I was a little busy for a few years in that time frame.
People were tougher, believed in God, and understood that socialists were enemies of the American way of life.
When you are in a drug induced haze, your worries are nil.
I have some vivid memories of 69, it was my first tour in Vietnam. Had water and some C-Rations. Took showers in the rain. Nice to get the clothes off that were stiff with dried sweat and mud. I heard through the grapevine that they had a good time going on at Woodstock. My former girlfriend went to it. I talked to her after my first tour and she said it was miserable there. You can imagine what I told her. Twenty-seven days later I was back in the high humidity.
Good article. Among many reasons, there was no 24 hour TV and social media news void that required constant feeding to spread constant fear.
“That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”
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Um, today the medical professionals (with lifelong political ties) are issuing edicts to hunker down through the spring and summer for possibly a year or longer. Where is the rational thought intelligence in that?
I don’t remember the media whipping up hysterical panic. I also don’t remember the dems attempting to politicize it either. At that time the media and the dems were run by men, not hysterical and feminized men and hysterical women.
They had to deal with a pandemic and the brown acid.
Wow, Woodstock Nation is getting up there, and so are the non hippie 17yos of the summer of ‘69. :^). Me, I turned 8 the month of Woodstock and only remember the moon landing and day camp in Delaware and vacationing at the DE beaches.
People expected, as we do now, that for the most part, we will get through the “pandemic” whether governments do or not not close most businesses down. So what’s the difference? The difference you can compare, between 1969 and now, is what was then and what will be the state of our economy, the economy that living depends on, after we get through this, and to what extent will our so called solutions have contributed to that economy.
bump for later
Didn’t have hysterical media on the internet.
Mainly because 1) we still had steely spines from WW II, 2) the nation hadn’t turned into a bunch of limp-wristed panty-waist snowflakes, 3) we didn’t have the press yammering about it non-stop 24x7, 4) Trump wasn’t running for re-election in an environment of no-holds-barred politics, and 5) the Internet hadn’t been invented.
Food ran out the first day. Roads were impassable, full of abandoned cars because there was nowhere to park them. The only way in or out was walking. The bands arrived by helicopter if at all. If you bought a ticket, you wasted your money, since the hippies tore down the fences and waltzed in for free. No toilet, no showers, no shelter. Anarchy (and mud) ruled.
To me, the whole show boiled down to a brief ten-second clip of one moment - two high school girls, obviously high as a kite, naked and giggling as they ate Spaghettio's straight from the can with their fingers (The canned food was donated by neighbors who shared with the starving idiots). I'm sure those kids' parents were proud of them.
I was in my last year of college and I do not remember any thing about the Hong Kong Flu. And, yes, I was mostly sober that year too.
I was in college when the Hong Kong flu hit here. I remember going to Student Health and being put on an IV drip to re-hydrate. Approximately 100,000 people died in the U.S. from the HK flu, when the total population was only about 200,000,000. I don’t remember any lock downs.
Rules for Radicals hadn’t been published yet.
That’s easy. Late 60’s music was much better!