Coming of Age in the Sixies

Part I: growing up in the repressive 1950s

Even in the 1950s, a stealth wave was gathering force
CC Jean Stimmell: 7/10/13

Strangely, out of the blue, I started having what Jung called “Big Dreams.” Interpreting them with my Jungian analyst brought out a flood of repressed emotion. My analyst first suspected my tears were a manifestation of depression, but my anguish apparently is more a reflection of impacted grief: a combination of nostalgia for the 1960s and longing for lost youth.

We grew up in the 1950s serenaded by a constant lullaby that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. The road to my rosy future was to follow the rules, put my nose-to-the-grindstone, and be hormonally frustrated by light petting because “good girls” didn’t put out, all done in the service of following the American dream: growing up to get some vacuous, pencil-pushing job that would provide the means to purchase a ricky-ticky little house in some suburban wilderness with all the modern “labor-saving appliances, along with 2.5 children, a dog, a white picket fence, and a wife that was the perfect robotic helpmate like Mrs. Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver.

In a variation of the movie, Wally’s World, we lived on a stage set directed by Lawrence Welks, Lassie, John Wayne and Uncle Walt Disney broadcasting a mind-numbing agent, the equivalent of the psychotropic drug, Thorazine, which was also being used at the time to sedate our fellow citizens in mental institutions across the land.

Underneath, we all felt a diffuse free-floating fear and existential dread. Although we couldn’t articulate it, our middle class life was a fantasy, a cozy white cloud projection based on massive denial about what was going on around us: lynchings, unjust wars, massive poverty, sexual repression, gross discrimination, paranoia and ever-present anxiety ratcheted up by real-life nightmares like the bomb shelters the government encouraged our parents to build and duck-and-cover exercises we practiced in grammar school, as if that would protect us from the inevitable Russian nuclear attack.

Cultural conditions were still about the same when I dropped out of college in 1964, resulting in an unplanned sabbatical to Vietnam. Imagine my surprise when I returned from war to a whole new world: a rising tide of unleashed emotion and spirited protest against the stale, gray world I grew up in. What a rush!  I felt the very fibers of my being coming alive like the lush, long fibers of a shag carpet, slowly unfurling and recovering their natural loft, after being crushed by the deadweight of 100,000 cold war bureaucrats.

Certainly one aspect of our awakening was tribal bliss, a bacchanal of sensual abandonment, celebrating our arrival in the promised land after spending our childhood’s locked in the barren, spooky cellar of 1950s repression. Our childhood brainwashing that Americans were the most perfect of all people, living in the greatest nation on earth, blessed even by God himself, began to fade away along with crew-cuts, suit coats, neckties, and girdles. As we emerged from the dark denial our childhood, we discovered new horizons, more far-reaching, authentic, and diverse than we could have imaged.

–––––––––––––––

Part 2: Coming of Age in the Sixties

The cresting wave ushering in the Age of Aquarius

CC Jean Stimmell 7/11/13

The cresting wave ushering in the Age of Aquarius

Introduction to Part II: As we emerged from the dark denial of our childhoods and came of age in the Sixties, we found ourselves swept up in a paradigm-shifting wave of rapid social change causing us to embrace new horizons, more far-reaching, authentic, and diverse than we could have ever imagined. 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Entrenched authority was being challenged at every turn: The civil rights movement, personified by Martin Luther King, opened our eyes to how black Americans were treated more like farm animals than human beings in many places in our country because of state sanctioned discrimination, disenfranchisement, violence and routine lynchings. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.  The movement soon blossomed to fight for equal rights for other victims of discrimination: women, gay, lesbian, Native American, Hispanic…the list kept expanding, and rightfully so, to include just about everyone but privileged white men.

The word was finally getting out.

Although rivers were catching on fire because of pollution, it took Rachael Carson’s book, Silent Spring, detailing how pesticides were ravaging nature, to jumpstart a resurgent environmental movement. Michael Harrington published to instant acclaim, The Other America, detailing for the first time in the mainstream media the extent of “invisible poverty” in America. How could we have been so morally obtuse and visually handicapped, even if we were segregated in our suburban havens and gated communities, not to apprehend that 25% or more of our fellow citizens were living in abysmal poverty.

And then, of course, there was the Vietnam War where we lost over 58,000 of our brothers and sisters in a war against Ho Chi Minh, who lead a national movement for liberation for more than three decades, first against the Japanese, then the French, and finally the Americans. He fashioned his declaration of independence after ours and was considered the George Washington of his country. 

