I was truly a child of the sixties. I was seven in 1967, so the “summer of love” for me was moving from a small, protected provincial Pennsylvania town where all of my extended family lived—cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends-- to Ann Arbor, Michigan the site of sit-ins and demonstrations and movements of all kinds. During the years I was growing up there, the University of Michigan was home to the growing anti-war movement, the Trans-Love Energies, the Black Panthers, White Panther Party, the Black Action Movement, and Students for a Democratic Society. There were strikes and sit-ins and teach-ins, and since both of my parents were liberal thinkers and graduate students at the University in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, my brothers and I grew up hearing about all of it.
At home my parents discussed politics, education, issues of racial equality, and the importance of the growing Women’s Movement. Instead of being read the Bible, my father talked about Abraham Maslow and self-actualization at the dinner table. Instead of being told to obey our teachers, my mother taught us about the crisis in our schools and discussed John Holt’s classic book, How Children Fail. Instead of being told to respect authority, we were taught to question it.
Peace, love, justice, social equality, and a creative revolution in thinking were the air I breathed as a child, and because these were the “norms” that my brothers and I were raised with, I BELIEVED them. Then, suddenly, seemingly overnight, everything changed: Hair was short again; Lennon was dead; Regan was president. Suddenly, it seemed that all but a few of my friends just wanted to get into a good college and make a lot of money. What a shock to find myself facing adulthood in a world that seemed to have forgotten those years . . . all that promise, and all those promises.
People say that those years were a time of pipe-dreams and wishful thinking, filled with ideas and ideals that would never and could never be realized.. But I think they are mistaken. I’ve found over the years that I’m not alone in still believing in those dreams; as Lennon sang, “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” There ARE many of us dreamers still out there, and I am finding in my teaching that the children of the children of the sixties have inherited a great deal of their parent’s early optimism, along with their commitment to social change, but that they are more able than their parents were to tolerate the ambiguity and hard work that the world asks for in exchange for any lasting transformation.
