Stetsenko, Anna wrote:
> Hi Judy, I am back. To find the follwoing article in today's New York
> Times. You can access it at
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/26/opinion/26DOWD.html
>
> or read the text below. It kind of speaks to many issues relevant to the
> CHAT.
>
> Anna.
>
> -----------------------------------------
> The Age of Acquiescence
> By MAUREEN DOWD
>
> WASHINGTON - A friend of mine over the weekend was recalling her days as an
> idealistic child of the 60's. Students sitting around the dorm, amid the
> water bongs, water beds, strobe lights and Che posters, listening to Led
> Zeppelin and Dylan, dreaming about remaking the world in their own image,
> trading nightmares about spying Big Brother and soul-robbing corporations.
>
> "We thought America was being run by the corporate-military-industrial white
> male power structure," she said. "We were certain there was a right-wing
> conspiracy. We thought civil liberties and free speech were imperiled. We
> were suspicious of rich people. We had reason to believe there was corporate
> malfeasance and Wall Street was bad. We worried that the government was
> backing coups in Latin America. We figured the administration wanted to
> topple all the overwrought, self-appointed messiahs who didn't know how to
> run their own little societies. We assumed that powerful people were rigging
> elections. We feared there were people who wanted to blast roads through
> forests and rip up the tundra."
>
> She recalled all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret
> government plan to suspend the Constitution and declare a national security
> emergency and round up people without charges, and that the oil companies
> and banks would plunge us into nuclear war.
>
> "And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our worst paranoid
> nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our enemies from the
> 60's have crept back into power. And we were the empowerers, because we've
> turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against. We forgot to
> be suspicious."
>
> The times they ain't a-changin'. The passionate activists from the Age of
> Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent Majority.
>
> "Our young hunches are now becoming mature realities," said Bobby Rush, the
> Black Panther who became a Chicago Congressman. "Yet we are paralyzed in the
> headlights. We don't know exactly how to react to the right wing trampling
> our Constitution and dictating to the world who their leadership can be. The
> American people have been scared beyond all imagination because of Sept. 11.
> But now we are getting to the point where we can't use a library card
> without opening ourselves up to Big Brother."
>
> Ralph Nader said the phrase he coined in 1970, "corporate crime," is the new
> catch phrase in business magazines.
>
> Three and a half decades ago, the mantra among young people who railed
> against capitalist pigs and government lies was "the fix is in."
>
> "The fix is now institutionalized," Mr. Nader says. "When Congress won't
> double the S.E.C. budget in the middle of a corporate crime wave, it shows
> that the system is irreversibly decayed. As Brandeis said, we can have a
> democratic society or we can have a concentration of great wealth in the
> hands of a few, but we cannot have both."
>
> Of course some Democrats regard Ralph Nader as part of the problem and not
> part of the solution.
>
> People used to be shocked when a member of an administration said that
> what's good for General Motors is good for the United States. But with the
> Bush administration, the sinful synchronicity of business and government is
> just a day's work, and nobody is reeling from the spectacle.
>
> Some convictions of the love-bead era have been turned on their heads. The
> police are not regarded as "pigs" anymore. And, given their woeful
> performance, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. are not seen as scarily omniscient
> anymore.
>
> And it is not going to be so easy for women to get as much power and sexual
> freedom as men. Alpha women, like Martha Stewart - who got rich being an
> über-hausfrau, just the image women were running away from in the 60's - are
> crashing and burning out every day.
>
> Those who came of age in the 60's and lived through the plum decades of the
> 80's and 90's gave up a long time ago on John Lennon's wish that they could
> "imagine no possessions . . . no need for greed or hunger in a brotherhood
> of man." (Even Mr. Lennon, in the bosom of the Dakota, found his own fantasy
> hard to live by.)
>
> And now, faced with the evil of Osama bin Laden, they can no longer imagine
> there's "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too."
>
> These utopian sentiments were buried in the rubble in Lower Manhattan.
>
>
>
>
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Judy Diamondstone
>>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>Sent: 6/25/2002 4:02 PM
>>Subject: greetings from Eva Ekeblad
>>
>>
>>
>>Eva, who is not subscribed at the moment, has posted photos from a
>>couple of sessions in Amsterdam at:
>>
>>http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/ISCRATpictures/lst
>><http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/ISCRATpictures/lst>
>>
>>
>>Is anyone else back at the keyboard yet?
>>
>>judy
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Judy Diamondstone
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Sent: 6/25/2002 4:02 PM
> Subject: greetings from Eva Ekeblad
>
>
>
> Eva, who is not subscribed at the moment, has posted photos from a
> couple of sessions in Amsterdam at:
>
> http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/ISCRATpictures/lst
> <http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/ISCRATpictures/lst>
>
>
> Is anyone else back at the keyboard yet?
>
> judy
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 01 2002 - 01:00:07 PDT