Remembering the 60s: were you there?
Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane famously said that if you can remember anything about the 60s you weren’t really there.
Cute, but not really true. I bet even Kantner remembers quite a bit (as you can see by this), and he was most definitely there.
As was I.
In my post earlier today about Cornell in the late 60s, commenter “mizpants” had the following to say:
How terrible the sixties seem in retrospect – more and more so, the older I get. It was truly the opening of a Pandora’s box. The anarchic glee looks diabolical from here. I used to nod vaguely when people waxed nostalgic about that time. Now I leave the room.
Well, I ain’t going to wax nostalgic; I didn’t much care for the 60s even at the time. Oh, it was nice to be young, and the music and the fashions were fun and fine, and there was a sense of something new beginning. But I was very uneasy about what that new thing actually would turn out to be.
People seemed silly, full of themselves and self-indulgent, histrionic, violent, and (this is rarely written about) misogynistic or even misanthropic as they mouthed platitudes about the rights of women and of mankind. Those things gave me an uncomfortable feeling that fools and reckless idiots, or people up to no good, were in the driver’s seat of the movement. They seemed pretty drunk on their own power, too, while simultaneously accusing others (the older folk, of course) of being power-mad.
Now that I’ve learned more about the repercussions over time, it seems even worse. But even some of that was hinted at then, as I learned in a course I took that was called “Russian Intellectual History”:
It was there I learned – without anyone ever telling me directly – that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form. No, my generation was not unique; that was clear. No, we were not inventing something that had never been tried, going down some wonderful path that had never been trod. We were going somewhere that in the past had led to nothing good.
I could see it for myself; all I had to do was read, and think. If we don’t learn history we are indeed condemned to repeat it. And even if we do learn it, we may be condemned to repeat it anyway.
It was not only reading about it in the abstract; I was experiencing it more up-close and personal:
I also remember attending an SDS meeting at that same university…I was flirting with Leftist thought at the time – trying it on for size, as it were. And what I saw there made it clear to me that it was not a good fit for me. The level of mindless rage was immediately apparent. The speeches seemed nothing but name-calling and obscenities, with a few prepositions and conjunctions and verbs thrown in to aid the flow. It was assumed that everyone was on the same page and no argument or reasoning was necessary. The type of language used reflected the jettisoning of the conventions of rational discourse on the part of speakers who fancied themselves revolutionaries.
It was all there, even then. And this is not 20/20 hindsight. I well remember my visceral feeling of slowly-dawning horror when attending that meeting. I didn’t totally understand it all at the time, but I sensed both on an intellectual and a gut level that what I was seeing was wrong, dangerous, and would lead to no good.
Nothing I’ve seen since has disabused me of that notion.
You might ask how I managed to remain a liberal Democrat for decades after that experience. I’d refer you to my change series for the answer, but I’ll add that I simply did not connect the radicals I saw at that meeting with most of the liberals in the Democratic Party. Also, I didn’t know much about conservatism and never thought to seek it out because what I read about it in my usual and trusted sources, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, and the New Yorker, made it seem not worth the trouble. It really took the advent of the internet to introduce me to it and get me to realize its value.
“The speeches seemed nothing but name-calling and obscenities, with a few prepositions and conjunctions and verbs thrown in to aid the flow. It was assumed that everyone was on the same page and no argument or reasoning was necessary.”
Sounds just like the current “liberals” – Hmmmm.
I was there, a bit young to fully participate, but old enough to know what was going on. And I was appalled. While some of the music was good, a lot more was obviously performed while a bit too high on something. (I also never had any interest whatsoever in drugs of any kind, so this by itself separated me from a lot of my peers). I cheered for the Chicago police while watching the Democratic convention in 1968, and rooted for the Ohio National Guard a few years later at Kent State. Not that I had any love for a police state, and in the fullness of time I came to realize that both events could, and probably should, have been handled far differently. But I regarded the SDS crowd as fundamentally hating the United States, and people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as traitors to a country that allowed them to freely voice their views. No, I have no nostalgia for the 1960s.
Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” tells the tale of what really happened to America in the 60s (not exclusively that era but it was the focal point).
The book is a devastating critique that cannot be bettered.
Liberals fancy themselves liberated, free, open, intelligent. As the title suggests they are the opposite of all of those things. They did not “liberate” the rest of us. They put us in chains, made us less intelligent, and began the long shut down of American freedom and so American opportunity.
Reagan beat the bastards halfway back.
Obama is now charging the other way again.
We are right near the climax of a century old struggle and right now we might lose.
I long thought that the movie which got the 60’s right was, please don’t laugh, Fritz the Cat. The youth of that time were accurately portrayed as self-indulgent, narcissistic, dishonest, shallow, self righteous and irresponsible. Right on, right on, right on.
You and I probably took Russian Intellectual History at the same time. As instructors I had Communist professors (in all but self-declaration) teach Lenin, Chernyshevsky, and the lesser lights. I studied Russian history and German history because I wished to know evil.*
Did I not fit in, now or later, as I pointed out then and point out now the similarities between socialism (National, International, Feminists, Environmentalist) and the mass-murdering EUropean governments, movements, and parties.
The American people thought they could have a little bit of feminism, a little bit of homosexuality, and a little bit of socialism and remain the free West. They cannot. Socialism and its fellow-travellers are a new morality and culture which will totally replace the West as thoroughly as the pagans fell to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
In the 1980s I once had a Green (who later subscribed to Social Justice) dream of the utopia that would arrive when Greens governed. I replied we know exactly what kind of government Greens would implement: in the 20th century various socialist regimes referred to some fraction of their populations as vermin. Greens refer to the human race as the AIDS or cancer of the planet. And they will treat us all as a the relatively few were treated then. Made me very unpopular.
Didn’t Bloom write of the sixties, “it was a little like knowing Hitler when he was young?” (I paraphrase, of course.)
* I had to find and to read We and The Master and Margarita on my own. Trotsky was part of the curriculum (they were broadminded).
I remember the 60s very well, although I supposed I was cushioned from the worst of it through the efforts of my parents and extended family – who were generally Eisenhower Republicans politically and fairly tolerant socially. I finished HS in 1972, college in 1976 – just before those educational institutions began to be destroyed by the rancid ideologies put forward by the 60s generation. I never saw pot being smoked until military tech school, knew only a handful of divorced families, never went to a rock concert or a protest, never even laid eyes on a for-real-hippy. Didn’t even hear much of the music, save the Beatles White Album, which my younger brother loved.
I sometimes have the feeling that I am going through life cleaning up the mess that the 60’s generation made, and dealing with the aftermath. Kind of like the guy with the muck-cart, sweeping up after the parade.
“never even laid eyes on a for-real-hippy”
Sgt. Mom, I think I remember that you are in the Austin-San Antonio area. If so, you must not have arrived in time to stroll down “the Drag” on the edge of the UT campus. You would have seen plenty of scroungy, zonked out hippies.
I too attended an SDS meeting while in college. It was in preparation for one of Nixon’s moves in Vietnam. Being young and naive, I assumed they were about ending the war. They made it very clear at the meeting that they were about “the revolution”, and the war was just a means to that end. They even told people how to lie to common citizens during the upcoming protest to hide their true intentions.
I never went back, but stayedon the left until out of school, and paying taxes. I assume all those SDS types are now either in academia, in the MSM, or in politics somewhere. They have never given up. I wish the right had their tenacity, though maybe it’s a sign of their insanity.
