Action vs Reflection

I'm so glad for the intellectual revolutions of the 60s and 70s. The earlier generation dealt with tearing the structure down the ground and then rejecting what remained of it inside themselves.
It is clear that they were generally right - but it's equally clear that they had to fail. Just because we recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong with the situation - whether it's our society our ourselves - there is no option of giving it all up.
Even with all of the mind-freeing and radical experimentation of the past few decades, we still see that our government enacts horrors while most of our social institutions are (at best) distracted. We have all heard the call to stand up for the environment, for the disenfranchised, for the children. Yet still, Al Gore gave up the presidency.
Yes, we are disillusioned - try as we might to hold onto the dreams of utopia in our literary havens, we can't devote ourselves to the vision of a future that our parents fought for. They rioted, they dissented, they rebelled - yet still, all over our great country (and increasingly all over the world) life is defined by material possessions and experiences consist mostly of interacting with faceless retail corporations.
But just as much as we have lost the illusion of a peaceful, natural, synergetic future Small World After All, we have gained the perspective that comes at the dusk of the golden age of a civilization.
We have seen so many of those hippies settle down and get real jobs and raise kids in the very social, political, and economic structure whose validity they once questioned, encouraging them to excel in the only dimension which seems to be available. (to climb the only ladder which we have?)
We've seen the corporations that poison our environemnt with products and pollute our culture with ads begin to embrace their own evolution and breed with the counterculture.
We've seen the greatest of oppressors provide unity and growth in local communities while nonprofits and academia are revealed to be strong supporters and excellent progenitors of the existing power structure.
Yet we don't lose hope - because we know that these are us. They are made by, for, and of us, even if we don't like what htey are doing.
Detaching ourselves from our history - and by implication, from our present - would be equivalent to raising ourselves up by our own bootstraps. They discovered that cutting out the greed, the exclusionism, and the small-mindedness that characterize too much of human affiars, we would have to give up the stability, the satisfaction of achievement, and the love that make it worthwhile to struggle and suffer.
Yet it is, in fact, a physical reality (if only at a quantum level, for massless particles) that energy expended in a new direction can experience a feedback loop and gather strength and momentum from its reflection in its own medium.