![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The town may have been one of the first to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday even though it was, as McKibben writes, “overwhelmingly white,” but it was also sharply divided in climacteric moments such as the Vietnam War. He looks deeply into the role of his hometown, Lexington, Massachusetts, in firing the revolutionary “shot heard ’round the world” only to discover that even there, slavery existed until well into the 19th century. ![]() What happened? Well, those suburban kids took their detachments from cities and communities and extended them into the hyperindividualism of today, its governing motto “you’re not the boss of me.” McKibben capably picks apart long-ago history to find present themes. “We were better consumers than citizens,” writes McKibben of his generation, the original counterculturalists who mounted rebellions against the war in Vietnam, racial injustice, and inequalities of many kinds. The prolific writer and activist finds some of the causes of our societal meltdown in the idyllic suburbs of his youth. ![]()
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