After the Sixties, Volume 14 #1

Change Can Happen over a Long Time

My missionary family leaves Guyana just before independence (just one and a half at the time, I don't remember--but it counts, anyway);

I walk through our Saskatoon swinging door between the kitchen and dining room to find my brothers taunting their best friend, John-John;

I get a Jiminy Cricket walking toy and dance to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" in my friend's basement in Edmonton (we've moved again);

We travel across the prairies by car to my dad's new church in Windsor. The kids across the street make fun of me until I impress them with my pet mouse. We become the best of friends. I start grade one.

The end of a tumultuous decade.

Most of my peers resist talk about generational experience. Things are just too obviously divided--by race, class, music, clothes, politics, sexual orientation, status and aspirations. I know these divisions were part of the sixties too, but it doesn't seem that there was the same hesitation in the movement to speak for someone else. There were more straight middle-class whites confidently telling people what's what. If the sixties have handed down any legacy at all, though, it is a philosophy of openness, whether or not it was always acted out at the time. As a result, we now hear more distinct voices from more places than ever before.

Despite our differences, there are a few things that unite large numbers of post-boomers. In Canada, many of us grew up somewhere other than where we live now--another city, province or country. This leads to a kind of physical dissociation that makes it hard to organize: we all feel like strangers. All of us but the most privileged also share the same huge, yawning question at the end of each day: will I make it?

In a material sense, if "making it" means that we share the same standard of living the previous generation had, the outlook is bleak. But making it does not have to be seen this way. We learned that from the sixties when, coming out of utopian fifties materialism, a lot of people questioned the consumer culture for the first time in a while. It was just unfortunate that some people had to see it all change by the time they were twenty-five or so. They insisted that things had to happen, not just in their lifetime, but in their youth.

What do we want? Change! When do we want it? Now! What do we do when we don't get it when we want it? Get a decent job, settle down, get that car/house/lifestyle, then wax poetic about our youthful idealism that was, sadly, doomed!

When some sixties revolutionaries found themselves flirting with thirty, they jumped ship. I guess they could afford to. I don't believe this is the case for the most committed activists, who can still be seen slogging it out for whatever they believe in. But with these exceptions, it's even more regretable that there wasn't an acceptance that change can happen over time--over a long time.

A couple of years ago, an older friend questioned a reference to William Morris and his crafts movement, started in the face of the Industrial Revolution, as a model to follow now. From my friend's perspective, Morris had failed because the change he desired did not occur in his lifetime. Well, if there's even one person, a hundred years later, getting strength by this example, to me that's success.

But will I make it?

Only if I leave behind the me-generation detritus and the lean-mean-economic-machine dogma presented to us today as a quasi-religion. The question raised in the sixties, then too quickly dropped, was: will we make it? That we can't mean the young or the old or any one segment of society. It is all of us, including those to come.

Judy MacDonald is a Toronto journalist and fiction writer, a story producer with CBC Newsworld's Face Off, and a contributing editor of Compass.