Your mind was formed in the 1950's, during which period the US had a semblance of rational order, process, and secure family life. You were 18 in 1960. You already had finished High School at a time when that was still a real citizen's education. You wore clean, pressed clothes to school, leather shoes. You had a haircut.
Hippies were not yet invented, it was the beatnik era. Beatniks liked jazz, poetry, and were generally literate. And although they had enough drug problems to satisfy anyone, drugs had not yet become ordinary. In 1960, people were taking LSD, but they were more than likely graduate students, and it was legal. Marijuana was NOT everywhere.
What came later in the 1960's and 70's would naturally be, if not repellant, at least be considered strange or unwholesome, to someone who was a mature 18-year old in 1960. Someone who was 12 or 14 in 1960 grew up in the chaos and might be inclined to accept it as normal. They are the children of the 60's. An normal, educated 18 or 20-year old in 1960 was not a child, but already a man or a woman, or very close to it.
You’re exactly right. The 50’s 16 to 20 year olds were raised to respect people and to have a work ethic. Drug use was not considered cool. Many high schoolers had some kind of job even if only in the summers.
Even though it was peacetime, people had to consider the military because there was still a draft. Drug use and the anti-establishment thing really took off in the sixties. I got married and started a family and cussed every time I’d see a college campus demonstration or more often a riot on TV.
There were good things too but these anti everything crowd nuts got the spotlight.
I was born in 1940 and grew up in a stable, traditional family. My politics were Republican, staunchly supportive of Nixon and anti Kennedy.
My activities in the late 50's and early 60's were strongly based on moral and humanitarian principles. I marched with the Freedom Riders at the local Greyhound bus station in SE Ky and was threatened with lynching by an Appalachian with a shotgun. I was a founder of the SDS at Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Drugs, sex and rock and roll played no part in any of this.
By the mid 60's it had all changed. Boston in the mid 60's was awash in antiwar sentiment stirred up by Marxists. The SDS had been engulfed by communists.
I was in Seminary at Tufts and immune to the draft but soaked my draft card in blood as an act of moral defiance. Later interviewed by the FBI in the Dean's office, I stood my ground and was, no doubt, dismissed as naive and idealistic. I was, by then, vigorously anticommunist.
By the late 60's in Boston drugs, sex and rock and roll were all that was left of a once powerful movement. It required another 15 yrs to get past the demise and get grounded in evangelical Christianity and Reagan politics.
I’ve done my best to destroy all the pictures of me in those damn silly clothes.
Sounds logical, but is not true. I'm in that group and it was not viewed as normal - not even close. There was a huge gap between normal and what very quickly evolved.
Where "might be inclined to accept it as normal" really applies is to the people who attended schools and colleges where they were taught, and continue to be taught, by the draft-dodgers and other lefties of the 1960's. Teachers and professors who had grown up during WWII and before were generally pro-American.