Successful systems – economic, political, whatever – need a combination of a workable core philosophy, and checks and balances against the inherent weakness of that particular system.

The exact causes really don’t matter in the end. All Utopian dreams die from the the grim facts of reality.

Harsh, but true.

The true believers made a try of it on communes, after all. That didn’t work out, though, because as others have noted, perfect forms of sharing or government require perfect people, and they are in short supply.

That is why it was just a Utopian dream. Nothing wrong with those, but you cannot expect them to be any more real than fairy tales, after all.

The hippy dream of replacing stark materialism with social ideals has died, and the world is a much colder,place as a consequence.

Why would anyone give any relevance to anything Ted Nugent says? He actually looks like a hippie himself and has in fact has certainly engaged in permiscious sex, with underage girls at that.

And here I thought I was the only one to think this.

Their editorial pages have a consistent view: “Free Market”/Power/Money are good; dissent, non-conformity, “alternative lifestyles” are bad.

Ironic, because as the 60s showed with the rise of tie-dye t-shirts and Grateful Dead music – and the ’00s are showing today – with the internet subculture and its offspring, there’s a lot of money to be made in alternative lifestyles, non-conformity, and dissent.

See Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1958) and Gary Snyder’s poetry, especially Earth House Hold.

http://www.beatmuseum.org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html

Very beautiful. My wife and I have been married for over thirty years and in some ways we are typical of our generation (we turned 18 in 1968). We get together with four of my high school friends who each has had one marriage! that has lasted all these years, and yet 2 of the guys were at Woodstock and two came back from Viet Nam with pounds of marijuana. (I wish they were here to tell the story….)

Our daughter will be 24 and she writes often about how her generation does not hope. We did go wrong somewhere in America. Any human problem should be able to be solved by human resources and ingenuity.

I see two problems with the WSJ piece. First, Mr. Nugent is a flame-thrower. That is amusing if you agree with him, but hardly starts a conversation if what he is discussing is important. And second, The WSJ features him to squelch conversation. Their editorial pages have a consistent view: “Free Market”/Power/Money are good; dissent, non-conformity, “alternative lifestyles” are bad.

Why they pick Mr. Nugent is a variation of this argument: “some of my best friends are liberals, blacks, women, etc., and even they admit…” It is ironic, since I bet the editors would be more at home with my high school buddies and I and our wives than they would with Mr. Nugent, but that is what The Moderate Voice is trying to counter: this idea that we have to sound byte each other into a corner.

It was a dream, a beautiful dream, that you could change the world with music and love. Some things did change, especially in the sexual hangups department. The social-justice atmosphere gave the blacks on the civil-rights movement much needed allies (beating and hosing down middle class suburban white kids wasn’t as kosher for the TV set). Some things changed, and many more stayed the same. I value the liberty that my parents generation achieved for those of us that came after, but it is neither Eden nor Hell, but a work in progress. I worry about my generation, much less idealistic, fed off the disillusion of our parents, convinced that we CAN’T change the world. That can’t be healthy either.