And yeah, baby boomers with their sophomoric ideas were coming of age... but the vast majority of the country in ‘72 was still ‘trustworthy and trusted’ - not like today.
In 1964 the biggest high school problem was ‘spitballs’... Do you know what it is today? That tells the story.
Which is funny when you think about it, since many in the country were openly tolerating much more corrupt government on the local and state level. The reason people yawned for Clinton was fatigue, by the time he took office there’d been a bunch of presidential scandals (Watergate really opened a can of worms on that front) a bunch of congressional hearings and it had all really amounted to nothing. The era of presidential scandals had turned into the press crying wolf, still is that way 20 years later.
The vast majority of the country was just like they are now. Actually much worse, there were a lot more neighborhoods that were “off limits” to people of the “wrong” color.
If you think spitballs were the biggest problem in high school in 1964 you are quite simply lying to yourself. Heck they had a broadway about youth gangs stabbing each other in 1961, people knew high school wasn’t the land of milk and honey.