I was born in '48, so I was 20 in '68 and not really a child ... almost 3 yrs (early out) of Army and sex, drugs, rock n' roll with mini (or less) skirts attacking my senses.
There was a serious barrage of anti-Americanism going on and it was easy for a curious and quasi-educated mind to think, "Yeah ... that sounds about right."
Travel was free, interesting and the nation opened up to anyone who wanted to hitch .. (twice from Boston to the west coast in two years)
Work was everywhere so money was no problem and the whole idea of being phoney or 'plastic' was anathema. A great sense of wanting to be honest and sincere was everywhere.
I don't think I would have had a better education than my real-life experiences from '65 to around the late '70's.
We are always looking through a glass darkly from our present position and only later can we parse the rights and wrongs of who and what we are or did.
Street people smell(ed), not 'hippies' ... we were waaayyy too into ourselves to be dirty.
We talked ... a lot .... to more people about more things face to face in a month than most people do today on the keyboard in a year today. Our minds were flooded by choice with everything imaginable and there was a reality of power, realizing most 'straights' had no clue.
I was not an actor on the stage ... I was the choreographer, and really enjoyed flitting from society to society with others that had no fear and bothered to know and care.
Sex was a tool, drugs were a tool and freedom too was a tool to acquire knowledge of real, live people and what they thought and did.
Nothing is forever and in the end .. it's all rather entropic, isn't it?
So now I'm pushin' sixty and I look back at my youth with envy and nostalgia, realizing I had been part of an amazing generation ...
and I'm thankful.
Hell, I've been laid off 4 times as old hippies cut defense budgets. I may be laid off again when Elaine Tauscher and the other old hippies on the House Armed Services Comittee cut my program.
For me at 39, the boomers just look to me like a bunch of dopes who traded their American Birthright for a handful of magic mushrooms.
Knarf-I feel ya,boy!
Would that we would have a Summer of Love in 2007! A summer where people would love and serve OTHERS, not themselves.