Before America exhausted itself in our war against Vietnam independence, we carpet-bombed Vietnam for over a decade, saturated its soils with deadly pesticides and killed millions of Her citizens, mostly civilian men, woman, and children.  Vietnam was an object lesson in the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex that President Eisenhower warned us about a decade earlier. With the blindfold ripped off, we could see for the first time with fresh eyes how many of the wars we had fought for "freedom and democracy” were, in reality, patriarchal wars to dominate, control, and, perhaps most important of all, to provide unfettered access for corporate plundering around the world.

These were incredibly exhilarating times to live through, throwing off the cultural straightjacket of the 1950s, regressing to what is really real: the earthiness of nature, the sensuality of our bodies, our deep intimacy with our cohorts all sharing an identical mindset, and our increasing compassion and empathy with minorities of all stripes and third-world people around the world.  The solidarity was tribal in nature.

In turn, our tribal solidarity fed into, supported, and magnified the social movements, I’ve already mentioned, causing them to gather strength everyday, building like a huge tsunami wave, so big that when– and it was only a matter of time – it would crash over America, changing everything, ushering in the Age of Aquarius. 

–––––––––––––––

Part 3: Aquarius Aborted

Aquarius Aborted

CC Jean Stimmell 7/11/13

 Aquarius Aborted

Introduction to Part III:

The 1960s were incredibly exhilarating times to live through, throwing off the cultural straightjacket of the 1950s, regressing to what is really real: the earthiness of nature, the sensuality of our bodies, our deep intimacy with our cohorts all sharing an identical mindset, and our increasing compassion and empathy with minorities of all stripes and third-world people around the world.  The solidarity was tribal in nature.

Our tribal solidarity, in turn, feed into, supported, and magnified the social movements, I’ve already mentioned, causing them to gather strength everyday, building like a huge tsunami wave, so big that when– and it was only a matter of time – it would crash over America, changing everything, ushering in the Age of Aquarius:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Our tribal enthusiasm, born of collective solidarity, gave us supreme confidence we were being swept along on the crest of an unstoppable wave, destined to wash away all obstacles, ushering in a new society of peace and happiness. The unfortunate downside of this was our naïve assumption that this collective triumph would automatically translate into personal happiness in our individual lives, without having to do any work on ourselves.

None of that!

No delayed gratification, no grueling individual hardships, no wandering in the dark forest in search for who we were and uncovering what our unique mission in life was supposed to be. All we had to do is go with the flow…at least that was the unspoken assumption of too many of us.

  

Hunter Thompson, author and infamous originator of “Gonzo” journalism was, in many ways cynical and hard-core, but even he was driven to rave poetically about the potential of this mythical wave we were riding:

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour...but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that...

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.  Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that.   Our energy would simply prevail.  There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.[1]

There is a sad postscript to this story: Hunter Thompson committed suicide in 2005, probably from the same impacted grief I was suffered from. Many of us of my generation have such impacted grief, stemming, I believe, from two sources:

First and foremost, we were devastated when the new age we thought was inevitable was traumatically aborted, dashing our hopes for a kinder, gentler, more peaceful world based on social justice and compassion, a new world that would celebrate the innate worth of not only each human being but every sentient being  – as opposed to our current Military-Industrial-Media-Complex parroting Ayn Rand’s creed extolling the survival of the fittest.

The second cause of our impacted grief was personal. The magical bombast of the 1960s combined with the intense collective tribal identity caused us, as I mentioned before, to neglect the hard work of working on ourselves, learning to individualize and self-actualize into the unique individuals, each of us were meant to be.

Joseph Campbell, famous mythologist and sixties icon, was clued in to all of this, as evidenced by this quote: “The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.”[2]

Our public dream in the 1960s was riding that awesome wave, so well described by Hunter Thompson, surging in, unstoppable, poised to wash over us, baptizing us all into the Age of Aquarius.  Tragically, as we all know now, that wave crested prematurely, reversed directions, started to recede, and still continues its tragic ebb today, returning us to the corporate mentality of the 1950s along with the return of rising poverty, inequality, and a pervasive feeling of existential dread – this time not from fear of nuclear attack by godless Russians but terrorist attacks by heathen Muslims.

Campbell is correct: We are strangers in a strange land and when that happens, like it or not, we have no choice but to do the hard work to find our way to an authentic life.  It’s not easy. As he tells us, you have to blaze your own trail: “You enter the forest 
at the darkest point,
 where there is no path.

 Where there is…path, 
It is someone else's path.

 If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
 your potential.” [3]

That’s why I’m working with my Jungian analyst, wise woman, blazing a trail out of the dark forest. It’s never too late.  And it is a grand adventure.

XXX

---

[1] Songs of the Doomed, Hunter Thompson, pp. 140-141

[2] http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/mythanddreams.html

[3] Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work