After All These Years – Excerpt
Twenty years later, many of these people continue to refuse to settle for conventional identities and traditional institutional ties. Those who have married are struggling to redefine what has long been an inequitable institution; those with children are trying to become a new breed of parent. Many ‘i of those who work in what used to be called “straight jobs” are laboring from “, within to reform, restructure and humanize their workplaces. Some have carved for themselves permanent channels outside the mainstream. All of the sociologists who have studied former sixties activists find they have gravitated toward the helping professions, shying away from business, management, large bureaucracies and formal politics. Not surprisingly, they are making significantly less money than their non-activist contemporaries.
Of course, some did “quit the mob”: not just media-hyped “turncoats” like Rubin or Eldridge Cleaver, but many investors, developers, corporados and cosmetic surgeons can (perhaps only privately) trace their roots to the sixties. The fashionably cynical “Woodstock Anniversary Calendar” for the year 1989 celebrates these people. The illustration for one month shows a balding, overweight man behind a desk telling his employee: “Not withstanding that we both dropped acid at Woodstock, I’m still going to have to fire you.” In another illustration a conservatively dressed businessman sitting behind a desk-top computer has his eyes closed and a peaceful expression on his face. He is chanting to himself: “Buy low, sell high, buy low, sell high.” The caption reads: “Update: The Mantra.”