Why can't we leave the Baby Boomers' arguments behind?

The Associated Press

Sara Jane Olson

Featured Topic | Posted 35 weeks 6 days ago

Why can't we leave the Baby Boomers' arguments behind?

California authorities re-arrested Sara Jane Olson over the weekend, saying her release on parole was a clerical error. Outrage had greeted the release of Olson, a former member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army who had served six years for her role in a 1975 plot to kill Los Angeles police officers by blowing up their patrol cars. Why are the cultural battles of the Baby Boomers youth still so resonant? When will we get to leave them behind?

Ben likes: Kathy's clowns, eight years later

Scott Johnson/Powerline

Sara Jane Olson's real name was Kathleen Soliah. (She subsequently changed her name to Sara Jane Olson.) In St. Paul she had built a life as a fashionable left-wing activist with a physician husband and two daughters who attended the neighborhood school a block from where we lived.

Soliah had many local friends and acquaintances who stepped forward to speak up for her. They immediately produced an outpouring of support. Many of her friends were prominent Twin Cities Democrats. Among her local supporters, for example, was current Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison, though in Ellison's case Soliah was only one of a long line of killers whose cause he championed. In February 2000 Ellison spoke at a fundraiser on behalf of Soliah and demanded Soliah's freedom.

John and I were struck by the depth and breadth of the local support for Soliah as well as by its sickness.

Joel likes: A last gasp of radical cheek

New York Times

Some conservatives have sought to use cases like Ms. Olson's to attack not just the actions of individuals but the legacy of the 1960's. Todd Gitlin said he worried that a case involving a radical group that he called ''a farcical footnote to a footnote, a cartoon,'' might be used as a lance to spear all the offspring of the 60's -- which include everything from civil rights to the environmental movement -- as though the whole era had been a quixotic misadventure. ''This will turn out to have been very bad political theater if it just provides some clownish grist for people who have harbored this grudge against the 60's,'' he said. ''Nobody needs to rescue those days, but nobody needs to sabotage them either.''