After All These Years – Excerpt
But even those who moved back into the mainstream with a vengeance may not have completely escaped from or obliterated their ties to the past. In small ways that are sometimes easy to make fun of, their lives may be different: They recycle. They don’t buy their kids plastic assault weapons. Maybe they think twice about doing something selfish or manipulative or, to use an old phrase, politically incorrect. That small voice, which they sometimes listen to, is the link to their past. The very defensiveness of some hard-core yuppies about their current lifestyles shows that the values of the sixties still hold some sway over their lives.
Collier and Horowitz announce early on in their book that the sixties exist merely as a “nostalgic artifact,” and that the only enduring legacy of that time is “a collection of splinter groups, special interest organizations and newly minted ‘minorities’ whose only common belief was that America was guilty and untrustworthy.” They’re wrong on both counts. The sixties exist in a very real and very important way as the sum of certain core countercultural values that continue to playa vital part in people’s lives. The legacy of the sixties is people who have alternative political, social and personal agendas, and who find the energy to keep on working for them.