Last Friday was "Freedom Day" in Toronto. It was an event that felt just like the 1960s even to the mud that squelched underfoot as rain fell on the young people listening to bands and parading their causes around the Ontario legislature at Queen's Park.
It's an atmosphere similar to the Winnipeg Folk Festival in Birds Hill Provincial Park, although the age range there is significantly greater, with many who actually lived through the '60s still taking their tarps and portable chairs to listen to bands. At Birds Hill, hippies never die. They just grow paunches.
The Toronto event was more "freedom to" than "freedom from." The "freedom to" would be to smoke marijuana legally (and responsibly) and to do all the other things that young people want to do but their parents would prefer that they didn't.
The more things change, I thought using the old clich ©, the more they stay the same. But like all good clich ©s, that one has both the ring of truth and yet is not entirely true. My generation planned to change the world. Our children's generation does too, but they are living with our mistakes.
There was a revolution that took place in the 1960s and 1970s and there is no going back, but I wonder now what happened to our hopes. Like all revolutions it brought both needed change and collateral damage.
It's the collateral damage that bothers me. Looking back, the biggest change wrought in the '60s and '70s was the position of women in society. That change has now made women the majority of undergraduates at many universities. It has put women into the professions and trades and removed the institutional idea that it's the man who goes to work, heads the household and rules the world.
I don't want to overstate this. Women are still, on average, paid less than men. Men dominate corporations and politics and women still find it harder to get ahead in many occupations than men do.
But a major shift has happened. No longer is a doctor, lawyer, accountant or engineer automatically "he." Women are in the workforce to stay and the workforce is better for it.
The collateral damage of the '60s is not simple. Easier divorce has freed many from unhappy marriages, but it has also created fears in our children that my generation didn't have. Other changes haven't worked as well as we had hoped.
We thought we were driving hypocrisy from sexual relations. In part, we succeeded, but the double standard still exists and we have bequeathed our children an uncertainty over what to expect from relationships.
Marriage may have been stifling and restrictive to many, but the uncertainty of today's dating scene leaves many lonely and insecure of their emotional future.
There's a telling piece in last Sunday's New York Times, in which the winner of a college student essay competition about love describes the unsatisfactory and uncommitted relationships she has with men. She writes of her "underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he's going to stay, for a very long time."
What has my generation done so that the emotional, romantic ache seems so unlikely to be satisfactorily filled?
Our prevalence for divorce (yes, I have been divorced), and perhaps, my generation's search for experimentation and an ill-defined sense of freedom has left the generation after us fearful of commitment and worrying that lasting love between two people is unattainable.
Evidence to the contrary, perhaps, is contained in the later pages of the same edition of the same section of the New York Times, where there are columns and columns celebrating newlyweds. Cynically, I wonder how long they will last.
My generation wanted the social world to be more honest. We had hopes. We wanted sexual relations to be more open and less hypocritical. We thought we were forging a new era and in part we were. But we were also na Øve. We discounted jealousy and the hurt that we could cause.
The collateral damage of the freedom we sought is the uncertainty and fear of finding long-term happiness that we have visited on our children. We are not good role models. We destroyed the old system, but failed to put a new system in its place.
There's probably no system to put. But when I look at the young people on the edge of wonderful futures believing that they, like us, can solve hunger and stop war, I hope that love is an emotion that they will believe in, that they will work to get it, work to keep it and not be too distressed by the mistakes my generation made.
Freedom Day should be freedom from the fear that my generation wrecked the chance for good, long-term relationships. Long-term relationships are what happiness is about. Our young people need to believe they can have it.
PREVIOUS
