Children of the 1960s watch in pain as the story of our lifetime is erased

My almost pathological obsession with what historians now call “the Long Sixties” — especially the years between JFK’s assassination in 1963 and Richard Nixon’s Watergate downfall in 1974 — includes way too much time still listening to the jangly pop anthems that blared in mono from WABC on an AM car radio back when I was in middle school.

More than a half-century later, now coming from something called Pandora and a magical device in my jeans pocket, I so often hear the hidden messages of hope and, yes, naivety buried behind layers of power chords and a Farfisa organ like some archeological dig.

One song that’s become a soulmate to my personal AI algorithm is Three Dog Night’s 1972 No. 1 remake of “Black and White” — a 3-minute-and-24-second window into what it felt like to be a 13-year-old in a moment that was supposed to last forever until it didn’t. The song was actually written in the 1950s (lyrics by actor Alan Arkin’s father, David, sung first by Pete Seeger) to celebrate a nation that was finally overcoming its grim history of racial segregation in the classroom.

“A child is Black/A child is white/Together they learn to read and write,” is how the Three Dog Night version begins, but the line that really gets me when I hear it nearly 53 years later is when they sing, “And now a child can understand/That this is the law of all the land.”

By 1972, that line celebrated not only the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling — the inspiration for the original Seeger version — but the string of remarkable mid-1960s victories by the then-slain Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and so many other activists that had also made the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and federal affirmative action the law of all the land.

The change was real — a surge in Black elected officials, even in the former Jim Crow South, and in college enrollment for African Americans — and, for my generational bulge of boomers born from 1946 to 1964, the backbone of a narrative that we were the children of progress, born into the years when America finally woke up.

Instead, it was all a dream — one which came under attack from American viruses we foolishly thought lay dormant — until it finally died (beyond any irony thought possible, on the federal holiday for MLK) in the Capitol Rotunda at precisely noon on Jan. 20, 2025. The utopian harmonies of “Black and White” are no longer the law of all the land.

In a week-old presidency marked so far by royal proclamation, one of Donald Trump’s very first Oval Office dictates was the repeal of a September 1965 order by then-President Lyndon Johnson seeking to boost Black-owned companies for federal contracts, undoing LBJ’s promise in that revolutionary year that America would end its legacy of “ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.”

The end of federal affirmative action was just the cutting edge of a rampage of reactionary Week One backlash that also struck at the very heart of LGBTQ rights, academic freedom on college campuses, the environmental movement, and decades of rising empowerment for women. On the surface, Trump’s dictator-on-Day-One orders were a campaign-promise-fulfilling war on 21st-century liberal “wokeness,” but in reality the MAGA movement was stabbing at the heart of MLK, of LBJ’s “Great Society,” and the progressive victories that have sustained my generation for our lifetimes.

In a matter of hours, an American strongman had achieved the long-held dream of the far right, to toss the wave of liberations of the Long Sixties down an Orwellian memory hole.

Boomers who filled the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April 1970 to hear the Broadway cast of Hair sing “Air!” and successfully demand legislation for clear skies and clean water have lived to see their president declare a bogus “energy emergency” to help fossil-fuel billionaires pump more toxins into the atmosphere and to seek to block clean wind power, on the whims of sheer ignorance.

The protesters who kept pushing for gay rights, and more, in the rubble of the 1969 Stonewall riot in Greenwich Village can only worry what’s next after the 47th president’s full-on assault on the transgender community which — with typical scientific inaccuracy — declared there are only two sexes and stripped more than one million Americans of their right to be their true selves.

The college campuses that once harbored the American Dreams of an ambitious and optimistic post-World War II generation — and which spawned vigorous debates and, yes, protests about the true meaning of democracy — are rapidly becoming tarnished ivory towers of fear and self-loathing, racing to cancel seminars about race or gender, punishing free speech, and abandoning diversity.

The icy winds of authoritarian repression this week blew down the empty boardwalks of Atlantic City, where in September 1968 women tossed their girdles and bras in a trash can to start a renewed push for liberation that adjudicated-sexual-assaulter Trump and his dude-bro administration hope to crush by forcing another sex fiend atop the Pentagon and firing a female commander, with much more to come.

To be clear, the undoing of the 1960s came (apologies, as always, to Hemingway) in two ways, gradually and then suddenly this past week. The very real cultural victories of that era — the end of legal segregation, the growth of Black voting and elected officials, the recognition of LGBTQ rights and rising opportunities for women on campus and in the working place — were undercut politically from the very start.