It was there I learned–without anyone ever telling me directly–that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form
DUH!
want to know how it turns out? 🙂
i bet you remember when personell departments became human resources (means of production?)
how about when history became “social studies”
sigh
I simply did not connect the radicals I saw at that meeting with most of the liberals in the Democratic Party.
the radicals were strangers the liberals around you were friends, and mostly duped too.
want to know how it turns out?
it always has the same ending
too bad people didnt learn more before now
Mysterious Missile Launch Seen From Space Station
http://news.discovery.com/space/mysterious-missile-launch-seen-from-space-station-131011.htm
The Topol missile is a new addition to Russia’s military, the first intercontinental ballistic missile to be developed after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Topol/SS-25 missile – 6,500 mi range / 99,400 lb / moves at 7 km/s
With 276 ICBMs of other types (including 126 UR-100Ns, 75 R-36 missiles and 75 Topol-M missiles), that gives Russia an ICBM arsenal of 465 missiles — larger than United States ICBM arsenal of 450 LGM-30 Minuteman missiles
Obama White House sacks two nuclear missile commanders
SHOCK CLAIM: CHASE Bank Limits Cash Withdrawals…
MYSTERY: Debt Went Unchanged for 150 Days at $16,699,396,000,000
The Obama administration is continuing to prohibit approximately 50 Catholic priests from saying Mass and administering other sacraments at U.S. military facilities around the world. At Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, the DOD went so far as to lock up the chapel and sequester the Holy Eucharist inside it.
[DOD Refuses to Say If It Would Stop Priest from Giving Last Rites to Dying]
Food stamps may shut down for 70 million…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-10-15/foodstamp-program-shutdown-imminent
Common Core Student Survey Wants Parents’ Political Affiliation (and more)
Students Sign Petition to Legalize 4th Trimester Abortion
and there is a lot more we dont pay attention to because that area is not approved thinking…
Late to the thread. I was there and do remember. Class of 69
From my perspective the 60’s began in 63 (Oswald) and ended in 73-74 (Nixon)…
I was 11 in 1969. The main things I remember about the 60s were the Gemini and Apollo spaceflights. I’m a little too young to remember the Mercury flights personally, but I read about them.
Good times. Exciting times. Historic times.
I even primarily remember Walter Cronkite for his space coverage, rather than his Tet defeatism.
“It was assumed that everyone was on the same page and no argument or reasoning was necessary.”
This is still the way it is today of course. The media jumps at every opportunity to accuse Republicans of infighting as if the whole party is about to implode, but isn’t that more of an indictment of themselves, that no one on their side is capable of independent thought, or dare not speak up if they do?
Democrats that speak up, tend to get purged. Juan Williams, although he was only a partial. Zell Miller of Georgia. The list goes on.
Ah..
given i grew up in a bad area of town, i remember the shooting gallery across the street where they would take out their kits and inject in their penis, ankle, etc.
i remember beautiful windows with stuff you could go walking and look at, at night, then the power went out, and i remember getting caught in the riot in my area. it started out quiet, then when it took too long for them to come up, they started flipping cars, setting fires. money was hard to come by, so a few of us hopped the fence, went through the trash of the catholic church, and recycled the votive candles to earn some money escorting people up to their apartments safely.
i remember the guy who owned the only house on the block that wasnt a 50 to 100 unit building, walking down the block to his house past us playing. someone slit his throat, and he made it to his garage staggering past us.
i remember the really cute cool sex freak drugged out hippy chicks on the other side of the building, and how i had to scrape and scrape and paint and paint to remove their work of art from the wall (we were superintendents). i also remember how they nearly killed me thinking they discovered a new way to throw out the garbage (5 story drop. stair case windows all the way down – EXCEPT the ground floor which was the exit to the basement i was walking out of).
i remember a lot…
I remember looking out the window of my third floor office in the old Insurance Exchange Building at the anti-war riot down the street in front of an Army recruiting station. It was 1966.
Nearly all our contemporary stem from 1968. That is the reason why Hillary Rodham Clinton must be defeated.
I was there, fully: a college freshman in 1966 who spent the following four or five years deeply involved with the “counterculture.” It was a conservative school in the deep South, but that seemed to make for an even crazier brand of hippie. I recognize your misgivings, Neo. I felt similar things but suppressed them. I won’t try here to explain it, or my current view of the whole crazy thing, but I’m writing a memoir. Here is a sample, a few vignettes from the time.
