This was a strong sense, at the moment of being grabbed by those powerful jaws, that there was something profoundly and incredibly wrong in what was happening, some sort of mistaken identity. My disbelief was not just existential but ethical-this wasn't happening, couldn't be happening. The world was not like that!
A key reason so many young people in the 1960s threw themselves into the fight against US military involvement in Vietnam was that the civil rights movement had recently demonstrated the power of mass action. As Students for a Democratic Society's founding manifesto in 1962 put it, 'the Southern struggle against racial bigotry...compelled most of us from silence to activism.'
The generation that twirled the first plastic hula hoops and dressed up the first Barbie dolls, embraced the TV age, blissed out at Woodstock and protested the Vietnam War the cohort that didn't trust anyone over age 30 now is contributing to the overall aging of America. Boomers becoming octogenarians in 2026 include actor Henry Winkler and baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, singers Cher and Dolly Parton and presidents Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Detractors have since labeled the movement as little more than a battle in a lost liberal culture war, but at the time, it was electrifying. As I messaged with other women in my field, I realized that I was not alone in my situation. In fact, my situation was nauseatingly common, and the more I and other realized this, the more urgency I felt to change it, galvanized by a sense of collective anger and sorrow that built up into something real, and, evidently, dangerous.
"ABCD was created to challenge the deficiency lens that depicts neighborhoods of color as helpless. It emphasizes that community change begins with recognizing local assets.”
