If the increasingly brittle idea of “the ’60s” has any meaning aside from common nostalgia, it describes the transformation of a type of cultural fandom into a type of social and political identity. The Beatles managed to remain at the center of this phenomenon – if not ahead of it – as long as they […]
Baby Boomers Quotes
While history has never been fair and often stacks the deck against youth, the younger generation has at least always been secure in the knowledge that their parents would eventually die off and leave them alone to get on with their lives. But in an age where average lifespans are likely to creep up to […]
Those of us who grew up in the Sixties feel we shared a unique experience. From the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, to the Civil Rights movements in the south, to the Vietnam War and the Counterculture, and everywhere in between, the Sixties represent a significant time period in our country’s history.
College is always a time of change, I guess, the last major convulsion of childhood, but I doubt there were ever changes of such magnitude as those faced by the students who came to their campuses in the late sixties. Most of us don’t say much about those years now, not because we don’t remember […]
Being born in the middle of the 20th century, Boomer’s education and outlook have been strongly influenced by the towering presence of two revolutionary figures : Freud and Einstein. Despite many Boomers not having formally studied or even been aware of the work of either of these men, the Freudian and Einsteinian views of the […]
What I believed in the Sixties: Everything. You name it and I believed it. I believed love was all you need. I believed you should be here now. I believed drugs could make everyone a better person. I believed I could hitchhike to California with thirty-five cents and people would be glad to feed me. […]
Everything went. And when it went it didn’t go well. The wild, prophetic voices of the sixties can still be heard muttering in doorways and begging with paper cups. And the nonconformists long ago exhausted the supply of stuff with which not to conform. They’ve been reduced to wearing tongue studs.
The sixties was a decade without quality control.
We changed the world. Life has never been the same since that “youthquake” of forty years ago. Think of all the things we wouldn’t have if not for the uninhibited freedom and creativity of the 1960s: Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, Narcotics Anonymous, twentyfour-hour help lines, Cher, the Volkswagen New Beetle, comedians who […]
As a generation, perhaps we weren’t the “greatest,” but we certainly were the greatest surprise, when we returned from college drenched in patchouli oil, spouting Karl Marx, and wearing clown pants and braids in our beards. Members of the Greatest Generation pride themselves on all the tribulations they survived, but many of them never got […]
