Re: Re: the 60's

[Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>]

On 7/22/64 11:59 AM, richard sales wrote:
> Well... the hippies also used hard core civil disobedience to express 
> our anger!  It was a thrilling time.
> The free love and drugs was just a bonus for some of us.  For some it 
> was the core of the experience.  They're the ones who went on to Wall 
> Street and commerce. Truth is, they missed the most glorious boat of 
> the time.
LOL,  There is a common joke that goes,  "If you remember the 60's, then 
you weren't there."
Sadly,  sometimes I think that if you weren't there you just don't get it.

It's like Dickens said,  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of 
times".

American children were probably the most dysfunctional in our National 
history.  Many (and NOT the majority)
were angry but they also wanted to buy out of the materialistic culture 
that had emerged from all the wealth
and conformity that characterized our culture at the end of World War 2.

I always think it is dangerous to put too much emphasis on a time in 
one's life when one is first learning about the world and trying to come 
to terms with it's inequities (and it's delights) but there was some kind
of magic in that time, at least for me.

The one thing that I do miss about it was the ,  of course, 
intrinsically naive, notion that we could
somehow change the world........we could eschew the dominant 
paradigm..........we could make a culture
that was less racist, less sexist, less ageist, less sizeist, etc., etc.

there was a feeling, artistically, that anything was possible and that, 
I believe is what led to the explosion
in creativity in music and fashion (as tacky as tie dye shirts are to me 
personally.....lol).

that part of it was wonderful where I lived (and at my tender age (I was 
14 in '67 but had a sister 4 years older
who was taking me to concerts and parties and be-ins all the time----she 
took my brother and I to
the Monterey Pop Festival and to the Filmore Auditorium on my 16th 
birthday and turned me on, bless her heart)

Youth seem far more cynical these days (and I teach them a lot so I have 
some experience saying this).
I suppose we can't blame them after they had to watch George Bush stay 
in office for eight years and all it represents, psychically and 
politically.

I always wish I could give them a little tiny bit of that naive idealism 
we had at that time........
.....that sense that anything is possible.

It was a good think even though some of my memory about that time is dim 
(lol).

rick walker