I remember a sixties where moms and dads were shocked and angered that everything they were trying to teach and hand down to their children was roundly and sneeringly rejected as being the BS of “the Establishment”. Families were being torn apart. There was NO “peace and love”. It was a violent decade in every respect. I hated the sixties.
I resent being identified as a “Baby Boomer” because although I was born within that demographic’s range (’46-’64), I and my friends were all much younger than the people we’d see in the newspapers, magazines and TV carrying on, tripping out on LSD in the nude, “riding rainbows”, smoking dope, shooting heroin, protesting the war, burning buildings, flags and bras, coming home from Vietnam in flag-draped coffins (and to shouts of “Babykiller”), Molotov cocktail-throwing yippies...all-around self-centered assh*les, if you ask me...
I was only 10, going on 11 when the Beatles broke up. Jimi, Janis and Jim, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Ira Einhorn, (none of whom BTW, were baby boomers themselves)...I never knew anyone who went to Vietnam until I was almost 20 years old and we did not live sheltered or cloistered lives.
Then by the mid-’70’s many of them decided that in order to beat the system or Establishment, they had to join it but as it turned out, they love money and power as much as their predecessors did and became unabashed Young Upward Professionals or “yuppies” who found Disco, cocaine Valium, Quaaludes, booze and wreckless unprotected kinky and depraved sex to be the next big things as they continued to “evolve”.
I’ll admit that some of my peers adopted that mantra for themselves and became money-hungy, power-grabbing cokeheads who’d pay big bucks to leave their kids in daycare centers while they, as dual-income parents and unmarrieds, made their ways to the “big time”...and then they’d get divorced or become otherwise estranged from their families.
God, I’m so damned glad I didn’t follow them...But I am glad to still have the music to listen to after all of these years.
I’m so glad. I’m so glad. I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad...