ARE WE STUCK IN THE ‘60s?

Newsweek published an article title “1968 – the year that changed everything” back in November that proposed that we all are stuck in that year. I suppose they meant mostly us boomers, but in a way I suppose all of America is too.

Barack says he is “not of the ‘60s”, and Hillary tried to spend money on a “Woodstock Museum”, and McCain quipped that he was “tied up” most of that decade, but can anyone really escape them?

If you are near my age, you constantly got reminded that life is short and precious. Beginning with the “Cuban Missile Crisis”; the assassinations of “Robert (’68), Martin (’68), and John (’63)”; we have had too many reminders. If you add in the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, we got to witness three of them televised “live!”

Later there were constant reminders that our world, even the American world, was unstable. Wallace was shot and paralyzed in ’72, then Ford was shot at in ’75, and then Reagan was shot in ’81. I hold my breath now when I see today’s candidates in crowds. I can just imagine, after seeing all the past history that some “sicko” might take a shot at a woman or black man with the “audacity enough to run for president of his country”!

How could we not be “held hostage” as Jonathan Darman phrased it in the article.

To some degree we boomers were somewhat less shocked by the Iranian hostage situation, the Lockerbie crash, the Columbia disintegration, and even 9-11 terror! We had already seen our mortality on the little screen many times and grew up knowing that life was short and sweet. Shocking as it all was, it was nothing compared to the shock of the ‘60s on children of the “safe” generation. A generation experiencing the end of WWII and Korea, to a “cold war era” that was frightening in itself, but at the same time a safe period of security, drummed into our heads by situational TV that depicted fairytale lives where problems only lasted 30 minutes.

I remember when I heard about President Kennedy back in ‘63, I was sitting in senior English class at Harriman High School. Later at home, sitting on the floor with my elbows on my knees, watching the news coverage of Lee Harvey being hustled out through the garage area of the police station, I saw and heard the gunshots and witnessed the look of pain on his face as he folded amid a throng of police protection. I remember being disappointed in the sound of the gunshots…sounded fake – not like Gunsmoke to me!

Over and over they played the bullet strikes on Connelly and Kennedy and we watched in horror as Jackie crawled onto the limousine rear deck, partly, I suspect, trying to summon help for her husband, and partly to escape the absolute horror of seeing her husband’s head open up like a watermelon in front of her! Just imagine what she heard, that awful crack and thump it must have made, and the blood and brain matter of the one she loved everywhere, but especially that which was on her and on her clothes.

We saw it, we witnessed it, but in black and white, she heard it in surround sound and saw it in HD color…up close and personal. There are countless soldiers that have gone crazy from witnessing the same thing of one of their buddies on the battle field. Inside she must have been a mess and the mess probably woke her many a night in screams.

We all screamed inside when we see that, even today, especially if you loved “Camelot”!

No wonder we went to loud metal music, drugs, and alcohol in ‘60s and ‘70s…we needed the escape to forget the things we had seen and to forget our own mortality.

But somewhere along the end of the ‘70s we started to forget…the music changed…the drugs changed, but alcohol remained the same. What changed was Vietnam. We began to doubt our government and the grand purpose we had thought America stood for, but it was gone. Governments seem to go to war for the money, the oil, and the power of it! Us, the Russians, the Brits, and the Chinese…just a giant pissing contest over the bodies of their young men, who innocently followed orders blindly. Blindly that is, until the end of Vietnam…then the questioning of government began, and continues today.

Darman ends his article by asking us if we are really out of the ‘60s. He, like me, sees that we still have segregated cities, governments, businesses, and women are still chained in corporate America, and most strikingly similar today is that we are bogged down in two war zones so very similar to Vietnam and Korea. Government never learns from past mistakes, and they never will because the lives they expend are other people’s kids and not their own.

It seems we’ll never realize Martin Luther King’s dream of children that “will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

We are still there in 1968, watching our television sets waiting for the news anchors to tell us what to do. They can’t! They can only tell us how very similar we are to what we were over 40 years ago.

We need a leader that can and will tell us how to get out of the revolving door of history and step into true change.

Who do you think he/she/it is?

I know one thing; we do not yet have leaders like we had in the ‘60s. There’s no one yet that is inspired or ordained by God.