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For my part, I think the culture has descended dramatically in my lifetime (born 1960)

I was born in '62, and I don't remember a completely clean pop culture. I was 8 in 1970, when I started to become aware of the world beyond my town, and a lot of what I saw in pop culture was strange and scary. I remember the "ink blot" rock groups, constant news reports about hippies, riots and LSD, graphic images of the wounded in Vietnam, etc. On the plus side, there was the excitement about the moon landing, and heartwarming TV shows like "The Andy Griffith Show" and harmless pablum like "The Brady Bunch."

To my mind, the big cultural shift happened from 1967-73. It was the era of Acid Rock, "drug rock" (Pink Floyd) and the birth of Heavy Metal (Black Sabbath/Led Zeppelin). It was the drug age (LSD, mushrooms, heroin), and the era of free love. Psychology took the place of religion, to a significant degree. It was the era of "demonstrations" against all institutions. And Vietnam was a hopeless quagmire.

Looking back is sad. I remember the "old school" people and institutions fading away, but I don't remember the same institutions in their glory.

For some reason, those years, 1967-1973, are sadder to me than the current state of our culture, which seems to be in free fall.

Man, I’m right there with you. I remember black and white tv shows and loved them. I remember Petticoat Junction and really liking the red head, along with the train. I used to like watching the news and remember thinking what I was seeing on the news wasn’t matching up with what I was reading in my history books.

I had the advantage of growing up in a very small rural town so we were insulated against a lot of the change but it did eventually get to us. Sad to say.

I remember talking with my dad and telling him he grew up in the greatest time in American history.

We have really gone downhill.

To my mind, the big cultural shift happened from 1967-73.

Uhuh, and today the progressivist (Communist) hippy Grateful Dead rejectards are "changing the system from the inside":

Dn't need n Weatherman t see which way the'wind
blws.

"Behind the Violence, Says Jane Alpert, Was Sex"

--November 09, 1981--
"The leaders of the Weather Underground, she believes, followed a similar pattern of constantly shifting sexual alliances..."
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080637,00.html
"He [Bill Ayers] also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried to 'smash monogamy.' The Weathermen were 'an army of lovers,' he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend."
Source: New York Times, September 11, 2001: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
"...the Weathermen, when not engaged in group sex, committed such revolutionary acts as parading with a Viet Cong flag through a local park on Independence Day and spray-painting the walls of a high school with the slogans, "Off the Pigs," "Viet Cong Will Win," and "F#$k U.S. Imperialism."..."
Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era

"What happens next bears watching closely, as does the response of the president, ex-Speaker Pelosi, and others on the left. Encouraged by leftists in the Democratic Party and funded by left-leaning nonprofit organizations and celebrity contributors, Occupy Wall Street may in time morph into something resembling the radical factions of the late 1960s and 1970s."
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/predicting_the_weatherman.html

The Osawatomie Coincidence
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2818309/posts