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"If there is one theme that runs like a red thread through the fabric of our generation, it is an obsession with truth: finding the truth, telling the truth, not lying to oneself or others, honesty, authenticity, integrity." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 27-28)

"We were young. We had, as yet, no great stake in the System whose apparent heirs we were. And we felt vaguely oppressed by it in many ways: the social and academic competition in high school, the anonymity of the great universities, the sense of hypocrisy and of sensual and spiritual poverty that had already sent some of us on a search with an unknown goal." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 32)

"Only action could cleanse you." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 32)

"President Kennedy had created the Peace Corps as another outlet for our idealism. "The whole idea of that was that you can make a difference," says a woman born in 1945. "I was sixteen years old and I believed it. I really believed that I was going to be able to change the world." With an image of youthful activism at the helm, America was successfully socializing its white young.
"We could not then have conceived of the Peace Corps as an arm of Yankee imperialism, any more than we could have dreamed that one or both of the Kennedy brothers were screwing Marilyn Monroe. We believed. "It was a feeling of being at the apogee of history," Marc Barasch remembers. "A godlike state, the Greco-Roman ideal flowering in some weird way. We had no sense of entropy. We were going to live forever." And so was our handsome young president, with his hero's backache, his two cute kids, his hair blowing in the breeze." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 34)

"November 22, 1963
"That day, and the days that followed, television became our tribal bard, weaving an unforgettable visual ballad out of live coverage, news photos, the frames of Abraham Zapruder's home movie. The smiling, waving motorcade. JFK's elbows flying up as his hands clutch at his throat. Jackie crawling over the trunk of the car, reaching out for help in her blood-spattered pink suit and pillbox hat. Lyndon Johnson's stunned swearing-in. And then the drum taps, the riderless horse, "Hail to the Chief" played as a dirge. (I had never heard the song before, and I will forever hear it as a dirge.)
"These were the images that finally fused us into one, even as they shattered our childhood innocence. We had watched events en masse before, but now for the first time we became conscious of our unity--and our vulnerability. After that day, as the world came apart, we began to come together, reaching out for the physical comfort and power of our numbers. In November 1963, we watched history together. By August 1968, we were making it together in the streets, while the whole world watched us." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 34)

""The first intimation I had that something peculiar was going to happen was in the fall of '63, my senior year at Cornell," says New York artist Stan Kaplan (1944). "The Beatles' music had just become popular. Maybe a half dozen guys started to come to Cornell with 'long' hair, the early Beatle length. The girls like these guys very much. I remember going to parties and listening to this new music. I would get drunk and listen and think: The world is going to end. This is the end of the world. Which was a presage of what, metaphorically, really was going to happen. A world was ending."" (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 39)

"Something is happening. Something peculiar. What the fuck is this? The end of the world. And the beginning of something new. This was the current of feeling that ran and swelled under the distressing events of the Sixties. It was a sense that something primitive was forcing its way up from beneath, something destructive and creative that would not stop short of total transformation. In part it was the accumulated rage of blacks, racing through American streets in the form of fire. But it was more. It was the relentless removal of controls until, finally, all that the old America had repressed would erupt into the open--violence and chaos, femaleness and instinct, the irrational, the ecstatic, the sexual, the mystical. And the focal point of the eruption, the epicenter, would be us, the young. In the mid-Sixties, we felt the preliminary tremors; our stereos were our seismographs." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 39-40)

"[Marc Barasch:] 'The Summer of Love. . . . I was . . . just one of thousands who made 1967 the year that the cultural revolution reached critical mass. The Haight had been acid-soaked for three years, and Leary and Ginsberg had been proselytizing for LSD on campuses, but it was only after the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in January 1967 that the zeal of the media and the pilgrimages of would-be hippies spread the psychedelic movement and its sacrament throughout the land. A study conducted by Richard H. Blum in the school year 1966-67 showed that 21 percent of the students on one representative campus had smoked marijuana; 6 percent had tried LSD. In 1967-68, the year the second wave began to enter college, the figures had more than doubled: 57 percent had smoked pot, 17 percent had dropped acid.
In 1967-68 political activism also took a quantum leap. In March 1966, twenty-two thousand people had marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City to protest the war in Vietnam. One year later, on April 15, 1967, ten times as many--over a quarter of a million--massed in Central Park to march to the United Nations. Draft-card burnings and turn-ins and campus demonstrations against recruiters from Dow troubled the spring of 1967. That summer, Newark and Detroit went up in flames.' . . ." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 45-46)

