In the 60's that was going on in all areas.
I remember myself, I have to modestly admit,
writing a..an article for the student newspaper
at the university of Chicago. And it was called
What Is the Function of the University? That
was the article. What is the Function of the
University. What's the purpose? Why are we
here? Who runs the universities? What are
we being educated for? And then I did one
on sexual freedom that got a lot more publicity
actually, and uhm they picked it up in a national
newspaper, it ended up in New York City. My
uncle was very upset at me, seeing my name
in the paper associated with that one.
But there was in many respects, it was a time
of breaking down barriers very rapidly and
of asking very fundamental questions. And
I think there was also in that process a lot
of destructiveness, a lot of, as one looks
back, a lot of stupidity. I remember, but as it happens
for whatever reason I'm an enormously stubborn
person and amazingly individualistic which
my friends and opponents criticize me for
correctly. And, there was a period I remember
once going to a party. In a room, probably
as many people as there are here, a large
room, people mulling about and everyone was
acting kinda strange and I found out that
I was the only one in the room at that time
that was not on LSD. The only person in the
entire room who was not on acid and I think
the drug thing was, and I was not then and am
not now sympathetic to drugs for a lot of
reasons. But there was, certainly, if you
look at the 60's one can't look at it without
the whole drug aspect. The music, the music
of the times was an explosion out of the past.
The issue of sexuality. Tremendous changes
in people's attitude, that hadn't been the
case in the past. And certainly as Rik talked
about a lot, the whole war movement, and for
the first time something was happening, maybe
for the first time in American history is
that large numbers of people were beginning
to challenge a war. When I was a kid, and
especially after WWII which, y'know 99.9%
of the people in America felt was a proper
war fighting against Nazism. Fascism. And in a sense,
it was a shock to everybody, I think, that large numbers
of people were beginning, but it was not enough
for the president of the United States to
get up now and say "We are fighting for Freedom
in Vietnam." And usually everybody always believed
those things, but now you would have people, starting
with small numbers of people. Starting with
students beginning to question him. And the
demonstrations would grow larger and larger.
5 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand. And
more and more people would come in and the
kids would come home in bodybags and people
were wondering "My Lai." You know what My
Lai was about? American soldiers were accused
of massacring, Vietnamese people. Okay? Burning
the villages and people began to say "Is this
the United States of America?" The country
became extraordinarily, bitterly divided and
finally as the movement filtered down, more
into middle Americas, they saw their kids coming
home in body bags, they saw the lies of the
presidents being exposed. That war broke.
That in itself was an extraordinary time.
Where people were challenging an American
war. People would say "You're a traitor! You're
a traitor to your country! America is at war,
you're opposed to it, you're aiding and abeiting
the enemies of your country!" That is pretty
heavy stuff. Because in fact everybody. Nobody
wants to be a traitor to their country. And then
you're having a nation with young men, you have
a tremendous class division here as it's always
the case is that poor people go to war. Working
class kids go to war and get killed. And the
college students were the ones that were demonstrating, and tremendous tension, the black kids were
the ones that were getting killed. And uhm as one
reflects about the period and one can see
the tremendous tension in the air and gradually
more and more people, where there had been
few, there were more there were more. And
finally the writing was on the wall that the
American people did not want that war. Uh,
and the war finally ended. And during this
period you're seeing people, young people
again. Of course if one talks about the 60's,
one understands that it was a very youthful
revolution certainly and one sees young people
looking for alternative ways of living for
example. The whole idea of the nuclear family;
mommy, daddy and kids and that's what life
is about, and there was questioning of that.
And in fact the radical questioning was going
deeper than it had ever gone before in the
country's history. There had been a time as
many of you know if you've read American history,
that goes back to when where you had a strong
socialist movement, you had a strong communist
movement, you had active trade union movement,
and basically those issues were pretty clear
cut. What workers were fighting for in the
20's and the 30's, even before that, is basically
the right to live with dignity. The right
to earn a decent wage, the right to have the
union. That's what the fight was, so it was
pretty simple. It was basically an economic
fight. But what happened in the 60's, is while
the economic issue was there and people were
talking about the poverty in the ghettos.
Problems all over the country. The revolution
expanded and became a cultural revolution.
There was the understanding that perhaps the normal
fabric of American life was...
