[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[John W.]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 5:15 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:

"... the Counter-Culture hung up the Out of Business sign sometime in the
> Nineties, finished off by identity politics and general
> self-satisfaction..."
>
> --<http://www.counterpunch.org/>
>
> Commenting weekly in those days on "the news of the week and its coverage
> by the media" on News from Neptune as I was, I'd say that Alex Cockburn has
> this about right.


I haven't read Cockburn's article; his essays are invariably too long for my
limited attention span.  But I submit that in the so-called
"counter-culture" essentially BECAME the culture.  In some ways our
generation, that of the 60s, was absorbed into the existing culture; in
certain ways it profoundly changed the culture; and in yet other ways the
culture recoiled in horror and moved in the opposite direction.   But isn't
that simply the way of the world?  Thesis ---> antithesis ---> synthesis ,
for good or ill?

What we need now, I guess, is a NEW counter-culture.  The closest thing I've
seen to that in this country is the development of the independent media
movement starting in the late 1990s.  Last I looked, the U-C Independent
Media Center was still very much alive and well.  But of course the new
counter-culture needs to affect more than just the media, important as that
is.

I further submit, though, that as long as human beings populate the planet
and compete for finite resources, there will ALWAYS be war.  I dare to
imagine that American culture could change to allow for universal health
care if the political and public will was there.   We could inject a bit of
"socialism" into our "free-market capitalism" without demonstrable ill
effects.  But human nature does not change, and war will be with us always.

J.W.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090822/3fe5553c/attachment.htm