It has been written so many times over the years that the 1960’s were a much more simple time. I beg to differ. Consider the History changing events than occurred.
The assassinations of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King certainly are at the top of the list. The Vietnam War began in 1964 and lasted into the next decade. The Beatles as a group, began and ended during the sixties. Protests in the streets as well as the burning of bras and draft cards sprang up with the Hippie movement. Culturally, we came in to the sixties looking like a clone of our parents and left the decade with radically different views. We began with Pat Boone as our top selling musical artist and exited listening to The Grateful Dead. Teenage guys in 1960 were wearing pegged pants and girls were wearing Poodle skirts. In 1969 guys were wearing bell bottoms and girls were wearing mini skirts. Our literature was upended with the readings from Mao and Orwell. Playboy magazine became mainstream. Babies born out of wedlock became an acceptable practice. Marijuana was in, moonshine was out. In short, our parents lost control of our upbringing.
It wasn’t their fault, who could have forecast the change? Our folks had been born in the twenties and thirties and had seen wide spread Depression and two Wars. Their attitude by and large, was not to rock the boat. If the boat leaked, patch it. If it was too small, make due. Those of us growing up in the 1960’s did not experience the phenomena of “doing with out”. Our entire life was an exercise of our parents making a better life for us. They, collectively wanted more for us than they had. Consequently when we rejected the values that they had instilled, a cataclysmic cultural split opened up. Some families were never able to bridge the gap. For me personally, my father never understood the need for me to get the answer to the question , why? It was because he said so and no further explanation was ever forthcoming. It was pretty apparent by the time I was sixteen that going to Vietnam was a real possibility. I really wanted an answer to the question, why?
Being caught off guard by your children is not an uncommon experience. But, being blindsided by culture must have been an over whelming experience. It seemed that every where one looked in the mid-sixties things were changing. Parenting practices that worked for our Grandparents were ineffective. To a certain degree, we as a generation began to raise ourselves.
This is when the generational train went off the tracks. At 16 years old we were not equipped with enough maturity to make life changing decisions. However, in some cases it was the only alternative, because some parents gave up. My parents did not and to their credit they kept trying. Since I was the oldest, I think my Parents knew they were in for the long haul. There were a lot of shouting matches and I got grounded a lot, but I always knew they loved me. Other kids I knew were not as lucky as I was and they became part of this alternative generation that began to drift away. Like an Iceberg that has broken away from its base, these kids got lost. Drug use got some of them, the hippie culture took some, early parenthood snagged some, but most of them drifted for the rest of the decade. Living from job to job, home to home and paycheck to paycheck became their existence. You can still recognize some of them today fifty years later.
So, the next time you hear the sixties were a much simpler time. Take pause and offer up the thought, ” I beg to differ, I was growing up then”.
