[Fiji Hill]

Some of these reminiscences sound rather curious for someone born around 1963.

• Most black voters were Republicans. Most blacks were Democrats since long before the author was born. The Republicans got only 13 percent of the vote during the Nixon landslide in 1972, and it was even smaller in 1968 and 1976. Where the writer was living, where the black vote was so much at odds with the national trend?

• The greatest movie ever made was The Great Escape. The Great Escape was in the theaters in 1963. Could he be referring to a televised version or a re-release?

• Video games were things you played at arcades, unless you were lucky enough to get an Atari Pong console for Christmas. Atari Pong went on the market for consumers in 1975, so the time period to which the author alludes must be the latter half of the decade.

• Our heroes were people like George Washington, Neil Armstrong, Mother Teresa, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, General George S. Patton and Albert Einstein. Mother Theresa? I don't recall her name being a household word until the late 1970's, when she won a Nobel Prize.

• Abortion wasn't a privacy issue, it was a moral issue, and people who committed abortions weren't "pro-choice", they were baby killers. "Abortion rights" became a big issue in the late '60's, the "Equal Rights Amendment" sailed through Congress and seemed on the way to being passed in 1972, and Roe versus Wade was handed down in early 1973. By the time the author came of age, much of the nation's liberal elite was "pro-choice."

  The author must have lived in a rural area, far from a major media market, and with a predominately Republican electorate.

[DARCPRYNCE]

People often confuse the fact that while blacks voted overwhelmingly for certain Democrat presidential candidates as far back as FDR, most still self-identified as Republicans and voted for GOP candidates in lesser races more often than not until the mid to late ‘60s. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was the beginning of an irreversible trend to Democrat from Republican of blacks generally, primarily because the GOP presidential candidate of that year, Barry Goldwater, had voted against the legislation while LBJ had signed it into law.

The statement that the greatest movie ever made was The Great Escape is merely an opinion, yet it is one held by a lot of American males who grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

If the author was born in 1963, he would still have been a kid in 1975 when Atari Pong came out.

Mother Teresa’s name was well known to people all over the world before she won the Nobel.

While abortion may have been a growing political concern in the ‘60s, and while the Supreme Court did indeed decide the Roe Vs. Wade case in favor of abortion rights advocates in 1973, those facts do not suggest that the majority of people in the U.S. were “pro-choice” during that era. They were not.