Although current youth and their allies may applaud their new discovery of diversity, equality, and inclusion, and the oppressive nature of it’s enemies, recognition of talent, quality and accomplishment, their lack of knowledge of its moderate history in our country should be cause for some self-induced shame.
Those of us Baby Boomers slowly creaking towards obsolescence are largely responsible for their passionate rejection of any status quo, no matter how improvisational it may be. Suffering from the oppressive privileges of the post-WW II era of American hegemony and prosperity, we exploded with adolescent outrage against the truly evil remnants of segregation and racial discrimination, piggybacking on the actually heroic risks and efforts of civil rights activists. Seeing our successful coercion of that era’s gerontocracy regarding the Civil Rights acts of the early to mid -1960’s, our opposition to being made fodder for pungi stakes and jungle rot in Viet Nam was emboldened. Attempts to satiate the fears of the privileged majority by providing ways of avoiding the draft simply fed into our reactive emotions, since we were sending mostly socially and racially disadvantaged youth in our place. Not so severe as buying our way out of serving, as in the Civil War, but just as pernicious. Transferring our existential sense of Opposition (to something, anything) to the Viet Nam war allowed us even broader and more violent methods of extortion and coercion. We carried these feelings and methods, at a less incarcerable level, into adulthood. We infected our educational and governmental institutions with our focus on care and fairness, casting aside notions of loyalty, acceptance of authority, sanctity (traditional morality), or truly individual liberty and its congener individual responsibility(see
The Righteous Mind for explanations). Yet some few of us had learned the lessons of cancellation during that original awakening.In the late 1960’s to early 1970’s I was a card-carrying member of the well-established Anti-Establishment, sequestered in the protective embrace of a highly regarded liberal arts university. Although well-schooled in and rejecting of Marxism due to family history, I was just as active in anti-war and anti-administrative demonstrations, sit-ins, etc. A small group of us created, edited, and published an alternative newspaper, extolling the virtues of our version of counterculture and civil disobedience. My personal realities eventually invaded the artifice of my crowd-based belief system. My writing of real life experience made me a shunned oxymoron.
For me university attendance was sustained on scholarships, loans, and part-time jobs. Of the several I sampled, working as a graveyard shift longshoreman was the most interesting, lucrative, and dangerous of my transient occupations. Algiers, Louisiana needed people to finish unloading cargo, dunnage, and clean the holds overnight so that the cargo ships could set off as soon as possible, and the union longshoremen wouldn’t do this work. With the union’s blessing the port hired anyone willing at a fairly generous hourly wage, no benefits included. I would show up at the work office in New Orleans about 10:30 at night, and set off after assignment across the river to the particular site where our crew’s ship was docked. Here we might spend eight hours cleaning up the hold of spilled grain. That required a return up on deck every 20-30” due to the toxicity of fumes from grain that had “fermented” in sea water in the hot hold. Even at night, heat was also a concern given the humidity. On other occasions we were fortunate enough to be assigned a ship with dunnage to be removed. This was wood, usually long moderate sized sapling trees, used to hold cargo in place. One of our crew had a nice supplemental business selling the wood, generally of good quality hardwood, on the secondary markets. This required lashing bundles of dunnage together and using cargo cranes to swing the fardels of faggots into the back of a pallet-sided flatbed truck. Although I worked as long and hard as any of the other ad hoc laborers, they all knew that I was 1) a college kid and 2) a long-haired counter-culture type. Some subliminal hostility was evident in comments from time to time, finally culminating in a small incident. I was in the back of the pallet truck to guide the load of dunnage into place when the crane operator “dropped” the load—the quick reflexes of youth enabled me to jump out of the bed of the truck just before impact. Although I knew the probable origin of the episode, I chose to ignore it given “there were more of them and each was larger than me”.
This incident suddenly marked total acceptance of me by the rest of the crew. Although remarks regarding my long hair and beard would continue, they were now in the nature of affectionate ribbing. My job assignments on the ships evened out with everyone else. From that point on, I was member of their tribe, defendable against all others, defined by my work, not my appearance or presumed opinions. While the rite of passage had perhaps been risky, the acceptance and ongoing conviviality were real. That latter aspect is what impressed me, and led me to write about the experience.
My article in the campus alternative newspaper glossed over the accident, and concentrated mainly on my complete acceptance by this crew of disadvantaged and little educated workers, all staunchly conservative and opposed to our youthful inexperienced oppositions in the extreme. These were the exact persons we were so passionately defending, after all. The essence of my article emphasized our mutual ability to know and accept each other if we would only put our assumptions about the others aside, and concentrate on our commonalities. My overture at intersectional peace let loose the dogs of war.
Letters to the editors of our alternative publication flooded the campus inbox (remember, only paper, ink, and physical mailboxes then). None were empathetic to my viewpoints. Many were emotionally, if not physically, threatening. The newspaper itself was held responsible as well for permitting such an unsanctioned diatribe of unification to be published. Given the nastiness and hateful intent of all the responses, I decided to end my participation in the publication. We were a fairly small campus and finding me would not take much effort by any potentially violent fanatic. And so self-censorship and social cancellation claimed an early victory.
That my tale of acceptance by the so-called silent majority resulted in an angered rabid rejection by the “mainstream” of progressivists seeking equality and justice for all but only on their terms has remained a touchstone of my social and political philosophy ever since. Now in the autumn of life I view the metastasis of what we so fervently sought for some into all aspects of our culture with an appropriate dread. Silence is not an effective response to the insensible shouting of True Believers of any stripe. Despite the excellent advice of
and , listening to and actively understanding the viewpoints of those who would cast aside our history, traditions, and culture as intrinsically flawed and unsalvageable will not stay the hands of progressivism’s grasp. What began so long ago has not matured or mellowed, but fermented into an intoxicating liquor of omnipotence. We have somehow evolved anarchic antipathy against all our best intents and interests and passed this on to our several younger generations. Only a few such as (see his 2022 Hillsdale College commencement address on YouTube if not censored out) raise an effective voice of reasoned compromise. But what happened in the past has returned with vengeance, and whether it represents a permanent chromosomal change in our sociocultural body remains to be seen. Let us all strive to make the best of what was old, new again.