There was something very dark going on then, and it seemed to come to a head around 1969. I would say it was a spiritual phenomenon; others may call it merely pyschological. At any rate it happened at a level beyond (below?) politics. I don’t know of any better depiction of the atmosphere than the first essay in Joan Didion’s The White Album.
As a 1969 graduate getting a BS degree on College Hill in Providence RI I observed that the SDS flower power crowd were the most impressionable kids that lacked direction and understanding of the world around them. The proliferation of post beat/folk hippy culture started in our area in about ’66-’67 first at RISD. Rebellion against the establishment was fuelled by the attraction of the “summer of love”, and the craze dominated Brown by ’69. The super self-centered and whiny pseudo-intellectuals lapped up group think and assumed an attitude that they were “too cool for school”. Tune in, turn on, and drop out was the game for those that banded together to capitalize on their inablility to strive to join the mainstream. Then it went off the rails and many of the participants never recovered. Many stayed in academia and their children have grown up in an environment that was dominated by “counter-culture thought”. From Maine and Vermont to Humboldt County “where the ‘60s meet the sea” the ideology is predominant today.
In many ways the U.S. peaked in the Fifties.
Born in 1954, I was a little too young, a little too sheltered, a little too naive to recognize the hippies and pseudo-hippies among my friends’ older brothers and sisters as anything especially suspect. By the time my generation came of age, there weren’t any real hippies left anymore, anyway. We liked their style and tried to dress the way they had, only cleaner — but we laughed at their foolishness about real life and never thought there was anything more to them than style and silliness. Like everyone else I knew, I thought of myself as a liberal — as it was then understood — but rejected any clearcut Leftism appearing here and there around me as undemocratic, unrealistic and — I thought then — rightly destined to fail. I recognized the irony in the Beatles’ line, “Well you know, we all want to change the world” and knew that the “Revolution” the Leftists babbled about would not occur in the way that they imagined it. But I thought, in my own foolishness, that it would never occur at all. I believed, with that rising hopeful passionate conviction that only very young or very foolish people can feel, that all would be well because all should be well, that just because I thought the world should possibly be changed, it could and would be, and that of course, no harm would be done to anyone in the process.
I bought into far more of the received wisdom of the 60s than I should have, but I never believed in the silly dictum not to trust anyone over 30 and never lost faith in my parents or the country they passed on to me. I thought most people my age were like me. I didn’t come close to understanding what my parents’ generation had experienced in the Depression and World War II until I was approaching middle age myself. Even then and until very recently, I failed to understand the threat posed to fundamental things by what I thought was nothing more than my generation’s obsession with ephemeral, insubstantial details of fashion and style. None of this is an excuse. I wish I could go back to the girl I once was — a person who, I am fairly sure, would have been willing and able to listen to a trustworthy, sensible messenger — and warn her and others like her just what was at stake. If I could, would it have made any difference?
“People seemed silly, full of themselves and self-indulgent, histrionic, violent, and (this is rarely written about) misogynistic or even misanthropic as they mouthed platitudes about the rights of women and of mankind.”
What one remembers would depend on what and where one was during the 60’s. The student radicals and those in close proximity to them were a fairly small, elite and unrepresentative segment of America in the 1960’s.
In 1968, the “new left” types had not yet taken control of the Democratic Party. There were, still, insurgents. LBJ , Mayor Daley, John Connolly and even Humphrey had very little in common with the student radicals who reviled them and most of the Democratic party leadership at the time.
For all of the chatter about the “radicalism” or “liberalism” of the late 60’s, one fact is clear–It was a time of backlash in middle America–against student radicals, riots and angeneral sense that the country was coming apart.
One statistic tells the story. In the 1968 election, Nixon and Wallace, together, took 57% of the vote to Humphrey’s 43%. Had Wallace not been in the race, Nixon would have won the overwhelming majority of the Wallace vote by any measure. And, indeed, all of the southern states that went for Wallace in 1968 were carried, overwhelmingly, by Nixon in 1972.
