Sixties Redux

By Crispin Sartwell

 

     In 1968, there was a student insurrection in Paris, and civil rights and anti-war protests on American campuses and in American cities. Here we are again. All over America and in France and elsewhere (London and Rome, for example), students and members of minority groups are taking to the streets. And the causes are similar everywhere: civil rights and anti-war.

    One striking thing about the protests in both countries is the alliance of oppressed minorities with idealistic young people who can make themselves heard in the majority culture.

     There are many ways to frame the immigration issue, and it is furiously being framed in every possible way at the moment; it is suddenly central to the public discourse of both the US and Europe. It is an economic issue; it's a crime issue; it's a political football. 

    But it is also an issue of basic human rights asserted in the face of prejudice, an issue of second-class treatment, of fear, hatred, and exploitation.  It is an issue of segregation, of systematic exclusion; it is an issue of cultural identity and of skin color.

   In the fifties and sixties, there were many ways to obscure the basic fact that people were being reviled and excluded and ignored in virtue of their race: the issue was freedom of association, or states rights, or crime in the inner city.

    And in the overwhelming American and European civil rights issue of this era - the treatment of immigrants - there are also a thousand ways to obscure the basic fact that people's lives are being destroyed by bigotry and exclusion: anti-immigrant sentiment is expressed with regard to legal status, competition for employment, and "security."

     One thing that's interesting about the civil rights protests in both the US and France is that many of the protestors are the children of immigrants. They are, essentially, American and French kids, citizens, people who have never lived anywhere else. And while their parents may have had to lay low and lead lives of quiet desperation in a culture that both needed and excluded them, these young people feel entitled to basic rights of self-expression.

   They are here expressing their experience in a way that we must hear, in our cities, in our schools, in our own language. One generation, one moment, can change everything.

      They are speaking for their parents and for generations of people who have lived on the other side of the wall between the first and third worlds; they are speaking not only to the mutating forms of racism in Los Angeles, but to the global apartheid of rich and poor, white and non-white.

    George Bush's impulses on the immigration issue are relatively generous, and you can tell that Bush himself feels some connection to Mexican and Mexican-American culture and a desire to cultivate the latter's growing political clout.

    But as in the late sixties, you have a deeply useless war combined with a situation of domestic oppression, though the flashpoint is immigrants rather than racism against black people (of course, black/white tensions linger still). And you have an administration sinking into deep unpopularity, a government becoming ever-more alienated from its people.

     The Bush administration - with its militarism and concerted opposition to domestic liberty - practically demands insurrection, and it will, I believe, get what it deserves.

     France last fall and this spring has been on the brink of anarchy, and I think you could suddenly see the same thing happening in American high schools - which are deeply authoritarian institutions - and on the streets of American cities.

      Now the legacy of the sixties was mixed: the sixties generation overall sank back into self-centered smugness, and now its members are precisely the authorities.  Many of its ideals ended in futility or petered out into massive bureaucracy. John Kerry became...John Kerry, about as pitiful a fate as could readily be imagined. But the sixties cohort also stopped the war in Vietnam and ended Jim Crow America.

     If the present generation of young people leave us with similar achievements in Iraq and among immigrants, it will have changed the world profoundly for the better, whatever may follow.