Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerry Rubin

Rubin’s line is a self-indictment aimed at the easiest drug a former radical can take: nostalgia. “Copping out” is street-language moral accounting, not a gentle regret. He’s saying that clinging to the “myth of the ’60s” isn’t loyalty to a cause; it’s an escape hatch from the harder work of adapting to whatever ugly, compromised present comes next. The bite is that he names the decade not as history but as myth, a packaged narrative that flatters its veterans as permanent protagonists in America’s most marketable era of dissent.

The intent is defensive and prosecutorial at once. Rubin is pre-empting critics who might call his later pivots betrayal (he moved from Yippie theatrics to more mainstream and even entrepreneurial worlds). By framing the ’60s as a myth, he refuses the role of museum piece. He also hints at how the culture industry turns rebellion into a collectible: the decade becomes a costume you can keep wearing, a credential you can cash in, a way to avoid the risk of being wrong in the present.

Context matters: by the late ’70s and ’80s, “the ’60s” had already become a shorthand, a brand, a morality play. Rubin’s subtext is that movements die when they start curating their own legend. Staying inside that legend feels righteous, but it’s a way of freezing political imagination at the moment it was most photogenic.