At the time, many on the left misread the results of the election, which Wallace’s candidacy made close. Many chose to assume that Wallace took votes from Humphrey or too many liberals, upset about Vietnam, stayed home. They failed to see that they had lost what Nixon termed “the great silent majority.”
In 1967 I was recruiting Naval Aviators on the campuses of northern California, Nevada, and Utah. Talk about culture shock! My years in the Navy had been dedicated to containing Communism and did not prepare me for what I encountered – infiltration into academia by Communists.
That the phrases, “Better red than dead,” or “Communism is the wave of the future,” could be uttered by an American citizen, much less a callow youth, really got my attention. Where did they get this crap and did they really believe it?
The worst of them were pretty bad. They demonstrated against us; called us vile names; burned our literature; painted our vehicles; spat at us; and on one occasion, held us hostage in Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley. Interesting times. And we didn’t even get combat pay. 🙂
After all the turmoil and chaos of the 70s it appeared that things were turning around. Reagan was President and some conservatives were running for office. The truth was that the 60s radicals merely went underground. Now they’re coming out. They still won’t call themselves Communists, but they basically have the same goals as the Commies in China and the USSR had.
The fact that the USSR went through a similar period as the 60s before they went full tilt Communist is interesting. They (China and the USSR) eventually went bankrupt. Communism always fails because collectivism doesn’t work. They devolve into equality of misery for everyone except the elite. But everyone here knows that.
We seem headed for a similar fate – although the details are different. We may run out of other people’s money as they did, but before we get to full collectivism.
Unless…..they become too open and obvious. As the worst of the 60s radicals did. There is still a silent majority in this country. Most of them still get their news from the MSM. And that’s the problem.
Seems like we’re clustering around a certain age group here: vintage 1956, myself! Junior Hippy in style, graduated from HS in 1974. Went to college before it became a Leftist indoctrination camp.
Live large on other people’s money. And you deserve it, because, hey, they stole it from you in the first place. But we’ll take it back and set up utopia. Marx was both an economist and a sociologist in his time. He sucked as an economist. But as a sociologist, in social psychology particularly, it can’t be denied that he was very astute in understanding the basest of human desires, how to appeal to them, and how to pit groups and individuals against each other to supposedly achieve them.
That comment about the rarely written about misogyny brought that Stokely Carmichael quote to mind. When asked about what position women held in SNCC (Studen Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) he replied “Prone.”
I arrived on campus in 62. Played club lax, which did not put me in the varsity circles, since we ran our own show and raised our own funds. Still, it was different from the deliberately unphysical ideal of the hippy. I was greek. Did civil rights work. So I saw some of the varying cultures from the inside.
The counterculture included SDS radicals on one end and people who thought that MJ should be legal in the middle and those vaguely hoping for one improvement or another, on the other end. There was not an entire overlap with civil rights. But it was a pretty solid, say, three-fourths.
WRT misogyny, the Kids claimed that a woman who paid attention to her looks was unserious, frivolous, bourgeois, etc. So many of the CC women didn’t do much with their looks. I don’t have a problem with wearing a sweater and jeans to an eight o’clock class in Jan in Michigan. And I don’t have a problem with a particularly attractive woman trying to minimize the hassles she might get during the course of a day. Not my problem. But some of the women looked as if they’d tried to look grotesque. And many did seem to favor frumpy over average if they had a choice, standing in front of the closet in the morning.
Thing is, the counterculture guys lusted after the sorority girls–although sneering at them most contemptuously.
Practical joke, there.
One youtube, there are several vids of the old Brothers Four in concert at UCLA. The camera pans the audience. Looks as if they’re absolutely hypnotized by being inside away from the war, the riots, the absolute certainty of the uncertain. Make you cry, it does, for how things might have gone.
