I see in The Nation this week that the Port Huron manifesto turned 40 years old this week. It is an interesting document to read, it's a manifesto for change, done by the affluent college students of the early 1960s.

While the rest of the world was infatuated by plastic, some students where fascinated with a real society, not one of plastic. Unfortunately, as was all know, the Students for a Democratic society fizzed out in 1969, along with many the dreams and hopes of a generation. The affluent society became the troubled one.

The document is an interesting one, it helped to mainstream the concept of democracy with active participation by all members. A concept that would be actively embraced by grassroot groups (mostly to their failures), and to get lip service by many politicians, including the late Dick Nixon.

I guess it has a similar tone, and similar ideas to many other documents of that era, somehow it reminds me of President Johnson's Great Society speech. It's content proved to be impractical, the SDS would implode. While Great Society didn't have a happy ending, it had more of a possibility, then the Port Huron statement would ever have.

Both Great Society and Port Huron died and burned in the summer of 1968, with the hopes of the nation. While Richard Nixon tried to pass several pieces of legislation that were almost up to Great Society standards (like the Family Assistance Plan), they never happened. The Vietnam war, which fueled SDS killed it, as it did to the Great Society plan.

Since the era post-Vietnam and Watergate, politics have never been the same. Cynics have won the philosophical debate as of recent, because their has been a lot of evidence that the government sometimes doesn't tell the truth, and even outright lies, and takes advantage for their personal advantage.

Maybe you could argue that 1968 was good-doers gone wrong. LBJ, RFK and McCarthy in retrospect probably only had the best of intentions in mind, but unforently, as we all know, it didn't work out that way. The protestors didn't go there for an angry backlash, that just how it worked out.