"Everyday People" Turns Forty -- and the "Good Sixties" Triumph

Makes no difference what group I'm in . . .
Different strokes for different folks . . .

-- Sylvester Stewart (1968)

The legacy of the 1960s has been a matter of contention, with an uncertain outcome, for the past four decades. That contest was finally settled on November 4 of this year, when the "Good Sixties" triumphed over the "Bad Sixties."

With the election of Barack Obama as president, the Civil Rights Movement, which represented the best of the Sixties quest for freedom, has prevailed over the Selfish Rights Movement, which embodied the worst of the decade's freedom quest and which has most often in the years since defined the Sixties in the popular imagination.

This month, "We shall overcome" overcame "I shall overindulge" as the meaning of the Sixties.

As this momentous month draws to a close today, we should not allow to pass without noting it a significant anniversary in the battle between the good and bad legacies of the Sixties. Forty years ago today, Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" made its first appearance on the Billboard "Hot 100." From its modest debut at #93, the song slowly moved up the chart for the remainder of 1968 and reached number 1 in mid-February 1969.

"What of it?" readers are probably asking.

I'll explain that in a moment, but first, let's look at the competing forces in the struggle over the meaning of the Sixties.

A second American civil war erupted a century after the first. Like our first Civil War, it was about the definition of that essential American concept, freedom, and the question of to whom freedom should apply. Also like its precursor, the second American civil war divided the nation into bitterly opposed sides and became a dominant force in our politics for decades after it had ostensibly ended.

The length of our second civil war provides a convenient name for the conflict: America's Forty Years War. It is more commonly known as the "Culture Wars," and in it the Republican party has won most of the battles by running against the bad parts of the 1960s. Much as the Republicans ran against the Rebels of the 1860s for the rest of the nineteenth century by "waving the bloody shirt," the party has run against the rebels of the 1960s for the past 40 years by waving the tie-dyed shirt.

The GOP tried that strategy one more time this year, launching yet another of its offensive offensives. But pointing to Bill Ayers and Sixties radicalism and hedonism didn't work this time. On November 4, 2008, the divisions that arose in the second half of the Sixties and have been exploited for political ends ever since lost to the best of the Sixties: the Civil Rights Movement, diversity, and tolerance.

Those are the qualities that Sly Stone called for in "Everyday People."

The song captured the essence of the best of the Sixties at a time when the era's good was rapidly being submerged by the self-indulgence and destructiveness of the latter part of the decade:

Sometimes I'm right then I can be wrong
My own beliefs are in my songs
. . .
Makes no difference what group I'm in
I am everyday people

. . .
I am no better and neither are you
We're all the same whatever we do
. . .

We got to live together

There is a yellow one that won't
Accept the black one
That won't accept the red one
That won't accept the white one

Different strokes for different folks
. . .

"Different strokes for different folks" not only represents the best of the Sixties; it is also the essence of a philosophy of inclusion, diversity and tolerance that we all need to be trying to adopt and follow. The main reason why religions so often become forces leading to evil and violence is that many of their adherents are what might be called "singularists." They insist that their religion is THE way and all others are wrong: It's my highway to the high place or the highways to hell.

The call in "Everyday People" for pluralism is the antidote we need to overcome that divisiveness, by recognizing that "Sometimes I'm right then I can be wrong."

As I say in my new book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, one of the best images of different religions and their relationship to the Ultimate Truth is that of a wagon wheel, where the Truth is in the hub at the center and the various religions are the spokes on the wheel, each approaching the Divine Truth from different directions, but all looking towards and seeking the same Truth.

Different spokes for different folks.

{Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown). He is currently at work on a book on America in the 1960s, Oh, Freedom! (Norton).}

Comments

[feo]

Here's hoping that someday soon these nonsensical and simple-minded explications of the so-called Boomer generation will end. Some "boomers" fought against the war in Vietnam, some fought in the war, some did both, and many others had no interest one way or another.

[jackpinesavage]

Seriously? Barack Obama's election has redeemed the boomers? Never mind the awful political, economic, and environmental legacy left to the children and grandchildren of the Me generation so that it might live in the most allowable comfort.

Absolving oneself of sin over one, important but mostly symbolic act seems a stretch...though not unexpected. And what of the youth vote that was, apparently, so important in Obama's victory? Do the boomers get to claim credit for that because they really took the old CSN&Y song to heart?

And at least cite Gandhi for the wheel illustration.

[Robert S. McElvaine - Huffpost Blogger]

Yes, seriously--because you misinterpreted what I'm saying. I'm not trying to redeem the boomers. Far from it. AlI of what you list as boomer legacies are the part of the sixties that has been dominant for the last 40 years. It is the legacy of the early Sixties, the pre-boomer Sixties, the Sixties ideals of those born before 1946 that were embodied in the civil rights movement that won out over the self-centered later Sixties.

[McJeff]

There will come a time when everybody
Who is lonely will be free...
To sing & dance & love

There will come a time when every evil
That we know will be an evil...
That we can rise above

Who cares if hair is long or short
Or sprayed or partly grayed...
We know that hair aint where its at

(there will come a time when you wont
Even be ashamed if you are fat!)

Wah wah-wah wah

There will come a time when everybody
Who is lonely will be free...
To sing & dance & love (dance and love)

There will come a time when every evil
That we know will be an evil...
That we can rise above (rise above)

Who cares if youre so poor you cant afford
To buy a pair of mod a go-go stretch-elastic pants...
There will come a time when you can even
Take your clothes off when you dance- FZ

[Vandenbroek]

Another excellent piece.

I'd just like to add these lyrics from Frank Zappa's 200 Motels; this from the closing song, Strickly Genteel:

"They're all going to rise up.
They're going to jump up! I said jump up!
Talkin' 'bout jump right up on off the floor.
Jump right up and hit the door!

They're all going to rise up, and jump off.

They're going to ride on home.

And once again take themselves seriously."

Let's just hope that this time we do it with a sense of humor.