Missouri

It was some time in the early 2000's that I first heard someone describe America's red/blue social dichotomy as an extension of the shifting morality of the 1960's. That concept was quite a shock to me.

I had first become conscious of recent history in the 1980's. While there was lots of sixties nostalgia then - as the Baby Boomers had reached many positions of power - it was mostly in a rather light-hearted way. The Boomers had grown up, gotten jobs, become boring, and started to look back on their sixties antics as something between an embarrassment and a fun anecdote. And even when they did try to put forward the idea that the sixties were a significant time that changed the world, it was hard to take them seriously given the conservative shift going on around me. Essentially, I was learning about the sixties with the knowledge that all those kids at Woodstock would go on to elect Reagan.

So I thought of the sixties as a self-contained moment of history that didn’t impact on anything I saw around me. Other than the conception of some people in my age range. Today’s political divide couldn’t be related - for one thing, Fox News’ geriatric audience is composed of a lot of Baby Boomers.

But the more I thought about it, the more I could see how there could be connections. A lot of that just came from getting to see a longer sample of cultural history. I’ve realized that there are long-running disputes that may not involve the same people, but are part of a continuous narrative.

This all came into focus this week during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. I was thinking about how different aspects of American society see this differently. Every night on Twitter, my (largely liberal) feed erupts with shock and fury over the police treatment of demonstrators and the media. And yet, there’s a large constituency that is quite supportive of the police actions. It occurred to me that it was similar to the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Although that incident is now largely remembered as a tragedy, at the time there was a feeling among much of America that it was a reasonable action by the National Guard. It exposed a huge divide in American thought, and we seem to be seeing a similar division opened up by today’s events. Indeed, a number of those Tweets have been making explicit comparisons to sixties unrest.

So I get it. There is a continuous chain of societal conflict. And much as it pains me, I must apologize to the Baby Boomers; yes, you did have a profound impact on American society after all.