Quote:
Originally posted by lee
I must state I only saw about 1 & 1/2 hrs of programming so that may not be representative of the whole event, but what I saw was mostly disturbing and not at all unifying.
Did anybody else see this on cspan and if so what is your view?
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Lee,
You have an interesting observation. I was eight when this speech was given, and Camelot came to an end. I'm not an historian or teacher, but I enjoy history.
There is an old chinese curse that says: "May you live in interesting times." We live in interesting times. We grew up with desegregation, the Civil Rights Movement, a Presidential assassination and the end of "Camelot", the "Summer of Love", Woodstock, the Viet Nam war, the Watts and Chicago riots, all of Republican and Democratic conventions televised since the '50s, Watergate and the fall of the "Crooked King" (in context), and a host of other political and social upheavals, all televised for our "enlightenment" and beamed into our living rooms. Think about how different the social climate that we were raised in in the late '50s through the late '70s than what the young adults coming into the workforce today were raised with in the '80s and '90s. Their view of our world is very different. Quite frankly our view is very different from our parents' (the WWII) generation as they were shaped by different social forces.
They still tend to see the government as supportive and trustworthy. We tend to trust government less the more we're involved with it. The twenty-somethings aren't involved in government. Very different perspectives.
If you study any or all of the "social movements" through history, their rise to social consciousness is a winding path that doesn't typically follow a straight line to reach their goal, whatever it may be. The goals may not be straightforward, nor are the goals espoused at the onset necessarily even the goals that are obtained. The first task for any social movement is to gain followers among the disenfranchised that the movement wants to attract, and getting folks you want to join fired up is the way to attract followers.
I'm not sure that the "Civil Rights Movement" ever had at it's heart, a unifying message for the entire population. I believe it was largely a rallying cry by the leadership of a large segment of our population who felt disenfranchised and passed by. I think it's only been the last few years that we've tended to think of the Civil Rights Movement as unifying rather than separatist; a view not supported by history. A sort of revisionist's perspective, I think... Hopefully history will write that the Civil Rights Movement WAS successful at integrating our population...
Roger