After All These Years – Excerpt
The experience was so superficial that they all soon outgrew it and went on to more important things like making money. There’s another message out there, one that carne through loud and clear when Abbie Hoffman died in 1989: Unreconstructed sixties activists are tragic anachronisms. Demoralization, depression and suicide are the natural consequences of a life committed to political activism and social change.
It may be convenient for economic interests to view the sixties as merely a fad. Trivialized, robbed of its soul, the sixties become no more than a marketing tool. And it may be comforting for mainstream political interests to dismiss the sixties as irrelevant. It makes it easy to forget the important (and still relevant) criticisms levelled against the political power structure during that time. But those who continue to work for social justice and live politically meaningful lives-and there are many who fit that description-know that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of their deaths are greatly exaggerated. Sociologists know it too. For the past fifteen years, a number of them have been charting the fate of sixties activists. Every few years, a study appears in scholarly journals, and the message is always the same: The sixties changed some people’s lives. . . permanently. While few remain as untouched by time and travail as Ken Kesey, many serious activists are still committed reformers today.
Civil rights activists were still “keeping the faith” thirteen years after Freedom Summer, writes a Florida State University sociologist who studied them.