When we were in high school my best friend and I were obsessed with the 1960s. We listened to the Woodstock album and loved the movie Hair. Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, we worshipped.
We loved old footage of Berkeley protests (oh hi Mario Savio 😍). We obsessed over the SDS. We watched the documentary Hearts and Minds, shaking with outrage in 1990s California at the slaughter of Vietnamese children and US soldier kids and the moral foulness of the old men who sent them there. Bob Dylan on loop. Other anthems of the era imbued with the great historic heft of the moment: “Some folks were born, raised to wear the flag, oh the red white and blue!”
There are a few reasons for our interest in the time of young people of yore. 1990s youth culture sucked. “Countdown to Britney Spears’ 18th birthday” and Blink-182 were not great vehicles for youthful passion. My god, boys had frosted tips, of course we crushed on the rebels in Easy Rider instead.
As boomers aged into prominence, culturally and politically, as well as late middle age, there was mass idealization of the culture of their youth. I find it remarkable that the trope of “1950s suburban life” now reads as short-hand horror movie material.
Meanwhile, the intense backlash to the changes of the 60s and 70s have fueled our most disgusting right-wing politics and culture wars since that time. This “non-gift” keeps on giving. This is the world we live in.
A lot of the legacies of “The 1960s” (events that mostly occurred in the 1970s) are more fraught and complex than could be appreciated by bored ‘90s California teens yearning for historical drama in Bill Clinton’s placid era. (lol allow me to share: when speaking with my grandparents who underwent the horrors of Soviet Communism, I’d go, ‘It’s boring now!” They were like “Girl. NO. Be grateful about how ‘bored’ you are by peace.”)
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