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Ronald Reagan and Nixon, the “war on drugs,” the end of affordable college, and more were merely the start of a backlash by the forces of white privilege and patriarchy that — by playing the long game — made it possible for a corrupt and contented U.S. Supreme Court to gut LBJ and MLK’s Voting Rights Act in 2013 and to end affirmative action in higher education 10 years after that. But that wasn’t enough for an ascendant far right that had a dream of wiping it all away, of taking America at least back to 1959, the year of my birth, if not 1859.

“From 1965 to 1994, we did strange and weird things as a country,” the former House speaker and a generalissimo of their culture war, Newt Gingrich, promised those who wanted to wipe away all gains for America’s formerly marginalized. “Now we’re done with that and we have to recover. The counterculture is a momentary aberration in American history that will be looked back upon as a quaint period of Bohemianism brought to the national elite.”

It took 30 years for Trump and his MAGA movement to carry out the metaphorical March on Rome as envisioned by Gingrich. I reached out to an expert, the Illinois State University historian Andrew Hartman, the author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. He agreed that Trump’s moves, especially on issues like affirmative action or transgender rights that poll poorly, are a strike against the ideals of the 1960s. With the academic left, Hartman said “Trump and the right feel like they have an edge that they haven’t had in a long time so I do see them pushing the envelope there.”

The details of MAGA’s culture-war coup do matter. And we’re already seeing the results — from corporate America’s rapid retreat from diversity, to lower Black and brown enrollments, to “school choice” that’s really an assault on Brown v. Board of Education. But what’s also significant here to an increasingly demoralized generation are the four most celebrated words from the 1960s’ ultimate bard, Bob Dylan: “How does it feel?”

How does it feel? Joan Didion, in her remarkable 1979 essay “The White Album” that sought to make sense of the Long Sixties, wrote famously that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” For millions of progressive-minded boomers, myself included, the stories of Martin Luther King Jr., Shirley Chisholm and Marsha P. Johnson, of the arc of the moral universe bending slowly yet irrevocably toward justice for the marginalized and the oppressed, were those stories — as rock solid as the granite of the King Memorial erected on the National Mall.

To see that stone so quickly rolled away, and to watch the idealism of youth fading away near the end of our lives, is stunning, heartbreaking, demoralizing — along with feelings that are harder to even put into words. I asked others this weekend on Bluesky if they felt the same way, and was overwhelmed, if not surprised, by the emotional outpouring.

One response came from an ultimate child of the 1960s, Kelly Carlin-McCall — the 61-year-old daughter of comedian George Carlin whose skewering of establishment hypocrisy defined that era — who wrote that the MAGA backlash has been “a lot to process … sadness, disbelief, trying not to be cynical, and hope.”

She’s not alone.

One 75-year-old wrote about “seeing everything I fought decades for wiped out in 5 days. I don’t know if I’m more angry or heartbroken. I swing back and forth. Knowing I don’t have too much more time here, I find myself saying to the wind, “‘I’m so sorry for you who will be left.‘”

“At 71, I feel as if I’m on a stormy beach where positive societal foundational changes over the last 50+ years are, like sand beneath my feet, being quickly washed away by huge waves of anger and hate,” a woman responded. “I need to regain balance and then work to understand how the country can again move forward.”

Others wrote of a deeper arc, about how boomers like us grew up in the afterglow of victory of World War II that led us to believe America was the nation that conquered fascism, not a land that would someday succumb to it. Most of us didn’t realize as schoolchildren what we understand better today, which is that the forces of reaction that powered Jim Crow and the KKK would never go away or stop pushing back.

“We were sold a bill of goods about this country, true, but we had reason to believe the fundamentals would hold and progress was possible,” Bettina Pearl, a colleague from my college newspaper days, responded.

There is much to be written — today and by future historians, if the field of history survives — about how we got here, with the dangerous mix of understandable grievances about a capitalist and right-wing assault on the American middle class mixed with the toxic base fuels of racism and sexism. But first we’re going to have to grapple with how does it feel, with no direction home.

What we thought was the ever-upward arc of the moral universe turned out to be — as the great historian Heather Cox Richardson and others have noted — a pendulum, requiring a constant push against the unholy forces of small-minded reaction.

It’s fitting that the often naively optimistic music of the 1960s can also offer a wellspring of hope that the pendulum will swing back. If you watched the recent Dylan movie A Complete Unknown, you saw how his growing crowds were most electrified — as they were in real life — by “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” when he promises a young America that “the present now/Will later be past/The order is rapidly fadin’/And the first one now/Will later be last.”

A day is coming when the times will be a changin’, again, and there are a lot of us who are going to fight with our very last breaths to make that change happen, and not leave this world until it does.

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