Freedom: Not Always the Way It Looks

Part 1 of a 2-Part Series on Freedom and Constraint

Dec 26, 2023

What is personal freedom? What is constraint? Is one good and the other bad? These are questions many young people struggle with as they are growing into adulthood. But the answers are not at all simple. And from my experience, I believe they are almost always misunderstood. In this two-part series I explore the freedom movements of my young adulthood, how they affected society and me, and what I learned.

Part 1: The Freedoms of the 60’s and 70’s

From the late 1950s until the mid-1970s, four major freedom movements flourished in the USA: Civil Rights, Free Speech, Hippie, and Anti-War. The Civil Rights movement was, I believe, important and successful. It had an educated, articulate leader in Martin Luther King Jr. and both a specific goal and a firm boundary: King was adamant that the civil rights movement be nonviolent. Of the others, only the Free Speech movement had a specific leader, and none had any boundaries.

Many kids who had grown up seeing the civil rights demonstrations on TV had felt the importance and excitement of them. They looked for something similar for themselves.

My Experiences of Those Movements

I spent two years at Iowa State University, a very white, very Christian campus where I was one of the only Jewish female undergraduates. Those years are worth an article in themselves; in brief, I learned a lot about being Jewish; about anti-Semitism, ignorance, and the boundary between them; about freedom of the press; and about Marxist agitation. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was active on campus, led by two Greek graduate students who, I learned, were paid Marxist agitators who had been thrown out of the Sorbonne for their political activities. SDS was ostensibly opposed to the Cold War, although its roots were in socialism.

When I transferred to San Francisco State College (now University) near my home in California, I was a short ride away from U Cal-Berkeley, home of the Free Speech movement. For my senior year I lived about a mile from the Haight-Ashbury, which was Hippie Central.

At that time the Free Speech campaign was winding down and the Hippies were growing. Two years later the Anti-Vietnam-War drive was in full swing. All of those were in the name of freedom: freedom from censorship, freedom from traditional morality, and freedom from the horrors of war.

The slogans of the day were Free Speech; Sex, Drugs, and Rock-n-Roll; and Get Out of Vietnam. All these movements had serious ramifications for society.

Free speech

The free speech movement of the 60’s was, at base, just like the free speech claims of the woke: free speech for me but not for you. This movement was losing steam when I returned to California. But I was not interested.

I had been a journalism major at Iowa State and had experienced censorship first-hand when a news story I’d worked hard on was eviscerated. During research for the story I had been assigned, I discovered that a university employee was responsible for the problem. The morning after I turned in the article, I was called into the department chair’s office and had the realities of the news business explained to me. This man was near retirement and had a sick wife, and the story would have led to his early retirement with possible financial repercussions. I was told to rewrite the story without his involvement. Hours and hours of detective work were reduced to two inches of type.

I was not interested in the free speech movement; I already knew that the news was rigged. We have seen in the intervening years how journalism has moved from fact-finding to kissing up to certain powerful elements, the identities of which the reader is unaware. How much the free speech movement had to do with this, how much was simple corruption, and how much was protecting the guilty I neither know nor care.

Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll

The drugs that were a hallmark of the Hippie movement led to countless overdoses (including deaths) and cognitive changes that, if not permanent, lasted many years, rendering people unable to hold down jobs and to fall far below their pre-drug educational and employability levels.[i] We hear about a high percentage of homeless being Vietnam veterans. I suspect another high percentage are those who blew their minds on drugs.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Free love

Unbridled sex, a hallmark of Hippies, led to disease, abortion, and fatherless children. A lot of babies were born to mothers who were estranged from their parents and who had no idea which of many men were the fathers.[ii] The occurrence of sexually-transmitted diseases skyrocketed; NBC News reported that from 1964 through 1968, the incidence of the two most common STDs, gonorrhea and syphilis, skyrocketed 165 percent, as did often-illegal abortions.[iii]

The high number of hippies who bore what were then called “illegitimate” children changed public opinion toward unwed mothers. Unwed mothers of the past had been mostly lower-class and minority. Middle- and upper-class teens who got pregnant often obtained illegal abortions; I know this because during a summer job at Blue Shield of California I filed tens of billing statements for D&C procedures for teenagers. The D&C, which is used for problems rare in teenagers, can also be a method of abortion. An alternative to abortion was homes for unwed mothers, explained to acquaintances as “boarding school in another state.” The babies were then released for adoption. On the other hand, the hippies were mostly middle-class, relatively well-educated women who tended to keep their children.

The normalization of single motherhood, coupled with welfare laws that rewarded fatherless families, led directly to many of the social ills faced by the USA today. These include the normalization of drug use and the demise of the Black nuclear family, which has resulted in two generations of boys raised in fatherless homes, many of whom who have become criminals, druggies, or both.

Anti-war movement

The war in Vietnam was between the freedom-loving South Vietnamese and the northern communists, many of whom were ethnic Chinese.[iv] Neighboring Communist China was a big influence in the north.

The anti-war movement was led by Marxists who naturally favored the north, although they were smart enough not to use that as part of their rhetoric. Their movement was ostensibly about loving peace, wanting peace, and hating war.

Thousands of American men fled to Canada when the draft was instituted, probably contributing, all these years later, to the election of Marxist Justin Trudeau as that country’s prime minister. At SFSC, which began as a teachers’ college, most of the men I knew who did not go to Canada transferred from business and other degrees into social work, divinity, and educational administration, majors which gained men a draft exemption. Hence the Marxist influence in education, liberal churches, and social work.

Anti-war activists made everything about the war, the way everything in the USA has been about race, and now is about the Jews. Friendships between pro- and anti- were impossible. Clothing and personal grooming were political statements. I was in Israel from April 1968 until late July 1969. Since my family had left California, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, near a former childhood home. At that time I wore my hair very short. Finding a hairdresser who would trim it was difficult: I was turned away from several shops because short hair was a sign I was pro-war and therefore an enemy of humanity. I finally found a hairdresser in a working-class suburb.

More than 60,000 American men died and countless others were traumatized by the war and by the hatred that they faced when they returned from what was pegged a senseless war.

But it was only “senseless” because America had no will to win. The Communist victory in Vietnam gave Pol Pot of Cambodia the go-ahead to take over his country in a revolution that caused the deaths of between 30 and 40 percent of its citizens.[v] When I taught English to Cambodians, I heard stories that equaled those of the Jewish Holocaust for horror.

Today’s Free Palestine rallies remind me of those days: a lot of ignorant college students who want to make a mark on the world join to make themselves feel important. They have absolutely no concept of what they are screaming, or what the ramifications might be. And like the other “freedom” movements, they are without limits.

Next week: What living through these movements has taught me about freedom.

[i] As a college student I had watched several friends “blow their minds” on LSD and other drugs. Then as Intake Worker for the Idaho Dept. of Health and Welfare in the 70’s I interviewed people applying for welfare and emergency benefits. Many of these were young drifters with the same vagueness I’d seen in my friends. A few years later, in the Boston area, I met numerous people who had dropped out of both undergraduate and graduate programs following drug use and were unable to succeed in anything but simple, low-level jobs.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Alexander, B., Free love: Was there a price to pay? https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19053382, June 2, 2007, accessed Dec. 24, 2023.

[iv] Besides working with many Vietnamese refugees in the years after the war, about 2/3 of my ESL students when I taught college-prep English in Dallas were Vietnamese. The war and their family experiences were often brought up in class and in their essays.

[v] https://www.britannica.com/event/Cambodian-Genocide, updated Nov. 17, 2023, accessed Dec. 24, 2023.