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Living the Good Life
- West Virginia University Press
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154 6 Living the Good Life Looking for the Good Life W hile the seeds of the back-to-the-land movement may have blossomed in the antiwar unrest afoot in the late 1960s, civil disobedience and the desire to avoid what was perceived as an untenable war were not its only nourishment. To understand the deep roots of the largest urban-to-rural migration in our history you must think back at least three decades. After emerging from the painful Great Depression of the 1930s and enduring the sacrifices necessary to wage war on two fronts in the 1940s, weary parents vowed to make life easier for their children, who were ultimately dubbed “baby boomers.” Thus, middle-class children of the 1950s were the beneficiaries of a largesse of material goods unprecedented in their parents’ time and, for the most part, were raised to take their affluence for granted. That the back-to-the-landers were largely children of privilege was perhaps inevitable, according to Timothy Miller, chronicler of the hippie era. “Those who would reject middle-class comforts had to come from comfortable backgrounds; the have-nots of society had no material luxuries to rebel against,” he writes.1 Although all classes of society did not share equally in the economic boom, in contrast to the past, most families were better off. Moreover, it was this comparison that mattered, not the comparison to others. Nonetheless , haunted by the memories of what they’d gone through, many nowcomfortable parents feared it might not last forever. A child of that period, 155 Living the Good Life former student activist Todd Gitlin points out in his perceptive book about the 1960s that insecurity was lurking around the edges of all that affluence. Some feared that the Russians were coming, bringing communism to destroy their way of life. Others saw juvenile delinquency skulking on every street corner, and still other parents didn’t know what a world full of rock and roll was coming to. This pervasive insecurity translated into movie bogeymen like alien invaders or body snatchers and thereby created a new generation of wary children. In 1956, William H. Whyte’s book, The Organization Man, described in great detail how man’s driving ethos had shifted from the Protestant ethic of individualism to the pack mentality of the organization man. Belongingness and togetherness for the good of the company, or any organization , were now what mattered most.2 Perhaps this conformity and its attendant belief that what was good for the organization was good for its members also provided the security adults were seeking. But the emerging “cocktail party” social model and the parent who was “bad to drink” may have been a result of underlying insecurity and unspoken fears, as well as the worry that the effort necessary to maintain the new reality might not be worth it after all. Therefore, it’s perhaps not surprising that the number of psychiatrists in the United States multiplied almost sixfold between 1940 and 1964.3 For the most part, though, a generation overwhelmed with gratitude for their current wellbeing expected their children to be grateful as well. However, with what may have been simply the perversity of youth, rather than reveling in all that abundance, teenagers began to reject the material goods heaped on them and to rebel against their parents’ way of life. In spite of themselves, the boomers’ parents probably set the stage for that rebellion through their unwitting generosity. According to noted psychologist Abraham Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation, individuals generally do not seek self-fulfilling goals until their basic needs for shelter, food, sleep, sex, and security have been met. Those middle-class kids who were twelve to eighteen when the civil rights sit-ins began and seventeen to twenty-three in 1965, when the US started bombing North Vietnam, had not been raised with a money-grubbing mindset. They already had [3.230.76.153] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:02 GMT) 156 Chapter Six it all. Instead, as they either headed to college or were about to graduate , they began to look beyond the acquisition of things toward realizing Maslow’s higher needs: finding solutions to the emerging world problems, looking for meaning in their lives, and working to become all that they could be. Additionally, the boomers were the first generation raised with two unavoidable realities that clearly shaped their young-adult worldview: “The Bomb” and television. At school, daily “duck...