What Happened to the Battle That Was Ragin'?

As Jenny Diski says repeatedly in Picador's lovely "BIG IDEAS/small books" edition of The Sixties:  "The music was undeniably as great as we thought it was."  She repeats this over and over again, and over and over again I agreed with her.  She says, perfectly, "The music knew where we were going in our heads and wrote the score."  It reminded me of the scene in The Big Chill when one of Harold's (Kevin Kline's) college friends accuses him of being stuck in the 60's because all he plays on his stereo is 60's music.  One friend says, "Come on, there's been some great music since then", but isn't able to name any.  (That film soundtrack remains one of the best of all time.)

This is a small book, in both size and length, at 134 pages, but Diski is succinct, objective, and honest in her analysis of those times.  She's also a Brit, so it was interesting to read her take on what was happening in the U.S. from someone "across the pond."

I have another book by Diski, Stranger on a Train, (subtitled "Daydreaming and Smoking Around America With Interruptions").  The title alone was funny, and I really enjoyed this addition to the Travel section of my bookcase.  It was much more than a book on her travels by train, and the difficulties of smoking during her travels; like Paul Theroux, she has a knack for writing memorable portraits of the people she meets, and for writing profoundly on life in general as she makes her way to her destination.

I'm glad Diski made clear at the beginning of the book that:

"The Sixties, of course, were not the decade of the same name.  They began in the mid-1960s with the rise of popular culture. . . aided by a generation of people who did not have an urgent economic fear, nor (in Britain) a war to deal with, and it ended in the mid-1970s when all the open-ended possibilities we saw began to narrow. . ."

She says that the "big idea" we had, that included "freedom, liberty, permission, a great enlarging of human possibilities" was "an idea we failed to think through.  It was a failure of thought essentially, rather than a failure of imagination."  This is crucial.  What made those times so exciting and made them feel so open-ended was the power of our imaginations.  We had a great sense of play. 

She talks about the "terrible clarity of vision" that's "available to the young of every generation, and those who look become the trouble-makers, the difficult ones, that the elders complain about eternally."  How much better could the gist of those times be stated?  This also rang a bell to me personally, as I have always felt that I'm the "difficult" one of my siblings, the one unafraid to pull the covers off the truth and talk about what lies underneath.  I think a lot of those who were close to me at the time held that same spot in their family dynamic.

Diski is truthful about the failures of those times, but also kind toward our youthful hopes and dreams.  "Like the young at all times, I imagined that such as us had never happened before, and that nothing was ever going to be the same again once the old had passed into their pottering retirement.  What the young don't get is that they are young; the old are right, young is a phase the old go through."

To paraphrase Dylan, there are certainly still "battles ragin'", but I don't see youth on the front lines of those battles (against war and various oppressions) like we were in the 60's.  There are surely youth out there who are pursuing their ideals, and those ideals surely include freedom and liberty.  But despite the proliferation of media tools for networking and the spread of information, I don't hear or see much real rebellion in the air, at least not from youth.  Diski thinks the generations older and younger than us "are more inclined than we were to reproduce for their young what they experienced in their childhood, rather than offer them Wonderland.  We were stardust, we were golden and we had to get ourselves back to the garden. . ."