The 60's are very important because that's when I was born

Seriously-the 80's were plenty important for me. I was a lab tech when AIDS began, and saw big changes in my work in a hospital in the Northeast and obviously throughout the whole world. Reagan helped me solidify my thinking that some people who try to come across as genial next door-types could actually be hiding a monster inside. And seeing "Memory of the Camps"-what they found when they liberated the concentration camps-I still have the occasional nightmare.

I also think there was plenty good 80's music, no matter what some people think!

We love listening to it, and a lot of it is somewhere deep in my childhood subconscious. I've been listening to ABBA's Super Trouper all week (I know, more 70s, but technically 1980!)

I just can't with this 60's stuff. 9/11 was an incredibly formative event for Millennials. I was college age when it happened. It led to two pointless and expensive wars, a cracking in the Western alliance, and the gross expansion of the surveillance state. I was still in my 20s when the banking industry took a shit in 2008 and screwed everyone. But you will almost never hear a Millennial referencing it nonstop. We don't see a car accident and declare, "Oh my god, it's 9/11 all over again!" We tend to just take things as they come along. No one even remembers Occupy Wall Street was a thing that happened (which I think these current protests look far more like).

So the fixation on the 60s is just so interesting. Did history stop there? Has it all been stagnation since? Why this obsession and refusal to move forward?

I have a running working theory about consumer culture and nostalgia for sale where it has just been perpetuated all this time as a cash strategy. But it's just a theory.

doesn't help their music!

Probably not songs you'd expect from a band in a rock club, but lots of 80s music.
Of course, we started in '87, so the songs were still fairly new then.
We agree on the music scene.

Don't mind us old folks.

This boomer is a firm believer in the school of hard knocks.

is that it was a time of true political upheaval where long term notions of what form the US might assume were taking shape. No dream was too crazy (maybe that's bad). The right wing and monied interests were spooked. Like now, the right wing became adept at using the media - such that it was to (1) point to the supposed excesses of the "left" to produce a strong reactionary movement and (2) inculcate cynicism in the youth vote - i.e., "...they're all the establishment!" And we got Nixon. IMO, people were just as dumb then - but the would be self apppointed experts didn't have the platforms like social media available to them to amplify the crazy. But sure, point taken. The 60's weren't that great - but the decade was an inflection point - and we threw out the baby with the bathwater.

A lot of important events occurred then, and I don't think those events should be diminished in their importance.

But, you know, a lot has happened since. We don't have to reach all the way back to the 60s every time anything happens. The last twenty years has had plenty going on, and it's more salient to the contemporary issues at hand.

It was the first realignment after FDR and the New Deal because the 1950s was just Eisenhower Republicans tinkering with the New Deal, and the Koren War was fought with WWII type military. The 1960s was a cultural revolution with music, student unrest, the Vietnam War and napalm and Agent Orange (not Trump), the first walk of big money politics into Nixon's campaigns with Rebozo and Hughes, and the JFK assassination and the moon voyages to sell it all to the public. The 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s do not compare in the breadth of social and political upheaval compared to the 1960s. So the decade is mentioned for a reason. It was the root of what we face now.

why yes they did AOR gave way to MOR and the Stones put it best



Thank God for the 80's, rock took off again

I really don't remember it that way.
It's like to be a good Democrat, you must love protesting and protesters.
To be a good Democrat you must love pot and LSD.
First of all, I'm not crazy about protesting.
Me and marijuana just don't get along. Ditto with LSD.

When I saw footage of Woodstock, the Sunday as it was winding down: "Rolling around in the mud is not my idea of fun. What's with those people". Seriously, all the freak'n mud.

It's much better to remember actually working for change. (I was too young for that in the 60s) And I didn't work for change until I was in my 40s

You Must Be a Centrist If ... sort of thing.

the Wall Street cokeheads of the 80's. "Greed is good", unrestrained conspicuous consumption, Reagan Democrats, and all that.

If history indeed repeats itself, or even if it rhymes, I am scared shitless of what is to become of today's Columbia airheads.

The 2015/16 populist revolution that became trendy was '60s (the words establishment, elites, status quo and others as insults revived). The revolution was supposed to happen when The People rallied and protested.

But '60s roots weren't emphasized, the whole thing was supposed to be new and exciting because of the myth that Democrats became just like Republicans (neoliberals) 30 or 40 years ago so things like economic equality and universal healthcare HAD to be new ideas that Democrats rejected as radical. The Utopian Savior has arrived.

And it wasn't good to look too closely into the actual '60s because of the Myth of Economic Anxiety, that white Democrats abandoned the party in the '60s because of economic anxiety (Democratic elites ignoring the working class), but good-paying union jobs were still plentiful, economic inequality at its lowest, and corporations and wealthy still taxed when they shifted to the Republicans. Wasn't until after 1972 that manufacturing jobs began disappearing, economy changing to service industry, union membership decreasing and identity as working class faded. Clearly not economic anxiety causing the shift, just like Trump voters.

Kennedy also staged a coup and had the president of South Vietnam assassinated on Nov 2, 1963.

No one knows what would have happened had Kennedy not have been assassinated. I think JFK was more in touch with things than LBJ, but the North Vietnamese were emboldened after Diem was assassinated.

New age, hippy stuff, but it felt hypocritical.

One of the biggest things that I think happened in my life was the fall of Iran. It was weird, because I didn't pay any attention to it until the hostages were taken. I was friends with someone from Tehran from 1979-80. We never talked about the hostages etc. We talked about dating, guys, clothes, shopping, guys, dating. It's so strange that something so cataclysmic was happening in her life, but she didn't mention it. I just brushed much of it off as typical ME violence. We are still paying the price for the fall of Iran. It really is a huge tragedy. She can never go back. Iranian exiles can never return. We also have a lifelong enemy with Iran.

The Iranian revolution was supposed to bring a liberal Democratic government to Iran. However, the Ayatollah sensed weakness and infighting among the liberals. He played a divide and conquer with them. It boiled to a head at a women's march. But by then, he already had his ducks in a row. He hijacked the revolution before anyone could notice.