From: owner-believers-digest@smoe.org (believers-digest) To: believers-digest@smoe.org Subject: believers-digest V5 #165 Reply-To: believers@smoe.org Sender: owner-believers-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-believers-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk believers-digest Tuesday, September 4 2001 Volume 05 : Number 165 In Today's believer's digest: ----------------- Memo to Yankee Fans ["Ron Rosen" ] Every generation ... ["Ron Rosen" ] Re:Every generation ... ["Ron Rosen" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 08:30:44 -0700 From: "Ron Rosen" Subject: Memo to Yankee Fans Even if Mike Mussina had completed a perfect game against the Red Sox last night, it wouldn't have counted. He lied about his age! HELP! owner-believers@smoe.org Send mail to believers@smoe.org Susan's CD's are available on your desktop at World Cafe CDs http://worldcafecds.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 19:00:59 -0700 From: "Ron Rosen" Subject: Every generation ... Here's something I just sent to the Dar list that I'd like to share with you. Mike had said he, as a Boomer, felt inferior to his parents' generation. Norman had said that the Boomers were taking a lot of heat and shoud lighten up on themselves. Here's my response Norman and Mike: This is a hot topic right now as there is Gen X-er on the Jefferson Airplane list who trashes us boomers as being too full of ourselves and thinking we are the greatest generation. I recently read David Harris' 1996 book Our War, which is an attempt to come to terms with the Vietnam War. David if you recall was the head of the Resistance and was married to Joan Baez for a time. David went from being a Eagle Scout and Fresno's Boy of the Year as a High School Senior to being one of the most articulate anti-war voices and served time in prison for resisting the draft. He made an interesting point in Our War: that up until the 60s, there was really only one way Americans thought. No one (except very fringe folks) questioned the government, no one questioned wars, no one questioned the Boy Scouts. You knew what to think and you thought it. That's the generation of my parents. They were "heroic" in World War II, but it wasn't hard to be heroic, because there was no alternative. Once the 60s hit, with the Civil Rights Movement with support from the folk scene, and the anti-War ovement, the normal way Americans thought was under serious challenge. There was a war going on within the culture. I am not trying to take any particular credit here, because I believe that every generation not inherently better than another. It's just luck what challeges each one meets and how they handle them. I submit to you that the 60s boomer generation was indeed heroic. If you didn't live it, you don't know how painful it was. I used to wake up every morning and think, "I can't believe that we are in this war." Do you know what it's like to be stopped by your neighborhood cops just because your hair is long? You start to know what it's like to be black. Do you know what it's like when your parents hate what you look like and every day nag you to cut your hair? And literally look at you like you have the plague? This was what it was like. Springsteen tells the story of how his father never referred to his guitar as anything but "that god damn guitar" and how when Bruce was laid up with a broken leg, his father brought a barber to his house and held him down and cut his hair. This may sound trivial, but you cannot imagine the pain of this alienation from our parents unless you lived it. In 1984, I went to see Springsteen. He told this story and then he sang The River. I sobbed uncontrollably from the beginning to the end of the song. The boomers did have a chance to be heroic, and we were. We went to Canada and Sweden and jail to avoid fighting that war. I had a friend in high school who has been in Sweden ever since. Left his parents and bothers behind. I was prepared to do the same, but I didn't have to. We spoke out against everything that we had been taught as kids We fought the very institutions we cherished. Not taking away from the Greatest Generation, but I submit that it is much harder to break from tradition and fight one's own country because you love it, than it is to go along with something that no one ever questioned. We also brought a creative energy that does not come along very often. And it is clear that the current folk scene is very well aware of this. The Beatles and Dylan were pioneers and they inspired groups like Jefferson Airplane, and Country Joe, and the Dead, and the whole amazing San Francisco scene that I was lucky enough to experience first hand. The way I look at the 60s is that I was just lucky enough to be at one of the most exciting places and one of the most exciting times in the century. There were other such times and places to be sure, but the 60s in SF was one of them. There is a quote from The Hobbit that I always remember. One character says he wishes he did not live in such interesting times. The other character responds something like, "It is not up to us to choose the time we are born in. It is up us how we react to the time that is handed to us." I do not consider myself better. I consider myself lucky. But there was a lot of pain, a lot of scars. I don't know that if given the choice we would have taken Beatles, Dylan and all the rest if we also had to take the murder of JFK, the war, and the wrenching of our country and our families. There is a lot of bashing of the 60s as having destroyed standards and values. But that was the necessary result of what was happening up to that point. Blame the Pentagon, blame the Masters of War, blame the racists, the culture of Bull Conner and George Wallace. We attacked that head on. Sure there was damage, but it was necessary, and I submit that there are a lot of great things that current generations take for granted that would not have been possible before. I think Dar Williams understands this, and so does Susan Werner, even though she makes fun of us as she pays tribute by covering the old stuff in her encores. So thanks Norman, for the recognition. And Mike, you don't have anything to feel inferior about. Not at all. I guarantee you, I didn't live through the depression or WW II, but I absolutely know I've been through a lot more pain than my parents ever felt, and they know it too, because their parents never had to hate them. HELP! owner-believers@smoe.org Send mail to believers@smoe.org Susan's CD's are available on your desktop at World Cafe CDs http://worldcafecds.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2001 22:48:09 -0700 From: "Ron Rosen" Subject: Re:Every generation ... > However, as important as the Vietnam War, and the Counterculture, > were to the baby boomer generation, I don't see either as the most critical > event or experience to those who were baby boomers. I think the most > important and most defining experience of the baby boomer generation was > the knowledge of the existence of the ICBM with a hydrogen bomb on it: Baby > boomers were the first generation in the entire history of mankind to have > spent its whole childhood, all of its formative years, under the very real > prospect that it might be the LAST generation in the entire history of > mankind. I am not convinced that baby boomers have fully digested that > fact, and I don't think that members of any other generation have much of > an understanding or appreciation of what The Bomb meant, or did to, the > psyches of those born between 1 Jan 46 and the Panmunjom truce. Bob - I absolutely and totally agree with you. That is an excellent point that I didn't think about when I wrote the essay. Also, since it is so amorphous and vague in our psyches, it's subject to a lot of "it wasn't a big deal" reaction. But yes, we got under our desks in school for air raid drills. We read articles about bomb shelters and how a nuke would just disintegrate everything near it and make hundred of miles unsafe for years. We heard about the Doomsday Clock that the Journal of Nuclear Scientists published every month showing that we were at 2 or 3 minutes to midnight, midnight being the end of the world. When tensions eased they moved it back to 5 minutes to midnight. We had the Cuban Missile Crisis when we came close to the edge. One day in college I wrote a little line that I was going to use in a poem or song later on. I wrote, "We are the generation that grew up with the Beatles and died with the Bomb." Yes, the obliteration of the world constantly hanging over our heads certainly took its toll on our minds. HELP! owner-believers@smoe.org Send mail to believers@smoe.org Susan's CD's are available on your desktop at World Cafe CDs http://worldcafecds.com ------------------------------ End of believers-digest V5 #165 ******************************* --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- This has been a posting from the Susan Werner believers-digest To unsubscribe send mail to Majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe believers-digest" in the body of the message