During my 20’s, I was a wife and mother who became a women’s libber, and started wearing cotton instead of polyester. I got kicked in the teeth a lot, by the idiomatic status quo, for blurting truisms and exposing faux pa’s.

All during my 30’s and 40’s, I heard younger people, mostly impotent men and frightened women, accusing me of being behind the times, living in the past, stuck in the Sixties, chasing a lost cause.

Now I’m knocking at 60’s door, and I say, AH HA!
Who is so ignorant now, as to label me naïve and passé for believing in my own successful revolutions, when I see the motion rising, and it is irresistible, even NOW.

From: The Greening of America, by Charles Reich, 1970

"There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions
of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture,
and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It
will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully
resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and
already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in
consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more humane community,
and a new, liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new
and enduring wholeness and beauty—a renewed relationship of man to
himself, to other men, to women, to society, to nature, and to the
land.
This is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and
rebellion, their culture, music, ways of thought and liberated
lifestyle are not a passing fad or just a form of dissent and
refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational. The whole emerging
pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bell-
bottoms to the Woodstock Festival, makes sense and is part of a
consistent philosophy. This revolution is both necessary and
inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all
people in America."