"[Bob Waldman:] "Radicalism was in the air--radical behavior, radical possibilities. It was very intellectual and very political. And very violent.
"I remember one moment as almost an axis point in my life. We were occupying some building, up all night. There had been three or four years of speeches and marches and sit-ins, but nothing had really been done. What's next? Nobody knew. And then five or six crazies walked out and said, 'We're going to take over the president's office.' And a few of us followed.
"There was a cop there . . . and we shoved this great big black cop aside. And broke the glass on that door. And for me, the sound of that glass breaking was the sound of history breaking. It was the sound of everything being let loose.'"
(Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 46)

"Even Martin Luther King, in an April 1967 speech, had assailed "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 64)

"We hit the road barefoot, in hiking boots, in rubber sandals or Earth Shoes; with flutes and guitars strapped to our packs; in long purple velvet dresses and blue jeans with frayed-out knees. . . .
"While we made our share of true pilgrimages--seeking some swami, shaman, or sacred place--the quintessential Sixties journey was a search without a goal, what poet Roa Lynn (1937) has called an "open odyssey." America has always been synonymous with motion, but we moved as if moving itself was living, while Americans before us moved in search of a living. "The prairie schooners, the underground railway, the Okie exodus to California, the black migration to the urban North--all had been quests for a better life, measured in liberty, land, and opportunity. We were the heirs of that "better life": a world at last made safe, sanitary, stable, respectable, comfortable, gleaming with "conveniences." It was all that our ancestors had sweated for. And all we wanted was out. We burst out as if a deeper ancestral momentum couldn't be dammed up, as if we knew that the task of discovering "the New World" was only half finished, and would not be done until it embraced the whole earth.
"That urge for wholeness would drive us to discover and embrace everything our own culture had put down or ruled out. The children of security, we hankered for risk. Children of the "nice," the reasonable and rational, we wanted vision, passion, pain. Children of technology, we longed to get our hands in the dirt. Children of Lysol, Listerine, and Wonder Bread, we were starved for texture, taste, and smell. It was all "out there," outside these sterile space colonies, the suburbs; on the road, on the land, among people who had nothing much but life itself. They weren't far away." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 83-84)

"From 1967 to 1973, the number of passports issued annually to students nearly doubled, from 292,000 to 559,000; in the summer of 1971, over 800,000 young Americans traveled to Europe. For many, the events of 1968 were final grounds for separation from America, the state and the state of mind. . . .
Whether the reasons were political or personal, most Sixties departures were precipitated by a sudden, overwhelming urge to get out. Like butterflies that must leave the chrysalis or die, we had to struggle free of the tight forms of the old society--school, marriage, family, job--and put protective distance between ourselves and those still-commanding guilts. "Out there" you could breathe, search, grow. "I got up in the middle of an economics class," recalls Duke Bakewell, "and I walked out and got on a plane and went to the Outer Hebrides. And I never looked back." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 87-88)

"We weren't fleeing a home, we were seeking one. We were homesick for the earth, and for a way of life rooted in the earth. Hitchhiking across America, especially the vast spaces of the West, revealed that we didn't really belong on this continent yet, any more than we did in Morocco or Nepal. All the people we'd visited, even Europeans--even Mississippi blacks and their northern urban grandchildren--had roots in a place and a rich culture. They belonged. Only we seemed disembodied, ghosts in the machine that was relentlessly "developing" the earth." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 101)

"'We've got to get ourselves back to the Garden,' Joni Mitchell sang. It was one of the most passionate and important dreams of our generation, even if most early forays ended, like Woodstock, in the mud. . . ." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 104)

"It never occurred to us, in the great days of the Movement, that the real meaning of the word "radical" might be: someone with roots." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 123)

