76-04-B7
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The Communes[edit]
Transcript[edit]The counter culture of the sixties is far enough behind us to allow with the perspective of history some evaluation and judgment. I'll be right back. We remember the decade of the 60s as a time of riot in our streets and schools. It's easy to lay it all to the war in Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights but this can't explain the social revolution entirely. The generation gap, don't trust anyone over 30, or the rejection of virtually every custom tradition and rule of the adult world. There was rebellion against something called the establishment. One of the symbols of the revolution was the rejection of the lifestyle in which those rebelling had been raised and in which their parents still lived. Professing idealism, love for everyone, which still didn't keep them from stoning anyone in authority, they rejected privacy in their living arrangements and took up communal living. There were no more couples, just groups called communes. A rejection of the work-a-day, selfish money grubbing world of their elders. The communes aren't entirely a thing of the past. Some of the alienated still live that way, even though they approach or have passed that dividing line of age thirty. Recently two members of the counterculture set out on an eight-month tour to find out how their contemporaries were doing. They visited communes around the country and wrote of their findings in a book published by Doubleday titled "The Children of the Counterculture." The children they write about are not the children who took up communal living in the sixties, they are now parents, and the book is about their offspring. Remember now, the author started their project while still as anti-establishment as the people they were writing about. One of them allowed her own preschool children to puff on marijuana joints when they were being passed around. In their own words they believed that regular schools were prisons and America strangle their children with rules, routines and expectations. They seem to have changed a little and if you worry sometimes about being old-fashioned in the way you raise your children read their book even though it isn't very pretty. There is a ten-year-old commune lad whose mother seduced him when he was six so he wouldn't have any oedipus complex or hang-ups. A twelve-year-old scrounges for pennies to pay for a mind control course. On the whole, they found commune children illiterate, suffering emotional disturbances and unaware of even such things as flush toilets. Mainly their parents wanted them out of sight and mind. By contrast, some communes demanded a harsh conformity. Individualism, even crying was put down as childish self-indulgence. This from parents who had chosen their drug-drenched lifestyle as a rebellion against conformity. In one such commune they had their own school, a bare and ugly place with straw mats on a floor littered with orange peels and garbage. The authors saw a child with chickenpox pulled up off his straw mat and forced to attend a class. They wrote, "The children of the flower children emerge less as human beings than experiments in radical philosophy." The story of ten-year-old Nina is the most poignant. She lives in the slovenly litter of the adults and her freaky mother is baffled by her. Somewhere Nina must have seen a picture of how little girls live in that square outside world her parents have rejected. In all the squalor, her room is an immaculate island complete with neat bedspread, mirrors, curtains and teddy bears. Or could it be that in an odd moment, Mama revealed how she had lived when she was little. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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