Radical Deja Vu

by Robert Winter

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“Notes From Underground,” read the title of a recent article by David Samuels in Harper’s magazine, and as a product of the late sixties, I found my curiosity piqued. 

I suppose it’s natural for anybody from my generation to see the word “underground” and think back to groups like the radical Weather Underground.   Samuels was in fact writing about his observations among contemporary radicals of the Pacific Northwest, but the sense of overlap between the two generations was, I believe, deliberately cultivated.    The article brought home to me how much my own 60s-era generation and the current one have in common.  

One thing that wasn’t clear to me on reflection, though, was why we still seem to be going over so much of the same old ground, after so many things in society have changed.  The persistence of similar-sounding discontents led me to wonder if maybe the longevity of the protest, despite major changes in the social context, might not be indicative of more fundamental troubles—ones that we haven’t had much success to date in identifying and articulating. 

To even attempt to deal with these questions, I realized I needed to go back and re-consider some of my own experiences in the late 1960s.

 

(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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	In my hometown, radicalism did not seem likely to catch on.
	Many of the attitudes we now associate with 60s Counterculture appeared earlier in mainstream society.
	Until recently, I believed my experiences of the 60s were typical.
	A fellow Baby Boomer's reminiscences of the 60s made me wonder how typical my own experiences had been.
	The media were more active participants in The Revolution than many of us realized.
	A desire to enter into a bigger world "on the other side of the screen" underlay my own choice of a career in television news.
	My absorption in Big Weighty Issues kept me from seeing other kinds of potential news stories.
	Distrust of corporate gigantism has remained strong through the decades.
	A sense of being on the outside looking in continues to stoke suspicion of the corporate order.
	Things that we create ourselves still give great satisfaction.
	Things the The System creates are still foci of hip alienation.
	The world of our direct experience continues to be dwarfed by the realm of the media.
	Protests can foster connectedness as well as alienation.
	We can choose to create a more nurturant human scale in our lives.