"Apocalypse Now!
"From 1968 to 1971, that impulse--to social justice, personal risk, and blinding transformation--was in full flood. "I wanted apocalypse, Utopia," underground veteran Jane Alpert (1947) recently told an interviewer. So did we all, and we wanted it now. That apocalyptic impatience was the most striking characteristic of the Sixties. Sociologists traced it to the tantrums of spoiled children, or a TV-bred taste for instant gratification. Beleaguered college administrators blamed it on "outside agitators." But it was too strange and strong to be explained away so easily. It was the impatience of prophecy. We had SEEN, and the vision we'd had--of the terrible destructiveness of the present world order--made it unbearable that the status quo continue to exist for another minute.
"'Revolution' was, at first, a metaphor. We longed to see a world transformed. Being young and American, with little sense of history, we knew nothing about the processes by which that might take place. All we had was that acute sense of emergency. 'Revolution' came closest to expressing the totality and urgency of the needed change." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 125-126)

"[Wynston Jones:] Several friends of mine were totally apolitical, completely innocent bystanders, and the Tac Squad like a grim reaper just mowed them down. Beat them senseless. . . . . They became quite political after that. . . . There was a day we all called Bloody Tuesday. I saw unconscious bodies being hauled off with white sheets over them so that the press couldn't take pictures of how bloody they were, but the blood was staining through the white sheets and the press got the pictures anyway." Not only the Tac Squad, but the Oakland and Berkeley police, the California Highway Patrol, the National Guard, and the Alameda County Sheriff's deputies converged on the People's Park demonstration. "They shot people over in Berkeley." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 133-134)

""I went through a whole summer when I didn't speak," says visionary architect Donna Goodman. "It was 1972, right after finishing Smith. I'd been in jail Graduation Day, for a protest against an air force base for sending planes to Cambodia. I wanted to do something constructive and positive. I didn't want to go on living as a kind of outlaw and protester. But I had no idea what to do with my life now that the Sixties were over." You could say that we all went underground in the Seventies--and it was hard to tell burial from planting." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 139)

"In 1971 there was a big demonstration in Washington on Mayday," says Marc Sarkady. "There were about fifteen thousand people there, and almost everybody was arrested and put into this big stadium." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 139)

"The sense of defeat that settled over Sixties veterans after Reagan's reelection was almost melodramatic. There was a general mood of "It's over. We've lost." Old radicals and hippies withdrew into an "ark mentality," waiting for apocalypse or fascism to fulfill their direst prophecies. Moderates felt justified in withdrawing into self-interest."
(Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 149)

Marc Sarkady thinks we may be metamorphosing into "the We Generation." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 160)

"For all its mind-enhancing properties, marijuana isn't an empowering drug. It taught us to "go with the flow" and enjoy the process--fuck the result. At best, it could be described as passive-subversive. LSD was another story." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 173)

"If the late Sixties were a time of vision and hope, the Eighties so far have been a time of addiction, which is despair. Writing in the August 1985 Vogue, Jane O'Reilly put her finger on the connection between cocaine and conspicuous consumption. "'I want, I want, I want' is the mantra of the 'eighties," she wrote. "Spending frenzy is part of the short-circuited sensibility of the cocaine age. . . . Even earning money is addictive. . . . The one sure thing is that none of these fixes satisfies our undefined longings. Whatever it is we want, we cannot name it, and we cannot buy it." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) pp. 189-190)

"It was real religious or mystical experience we were after, undiminished by Sunday-school platitudes, deeper than the ethical Judaeo-Christian platform of shalts and shalt nots. Ironically, what we sought was far more like what Jesus offered his disciples than what most Christian ministers dispensed in his name. Transfiguration. Re-ligio (reconnection to the cosmos). Life everlasting. There is an apocryphal story that during his lost twelve years, Jesus went as far east as India to escape the limits of his own tradition. And so did we." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 196)

