Letters - Letters

Two Perspectives on the Sixties

In the curtain-raising issue of TReehouse magazine, Jim Newsom’s review of the traumatic history from 1960 through election night, 2008, pretty much summed up the long, strange trip our fellow right-wing Americans have imposed upon us for the past 40-plus years. But I can’t agree with Jim’s conclusion that the ’60s ended on election night. For me, they finally—and at last!—resumed.

Of course, it all depends through which lens you view that tumultuous, revolutionary decade. If you focus on the headlines—the assassinations, the Vietnam War, the police riots against blacks and anti-war protestors, the election of Richard Nixon with his divisive and racist “Southern strategy,” the Manson murders, the collapse of peace and love at Altamont—then, yes, you’d have to agree that it’s been a dreary history, like living in an increasing drought as every
social advance since Franklin Roosevelt has been reversed, our civil liberties stripped, our moral authority trashed, our economy wrecked, and our military spent and gasping in yet another self-defeating war.

But to me the true spirit of the ’60s was not in those headline events but in the emergence and subsequent pledge of fealty to what I call “hippy values”—a loosely organized behavioral code emerging and defining itself in large part as a reaction to the brutal headlines which instilled disillusion, sorrow, and even despair in the hearts of a good number of Americans, especially the young, who embraced the code most fervently.

From my perspective in 1967, as a hippy convert from American academic intellectualism and on the run from the draft, the 60s were a time of radical awakening, of ecstatic revelation. Admittedly, for me and many others, psychedelic drugs were the gateway to this new understanding. But what I learned under their influence has borne the test of time.

Foremost, for instance, I experienced the Earth as a living, breathing organism. You could call her a person, with needs and perhaps even desires not so different in kind from my own. I realized, as with any person, that I exist in relationship with her. To rip her off or rape her for profit is both a crime and a sin.

Today, informed by science, we recognize that every molecule of life is dependent on every other molecule in an ecology of inter-connected being. We call it environmentalism, and, guided by sheer practicality, few quarrel any more with the necessity of developing a comprehensive plan to protect, nurture, and restore our planet’s basic health and well-being. Barack Obama was elected with a mandate to do just that, which, presuming he responds to the call, will institutionalize a hippy value long under siege from business interests which have controlled our governmental bodies, national and local.
Respecting the environment and attending to its health is a core issue upon which our survival as a civilization—perhaps even a species—depends. Further, with an over-arching reach, it spans every other crisis we face. Unless we recognize nature as our partner (a hippy value) rather than our cash cow (a corporate practice), we are unlikely to have much success solving our pressing energy, economic, moral, and spiritual woes or to bring an end to the planetary devastation of war.
Hippy values embrace reformation in all these areas by proposing a communitarian rather than single-family orientation. In the ’60s many of us lived communally. It was affordable, allowing us to spend less time working for money and more time doing as we pleased. We owned few possessions, and those we had we shared. Many of us grew our own food. We fixed things that broke. We gerry-rigged and recycled. We favored a diet of fruits, vegetables, and grains, with or without dairy products. We played music, painted and sketched, and wrote stories, plays, and poems to entertain one another. We loved—a little too loosely, no doubt. There were troubles. But there were also unforgettable moments of solidarity, unanimity, and wild adventure.

The hippy communitarian culture was crushed by the political forces that ran the Vietnam War, exploited the white backlash against African-American civil rights, and declared war on marijuana. Those same forces, culminating in the tragi-comic Presidency of George W. Bush, are now morally and financially bankrupt. It’s about time. And community, affordability, conservation, recycling, renewable energy, vegetarianism, peace on earth, saving the planet—these once-despised Hippy Values of the 1960s—are back in vogue at last.

- D.D. Delaney, Norfolk, VA

I have one trivial note of difference.  The sun did not "come up that morning" in the usual sense, at least not to brightly illuminate the new day. 

The dark morning featured clouds and heavy rain.

As I worked at my precinct, performing the last of so many volunteer activities for the Obama campaign over the summer and autumn months, I would walk up to rain-soaked strangers standing in the long line and ask, "Is this a beautiful day or what!?"  All responded the same way. It was one of the most beautiful days any of us have ever seen.

At my Norfolk precinct as in so many, we prepared for a post-rush hour crush but none materialized.  Folks showing up to vote in the early evening had almost no wait at all! 

Why had so many people come so early?  I arrived at 5:45 AM, a quarter hour before the polls opened, and didn't vote until 9:15.  The lines grew even longer by mid-morning.  But lines grew shorter as businesses closed for the day.  The explanation?  It was like Christmas morning.  You wake up early, all excited and just can't wait to unwrap the presents.  Our great gift that day was the end of an era and the start of a new time of monumental challenges and rewards.

In Obama's speech at Grant Park one could hear echoes of Kennedy's famous inaugural couplet, "Ask not what your country can do for you; Ask what you can do for your country!"  Surely there must be shared sacrifice on the near horizon and shared accomplishment further along.

We have not scaled any peaks in this election.  But we have found a trailmarker that points the way to the mountains.  Once again we are poised to ascend!  On this trek we will endure our share of storms, but there will also be sunshine once we stand above the clouds.

Maybe Newsom is right, after all, even meteorologically.  The metaphorical sunrise on November 4th, was bright and beautiful enough to relight the soul of a nation, notwithstanding a few umbrellas.

-Tom Reel, Norfolk, VA

Throwing Money at the Education Problem

I just read Tom's introductory essay, and am delighted to see his voice once again being published here in Hampton Roads.  Best of luck with the continued success of the business end of things!

In a conversation today with one of my classmates at ODU, we got onto the question of how to optimize education (we're studying engineering), since we were both dissatisfied with various aspects of our studies.  Several ideas came up, but I wanted to highlight just one of them and maybe get some feedback from the good people at TReehouse, or maybe inspire an article....

People say that you can't just throw money at the problem of poor quality education.  Our idea is that perhaps you could just throw money, as long as it was aimed only at hiring new teachers.  I know from teaching experiences I've had that it's not very difficult to have a good teaching experience when there are less than 10 students for each teacher.  It doesn't even matter much how good a teacher you are - with only 10 students, you can teach really inefficiently and still communicate most of what you have to give to all of the students.  This would about triple the labor expenditures of school boards, since I think average teacher-student ratio is around 1:30, but a big chunk of the money could be simply taken from the development and administration of standardized tests, which don't measure learning in a meaningful way, take classroom time away from in-depth learning, encourage rote memorization of facts and superficial understanding and emphasize competitive rankings over absolute learning. I don't know the numbers, but I suspect that if all the money allocated to No Child Left Behind were spent just on hiring more teachers, the improvements to education in America would be much greater than those we are currently experiencing!

Thanks for taking the time to listen.

- John Whitelaw, Norfolk, VA