“I long thought that the movie which got the 60′s right was, please don’t laugh, Fritz the Cat. The youth of that time were accurately portrayed as self-indulgent, narcissistic, dishonest, shallow, self righteous and irresponsible.”
Jvermeer makes a good point. Some of that played out in 1968 in the difference between the Kennedy and McCarthy folks. A lot of Kennedy’s people looked at the McCarthy supporters and the new left types as elitists and spoiled revolutionaries on daddy’s credit card. Even McCarthy used to boast that the “smartest” students were with him.
When students and youths allow the system/authority to change them, they lose the ability to change themselves for the better.
It doesn’t particularly matter if the authority is communism or the status quo powers.
If people wanted to generate their own identity, so that they could distinguish themselves from their parents and their elders in the US mainstream, then they should have obtained unique knowledge and skills to benefit themselves and later their community. The old tribal cultures always had a tradition for people that refused to fit in. They sent them out in the wilderness to die or figure themselves out and achieve enlightenment. They would later come back, if they survived, with the skills and knowledge to lead the tribe to greater prosperity.
But when youths allowed the Left to change them, they became mere tools, and their identity was crushed into a mere cog.
I’m a few generations out of step of the average here. So it is interesting to hear what people experienced back in the day. Though similar experiences were written by Bella Dodd in the 1930s, concerning communist infiltration of liberty.
One of the things that surprised me as I sought out my own identity and purpose, is Japan’s educational system. Some of it is modeled on British private boarding schools, but what I found of particular note was how the Student Council conducted student lead business and how they interacted with the teachers and President of the school.
It was completely alien from American accounts past the 1950s, which is probably why even now it is so different I had to notice it.
Often times the Student Council is elected by the students and delegated many duties and powers by the adults. True mostly in high school, the last 3 years of mandatory education. The power to choose which clubs get funding, how much of it, the power to discipline students of the school that disobey school rules, is inherent in the Student Council institution. Each class has a more or less static membership that doesn’t move around, so each class is monitored by a class representative, who reports directly to the Student Council and is the delegate whenever some new policy needs to be passed out to the student members.
Thus the Student Council is its own miniature society, which generates laws and rules for itself, by itself, and when violations occur, it enforces its own rules on its own members. The teachers advise and guide, but do not often over rule decisions, since the school is originally designed to grow adults, not slaves.
I found it curious how such a monolithic society as Japan, with its focus on top down hierarchies, could ever have produced such an extraordinarily distributed system of education. It doesn’t seem possible. There is still talk of overthrowing the system, but much of that is funneled towards the Student Council President and their appointed staffs. Instead of trying to rebel against society, coordinated by an outside force, it is the internal disharmony and disagreement of the student body that can call for change, elect someone new, and thus change the system itself.
It has been noted that video violence in the media is much greater in Japan than in the US, but violence is kept down by distributed systems like police boxes every few city blocks, a very strong moral system enforced from age 15 to death by everyone around them, and Japan’s consistent monolithic nationalism and identity. Some people note the centralized planning of Japan or Singapore and think we should Obey Socialism as a result. But the thing, socialism doesn’t have half the distributed systems those nations have to get their centralized planning to work.
The fact that I suspect much of Japan’s education system is privately funded, thus the government can’t tell them who to hire or fire, probably helps. People choose high schools based upon how close they are, the benefits, the costs, and how cute the uniforms are.
“It was there I learned–without anyone ever telling me directly–that in the 60s we were reliving those long-past Russian years in a somewhat altered, Americanized form.”
Neo. I’ve seen you remark on this a couple of times now and it is interesting to me. But I don’t see any explanation or summary of what it was specifically in Russian history that we are re-living. Could you summarize or provide a link that might do so? Thanks.
I’m a May 1944 kid, so, yep, I was right there for the 60s. College and grad school in history. “Dodged” the draft that dogged me for years and got out on a ‘medical’ literally in the day of induction in Jan.’70, a few months before the ‘cut off’ age of 26. Called myself a ‘non-ideological radical’. Really just an anti-Vietnam Liberal….Fell, quite by strange alignment of the planets into film just before heading to Germany for the start of my PhD Nazi Studies at The Institute for Contemporary History in Munich… The road less seen was to be axis changing, work & career wise…. Ahhhhhhhhhh…. Like David Mamet, I carry some earned shame in my belly for the draft avoidance.
