Reply #4: Lived through it; most of my teenage years....Amazing time, but both good and bad [View All]

Stunning amount of great music. So many great groups and artists at the very peak of their creativity... Exhilarating level of REAL hope and REAL change in the air,not coming from any politicians ( though there were some who WERE with us)but bubbling up from the younger generation with a feeling of solidarity and discovery of a radically new and at least hopefully improved way to view and interpret virtually everything. But with that exhilaration came a crushing devastation from all the violent deaths of the leaders that could have effected so much permanent change for the better ( I am thinking , more than any others, of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.). I still, as I approach my 59th birthday , viscerally feel the despair and bewilderment at the seething hatred directed at those of us who , despite all our youthful folly and naivete, gently and with love in our hearts, tried to show America that there was a better way than war, racism,greed, materialism, environmental degradation etc. Did many of us end up selling out; going over to the dark ( repub) side? Absolutely, but from nothing more than my own experience and my own eyes and ears, the percentage of those that did that is as overinflated as a Fox news teabag crowd estimate. So in some ways, it's not romanticized at all; it was a special time, but it was also a time of an absolutely devastating disillusionment or at least a backdrop to it. I hope some others here who are more eloquent than I( and that sets the bar pretty low) will weigh in on this too. But just speaking for my 60's teenage self, as well as looking back, it WAS a remarkable time.