WE WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN – Part 2

By Barbara Groark

What the poet Mary Karr calls the “Big Lie of the Drug Culture” caught many of us up in the years following 1968, but most people I know recovered within ten years and left the time-wasting and illegality behind. It was those who stayed stuck in the same old anti-authoritarian viewpoint (nothing odder than an old “angry young man” - who is not kidding about it) or were bamboozled into the more serious drugs who had trouble letting go. Again, the people in the 10 years younger than we had more trouble recovering anyway, only because they were younger when some of the big events happened, or when they started using drugs. It is some of their children who are the angriest in the aftermath of the sixties and seventies, if they are not entangled in the same syndromes themselves. With two whole parents, a kid can do almost anything. When both parents are just not there, anger is a better response than acquiescence and despair.

Here is another of my mother’s stories, one I did not hear of till some time in the 1990s. “I used to go to the food store for a few things, and it would take me three hours to get done. I’d run into women holding on to their carts and crying as they walked around picking up what they needed for supper. I’d go up to one, put my hand on her arm, and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d start telling me about one or two of her kids who was doing drugs and whatever else was going on at the time. Then I’d see someone else with dark circles under her eyes, and I’d talk to her for a while.” The children were just very far away from home, and some ended up dead. This was ongoing through the seventies, and it was not always the same women my mother saw in the supermarket.

These were women who loved to laugh - you know, Erma Bombeck readers, Wednesday morning bowling league members, genuine comedians themselves. [Try To Hell with All That by Caitlin Flanagan for a not uncritical but still affectionate view of the housewife flavor of those times.]

I know many of you have your own family tragedies that may be too painful to speak of. Psychologists say family patterns may be to blame, but don’t forget about the kidnappings. Some solid families had people stolen right away from them. The predators, like leopards and lions in the animal kingdom, go after the weak and the young. They don’t want a real fight on their hands.

The only thing I can think of to explain what happened is to take the really long view, like from outer space. We as a society must have been doing very well – civil rights laws, trials of Nazi criminals, even Church reform and ecumenism, expanded opportunities for women and the working class in general since the GI bill, post-World War II economic boom, new housing, more inventions. In fact, what were conservatives doing at the time? They were sending rockets to the moon, that’s what they were doing! That’s the conservatism I remember.

We all just had to be stopped! Too much justice and prosperity and human progress and wonder was happening!

Well, this blog is in danger of going off the deep end (really long views have this tendency), so I’ll make it a short one.