They brought Buddhism into the mainstream. They ended the total domination of a born-into-sin mentality and the consequent fear of eternal hell-fire and damnation. They believed you can be spiritual without religious hierarchies, dogmas, doctrines, or collection plates. Many of them believed that we are all God, or at least there is a good God within us, or within reach.
If there is even a hint of that spirit in the tent cities of your Occupy movements, it likely can be traced back to the "one love" people. They awakened within America the dream of unity between man and nature and a single harmonious economy from which each took only what was needed. This unity could exist on earth, whereas before them the general belief was that it could only happen in heaven and would include only some Christians.
As good as all this Great Society/one love stuff sounded we did not think much about claims made, with the best of intentions, that the nation had to be wary of ill-effects of its massive government success at reducing poverty so rapidly (our revolution cut it in half, remember), and the ill-effects of embracing too much freedom of mind and spirit.
Those ill-effects can lead to the erosion of character in individuals, to a death of motivation in large (nations) and small (families and communities) economic systems. In the end the ill-effects would compromise national security in a hostile world where we'd be unable to find the firmness of purpose necessary for human progress.
Back in the 1960s, we did not take much into account the people who hated the decade. But now listening to the 2012 Republican Presidential debates we hear nearly all of the sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly expressed reasons for the hatred. Listening closely we hear so much anger in the voices of snarling candidates vying for the votes of those who also hated many of the ill-effects, as well as the effects, of what we did..
We sense the born-into-sin ideologies at the foundation of everything that 2012 Republican candidates say. It is like entering a time warp. It is easy to see why 20 years after our revolution, after Richard Nixon had tired without success, the Republican Party came up with a leader, Ronald Reagan, once a California liberal, who could lead a counter revolution.
As Barack Obama said:
"Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. . .He (Reagan) put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it ... he tapped into what people were already feeling. . ."
To put together an electoral majority Reagan tapped into a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, super nationalism, greed, militarism, and evangelical hatred. He did not create what we can call Reaganism. Reaganism is a form of government named, of course, after him, in which an affable man of less than stellar intellect becomes President while the government is actually run by Reaganites.
Reaganites are those behind the scenes operatives who designed programs during and after Reagan's two terms and grew rich, directly or indirectly, from the coffers of .001%ers who still dream of an American empire.
Now, Obama, a less affable man of sterling intellect, has the task of guiding us away from the ill-effects of our revolution without betraying the spirit of what his white mother must have felt in the 1960s to even entertain the idea of marrying a "native" of Kenya who could be kicked out of the way by any colonial overlord.
If it were not for what we did, Obama most likely would not have been born. And there would be no new world for him to try to lead you, our grandchildren, deeper into.
The previous posts in this series are:
Should President Obama Have Gone the Way of LBJ?
Will the 60s Revolution Be Undone?
Undoing the 1960s
The next post, " The Rapid Rise of the Reaganites" is coming soon.
George Davis is creator of the series of world-sourced, interactive books, Barack Obama, America and the World. This series contains the background reporting, drawn from across the nation and around the world, that gives deeper meaning to the ideas in this post.