Scott,
” But I don’t see any explanation or summary of what it was specifically in Russian history that we are re-living.”
I took some Russian Lit classes in college, and I was shocked reading some of the literature that portrayed the 1860s. It was similar to our 1960s here, but to a different degree.
It was a time of changing of the guard – the old style man was an aristocrat, but a new man was appearing on the scene. This man was much more authentic and was the harbinger of social change. Old mores and values were tossed out the window and more up to date values were espoused. It was a time of liberation and throwing off the shackles of the old society. No more mindless conformity.
Made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. It was sooo similar to the 60s – at least the popular portrayal of it. I was in school in the mid 80s and wasn’t fooled at all by the “peace and love” portrayal of the earlier decades.
It’s almost frightening to see how vastly different Russia became over the course of the last 150 years, with several big changes.
Perhaps Neo is thinking of a different time period – there were certainly several instances of hope and change in Russia’s history. Perhaps Art will be along with some events and books about the 1860’s since my memory fails me.
Answer to Texexec – I live in San Antonio now, courtesy of the Air Force dropping me off there when the twenty-year ride was over. I grew up in a very remote part of suburban Los Angeles. There WAS supposed to be a hippy commune way up in Big Tujunga Canyon, but I never laid eyes on them.
For those of us like Beverly, who can from a grade school perspective recall both “the era” and to some lesser extent the preceding time, the unanswered question is how did that older generation of kids “transform” so radically?
It’s always mystified me how a generation of super-conformists, and I recall the seeming pre ’68 conformity of the older kids and young adults to some extent, apparently flipped in no time at all.
Maybe the transition from being a Greek wannabe who will undergo any hazing in order to belong, and just had to have the right loafers or wingtips, to being an economic collectivist, is not so great a transformation after all.
Maybe that is what they were, in principle, all of the time; a species of self-seeking social conformist.
But then, how could all that pathetic emotionalism so emblematic of the late 60’s have been so effectively suppressed in persons probably biologically prone to it, prior to that?
Maybe they were “oppressed” after all.
I started college in 1960 majoring in engineering at NM A&M, later NMSU. I went to school with a lot of cowboys and indians but no hippies that I can recall. Engineering majors weren’t into the hippy drug culture and we didn’t have time to be campus revolutionaries. I worked my way thru school and graduated in 1966 and joined the Navy. Navy OCS was at Newport, RI and there were lots of hippies there. I was also stationed in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor and lastly in 1969, beautiful Naval Station Brooklyn. I was NY for Woodstock. Evidently with engineering school and the Navy taking up all my time in the 1960s, I missed all the fun and only got to see it on TV. What I particularly remember were the antiwar protests. The protestors were so righteous and outraged by the war. However when the draft ended so did the antiwar protests. Suddenly nobody cared about the war. They weren’t really antiwar, they were terrified of the draft.
The communists in charge of the antiwar protests saw no particular reason to fund more of them once they had gotten US troops out of Vietnam. By that time, they needed to defund the South Vietnamese defense more.
All the antiwar protestors were mobilized and ordered to harass returning veterans by then as well. So they were busy with that.
I remember the 60s. I was 19 during the “summer of love”. The only thing I found positive beyond the music, were there concepts of small is beautiful (keep it local) and nubile young women ‘liberated’ by the pill. Looking back I realize this was a tradegy. Then, in 1969 I meet the love of my life and everything was nailed down to feet firmly on the ground. We are still standing. She is still my beautiful bride.
The ’60s are still occurring. They run our institutions and are essentially turning this society upside down. They used pretty effective techniques – drugs, ubiquitous sex, great music, and brainwashing.
The greatest generation begat the worst generation.