Sixties Momentum

This past Thursday was the monthly meeting of the Point Roberts Community Association. Everyone, at some time in his/her life, goes to meetings like these, I imagine. A somewhat amorphous group with a somewhat amorphous purpose struggling to find a way forward. Such meetings are profoundly frustrating in some ways (can’t we just do what I want and then get on with doing it?), and profoundly interesting in others (what’s really happening here?). The frustrating part is immediately available to everyone, I think, but the interesting part takes a little more work to discern.

The ten-twelve people who show up for these meetings do not come from the same generational, educational, or experiential backgrounds. They are not all committed environmentalists, or political enthusiasts, or evangelical Christians, or home schoolers, or anything unifying. Except for the fact that they live in Point Roberts—well, that’s the unifying point. And it’s often hard to believe that that is enough of a shared experience to make the group work.

It sometimes feels like that reality TV show—which I have never seen, so I may have it wrong—in which a bunch of people get put on a desert island and each week, I think, someone is voted off. Similarly, at the end of each of our meetings, I worry about whether someone will decide not to return the next month. After all, if the members of the Point Roberts Community Association can’t get along together as a group of people willing to try to work together, why would we think that the larger community, whose members have not made any particular commitment to trying to do something together, could operate in a more harmonious fashion?

Why would we think that just showing up in the same place (either in Point Roberts, or at the PRCA meetings) would be enough to enable us to overcome all our differences? I ask myself this frequently, and especially right after the monthly meetings. And the answer, for me anyway, is that I come from the land of the ‘60’s, when people with vastly different views, ages, experiences, and backgrounds came together all over the U.S. in very different groups and made something happen.

It’s hard and maybe impossible to explain the sixties (and early 70’s) to someone who wasn’t there. The feeling of hope, the feeling that things could change, the fact of endlessly multiplying groups that formed to carry forward those hopes and actions, ranging from the many groups that went to form the Civil Rights Movement (it wasn’t just Martin Luther King), to the Black Panthers, to the Free Speech Movement, to the Students for a Democratic Society, and on and on. This blog post would be a lot longer if I just let myself list all the groups I can remember. And though all those groups had disagreements with one another, there was a steady sense of forward movement in which the various institutions of society (the press, the courts, even the U.S. Congress and state legislatures) seemed to be reflecting, following, or even leading, on occasion. That sense of movement is what kept us going. And momentum is a very big thing.

Not so much now; really, not any now. Starting anything nowadays is starting from pretty much a dead stop. The internet is full of recently-formed groups/movements, but they pretty much just talk to each other and/or send checks/emails to one another. So, the fact that a dozen people are willing to come to a meeting in a building once a month and do anything at all is a great success, I remind myself. At least we aren’t voting each other off our island.

The sixties made it seem easy. But it wasn’t, even then, as I recall.