How the West was Lost
Preface: I have tried to write this out for months. It always spins into thousands of words and fragmented trains of thought. There is no small irony that I found it to be an elephant that must be served in pieces. So, for continuity sake I am going to split it up and do a series.
The story of the US is self explanatory, because the story of the US has always been just that… The story of us…
There’s been one nagging question for years now. As someone not short on life experiences and time on this planet, I wanted to know what happened? How? With the life I lead, the people I grew up with, and the country I hold dear did this present come out of those yesterdays? Sure, I lived some life and missed some things, but what the hell? Was I that dense? What happened?… Most of us who lived through it can see the patterns that shaped our history, but the outcomes and some of the causes may not be as clear.
I wanted to know, if nothing for the feeling of closure, understanding, and finally letting it go as I count down my days. I know that something can have a variety of meanings to everyone; yet I wanted to know when the We stopped and the us got shoved in its place. When the us started the tug of war, and left the “I’s” well blackened in the end. What I found surprised me and at the same time reinforced my belief that our story will never change until We make it change.
The way I walk through times and memories is often through the emotional imprints I remember of those times. That has always been the stronger remnant in my thinking. I go back to a time and bring up a memory or news bit and try to remember how it felt? What were the emotions I was picking up? What did others feel like around me? To my great benefit I began life plugged into ten other people’s lives so my emotional connections got to work early on. I grew up as one of the first generations of TV kids, those that were babysat by the boob tube for as long as we could before Mom kicked us outside to play. I was raised with classic TV shows, and of course all of the news as well. In my case Vietnam was always a top story, or The Soviet Union and a nuclear saber rattle or two. The protests going on and the various movements gaining speed made the late sixties a perfect place to start, right where my time began. Not that any of it started there, but this is my emotional look at things and my emotions weren’t around before I was…
Let’s start this painting almost 60 years ago, 1967, good old US of A. That was the year that our national fabric was fully engulfed in a changing avalanche of conflicts. The Vietnam war was protested, the Civil Rights movement was peaking, The second wave of feminism/Women’s rights was pushing hard, the counter culture “hippies” were also thick in the meaning of things. It would be just one more year until 1968, the single most chaotic year in US history to this day. The fact that we landed a man on the Moon just a year later has no small part in this either. It was as much a defining moment for humanity and at the same time, a validation of the kind of democracy we had built until that time. We were doing what we thought we were supposed to do, trying to form a more perfect Union.
I’m not going to pick up all of paints and brushes for every decade, but the template of this era is important in context. This is one of those pieces that doesn’t paint the whole house, just the load bearing beams so people can see the structure. The response to the civil unrest, the fraying of the perceived “norms” and the ultimate changes they would produce brought many groups together to work for or fight, fight for your way of life, fight the change, fight for civil rights, fight for women’s rights, fight for the planet, fight the establishment…
In the late 60’s and early 70’s, both traditional power structures and emerging movements began to recognize a shared reality: public protest can force change, but lasting influence depends on institutions. As a result, competing groups increasingly shifted their efforts toward courts, policy organizations, media, and long-term infrastructure where power could be sustained beyond any single movement. During the early ’70s all the way through it the Heritage Foundation, ALEC – The American Legislative Exchange Council, The Business Roundtable, Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly – STOP Era. Powerful, religious, entrenched already, those led to The Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy. Even though religious outwardly in its branding, It reflected a commitment to preserving existing gender hierarchies and traditional social structures. They had the power over the most powerful messaging machines in the ’70s and while they fought back, they were also able to give caveats on each social front without changing the blueprint altogether. They kept the counter culture to a phase and placed Women and Minorities in a new box, It was all just a larger box with more room and label changes, but still a box by any measurement. Title IX passed, Roe v Wade, the ending of the draft, these were the continuations of the old world guard making sure that while society changes the shape of our fabric still fits their models, their worldviews. Speaking of worldviews…
Who Needs Friends?…
The one constant among those aspects of our history is the connection to our biggest adversary, the Soviet Union. The Cold War was also firing on all cylinders and while every other country was trying to take advantage of the chaos, none were as coordinated as the Soviet Union. I am calling it that because it never really went away, it too was re-boxed and had a change of labels, but it was still the Soviet Union then, and now. An old memory is the siren on the tower, based at the corner of our playground that used to blare in Elementary School. The Nuclear Warhead drills of getting under your desk and away from the windows. While even then we knew it wouldn’t do a dang thing if it was real.. The Cold War was at its finest and the Soviets were always a part of things. It is almost funny that we know about the operations they had in the ’60s and ’70s to help amplify each of those movements in the US. Yes, we created them, they were home grown, grass roots movements. Yet, they were also amplified and made into something else by our antagonists, our Cold War opponents. They called them things like The Big Umbrella, Operation Ryan, etc… They knew what to amplify because we told them to. Even Hollywood inadvertently fed them and gave them models to use against us. Psychological warfare was a newer field to us back then and the Soviets had a 75 year head start. They didn’t need their operations to succeed, just cause or continue the disruption.
As I said previously, the way to my understanding of it all is to go where the emotions were. I didn’t know what all this meant at the time, but it did leave me with obvious lasting impressions. Years ago when this began to go seriously sideways I said that the thing that will bring us back to some kind of normalcy is our stories, our individual stories. Because in order to understand anyone’s or anything’s story is to understand what the emotions were in decisions and changes along the way.
Someone Changed the Rules
In ’73 when Nixon ended the draft, that one moment the protests seemed to vanish almost overnight. The Paris Accord was signed, soon Watergate and the energy crisis took our minds elsewhere. The historical patriarchy models held for the most part. The nuclear family blueprint that produced a reliable funneling of minds and beliefs, money and influence held strong enough throughout the next decade. The energy crisis and accountability for corruption changed the surface level tensions for a moment in our history. The early ’70s were a release valve. We had bigger things to look forward to, space, peace, and a better tomorrow was the new thinking. By ’74 everything had eerily calmed down, we were exhausted. There is a reason the late ’70s were filled with a ’50s nostalgia boom, we were trying to imprint that nostalgia to cover our failings with past imagery, something societies and cultures do over their lifetimes. But the late ’70s produced probably the most singular disruptive tear in our national fabric. It was just a thread, barely noticed, but it began the unravelling process. It was also misinterpreted, and was one of those moments where the old guard squarely shot themselves in the foot in the context of things.
Vietnam didn’t produce the results that the old guard thought it would. It was a protested war, a cause for division and anger for the conscription process and it’s usage. The veterans weren’t seen in the same heroic light and weren’t given the same societal recognition as those that came before. Here’s where the thread separated; The old guard from the other wars, the veterans and products of another time didn’t accept them into the male only circles. The VFW didn’t recognize them at first, or would and make it difficult on them. The other groups were also headed by the same old guard and they too didn’t recognize their service as worthy as their more orderly and disciplined service. Many would place the war as a battle, and downgrade its importance and worth as well. That small act, almost forgotten in the footnotes is where we began to break apart. The old guard read this fracture and failure to congeal into a national unity as society’s problem. They failed to recognize their own damage, and then doubled down with the various foundations and groups. The late ’70s brought us the Moral Majority in all its glory trying to imprint forcefully the religious branding we now see happening, and the thread continued to unravel. That one act broke the fraternal clubs and organizations cycles of membership and was the beginning of their downfall. The natural recruitment and generational cycles of inclusion and community service were broken. This is where we lost the continuity to the institutions in our communities. People started to unplug from those past institutions and began to look for a different connection point.
What that would do to our communities, families, and fabric is part of the echo that is hardly heard, and continues in Part 2.