"There is a world-hating, life-negating strain in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition--the doctrine that life is "illusion" and "suffering"--just as there is in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The West has taken this as an injunction to dominate the world, the East to withdraw from it, but today the endpoint of both is the same: the abandonment and destruction of the planet. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima and advocate of "the embodied self," has noted that in "nuclearism," "bodies and persons are absent." He could almost have been describing the far reaches of meditation mania. It's from this quality of abstraction that so many of us have retreated. We know we need a religion of life. . . . Our "religion" is life-positive, eclectic . . . decentralized, anti-authoritarian, compassionate, individualistic, communitarian, and passionately attached to this earth." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 206)

"To make our earthly priorities clear, we don't call the quality we all have in common "spirit" or "soul" or "consciousness." We call it "life." That has the added advantage of broadening it beyond the human. Meditators and acid trippers felt, as St. Francis did, kinship with animals and trees and the ocean, as well as other people. Meditation, the discovery of universal subjectivity, transformed both social justice and ecology from ideologies into empathies--and fused them into one. The basis of our "religion" is the oneness of human beings with each other and with all life." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 211)

"Almost half a millennium ago, Martin Luther made a revolution against the Catholic Church, insisting that the individual soul could contact Christ without "help" from a hierarchy of middlemen (who got rich in the process). An even more sweeping revolution is now going on against all forms of centralized spiritual authority. Most of our generation seems to believe that, while large blasts of "divine revelation" have come through scriptures and masters, little glimpses of revelation and guidance are available to everyone every day. The "authority" that gives us these glimpses is called intuition.
"In one form or another, intuition is the antidote to fascism in a chaotic, changing world where the real Satanic temptation may be the comfort of absolute authority." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 215)

"WOMAN AND NATURE
"The theological center of our "religion," and the real revolution, is the restoration to equality or supremacy of the female principle: the divine creativity of the earth. In politics, the feminist movement and the environmental movement have been separate. In spirituality, they are increasingly understood to be inseparable.
"For many of us who didn't much care for "God," nature was the refuge of religious feeling from childhood on. Feelings first experienced as a child in the woods were rekindled in the Sixties when, somewhere in our brains, LSD met Silent Spring and ecological consciousness was born. Ecology, earth passion, is our real "religion," shared even by those who don't think it's a spiritual concern. But many of us knew before 1970 that visiting the vast Southwest--"the spiritual center of our continent," according to Hopi traditional leaders--was a pilgrimage to our Mecca." And astronaut Edgar Mitchell told us that seeing the earth from space was a religious revelation.
"It now seems like a short step to seeing that blue mandala as the living goddess suggested by scientist James Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis." But that step probably wouldn't have been made without the work of feminist "thealogians" like Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology) and Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature), who saw the intimate connections among the oppression of women, the exploitation of nature, and the rule of a transcendent father God." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 222)

"Our generational "religion" of ecology finds its purest expression in the "deep ecology" movement and its purist political activism in the non-violent confrontations of Greenpeace, the animal-rights movement, and Earth First! But just as environmental concerns are now a congressional priority, ecology has also burrowed its way into traditional religion, especially Christianity. In Catholicism it is called "Creation-Centered Spirituality" and led by author Matthew Fox, who has been inspired by the life-affirming vision of such medieval women mystics as Julian of Norwich. In evangelical Protestantism, it is called "the Christian stewardship movement."
"It's a redefining of the Book of Genesis, and it's very profound," says Jeremy Rifkin, a Jew whose 1980 book The Emerging Order was chosen as one of the ten best books on the evangelical movement. "They're saying that God's big instruction, his mandate, his covenant about dominion--we got it wrong! Dominion did not mean subdue nature, it means stewardship. God created this whole thing and called it good, so any time we despoil it . . . we are in rebellion to our covenant. Our job is to take care of it."" (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 224)

"This 'religion' has its politics, too--a tough, tribal resistance and friendly anarchism. "Basically, we come from a long history of people who fought the Romans," says Otter. "We never thought of Rome as our government, whether it's in Washington, D.C., whether they call him Caesar or President. This is not our government. Our government is the tribal council, and it always has been and always will be. As far as we're concerned, if you can't get everybody right there in the same place to talk about what you've got to talk about, forget it." (Annie Gottlieb, Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (1987) p. 227)