I was born in the "first wave," of boomers--the same year the boys started to get off the boats after the big war.  Dad was a vet, a bona fide member of the "greatest generation."  While he didn't see combat, he served with honor.  That was the primary credential.  Nobody knew at the time the difference it made to come early in the generation, but we do now--those who came a mere two or three years later experienced a huge, almost insurmoutable gap.

When I went to college, there was no anti-war movement, no hippies, no counter culture, no dope, no "free sex and love," nothing that wasn't on the menu for a long time.   We had to start it all--shocking our parents, the people who were supposed to protect and teach us, and a nation.  We  were the first to be called, "Nazis, traitors, cowards, degenerates, and dirty."  There were so few of us FBI agents used to follow us around collecting pictures, getting to know our friends, and in my case keeping a file of the articles I wrote.

By my junior year, I was voted out of office as the head of the local SDS (Student's for a Democratic Society) by the younger "generation" who wanted to burn down the ROTC.  When I said I'd report them because I didn't support violence, I was considered an enemy myself.  The great split had begun.  The professors who had become my friends called the new students "the crazies," and I'm not sure it isn't an appraisal that applies to some until this day. 

I moved to New York City, the Lower East Side, to be exact during the first incursion from the suburbs.  We knew each other's names and where to hang out.  Then we travelled around the world for a year and to India at a time when most Americans were tourists, if they travelled at all, or with the Peace Corp.  That was our "advanced" education.  We charted a new course the second and third waves followed, but drastically altered.

Tom Brokaw put it this way: "They got in their VW buses with 'make love, not war,' bumper stickers, drove out of town, and were never seen again."  I love that quote.  It says more than twenty books written on the subject.  The generation of "idealism" degenerated into the generation of arrogance, disillusionment, perfidy, cynicism and by defaulting from the electoral process turned the nation over to it's most conservative and fear ridden inhabitants--the exact forces that caused the war they so despised.

When Bill Ayers surfaced briefly during the last presidential campaign, after a lifetime safely ensconced in academia, and failed to demonstrate any accountability or regret for the excesses he played a part in, it acted as a benchmark for me: no wonder so little has changed.  It took the children of the boomers, after all, to shame them into supporting Obama and now I strongly suspect many have returned to their habitual ideological assumptions.  i.e. the "system" is rotten, all politics and politicians are evil, it's better to withdraw than face the reality of political incrimentalism.

In a recent broadcast, Brokaw characterized the boomers as a generation "at war with itself."  The initial factioning occurred when the protestors broke from those forced to serve as a result of the draft.  There is no "concilliation" when a mass ideology takes hold and that's what happened.  It's the canvas on which the current political landscape is painted, but is hidden and unseen.  Brokaw peeked at it, barely revealing the side he is on.

After a lifetime now seen in retrospect of right wing domination, the re-election of Bush--the bottom of the barrel--nothing can convince the "crazies" to come off their high horse--and time is running out.  Obama's health care is not enough, he hasn't kept his "promise" to get out of Iraq (and may not make it by August) and had the nerve to send more troops to Afghanistan.  Those are just a few of his sins.  What is possible doesn't matter compared to his ideological purity.   It's their way or the highway. They are little different from the rednecks--they only come from the other side of the spectrum--and are equally unconscious and irresponsible.

The reactionaries are gathering force again, abetted by a thinly veiled racist and classist rage--confident--as they have every expectation to be  the hippie rats will run again.  Obama has made the choice not to appeal to them, regardless of their numbers and positions they now hold.   He has made the harder choice of doing what can be done--appealing to a "pragmatic" center that has yet to reveal itself, picking up where Clinton left off. 

I think of it as one of the boldest strategies by an American President in my lifetime.  The question is whether it will work--and a pragmatic center that will come to his defense in the midterms, or walk away so the right will return to power.