The Sixties generation has got to be one of the most evil generations in world history. They cursed the country that defeated Nazism while celebrating one-party totalitarian states headed by "great leaders" (like Mao and Castro) where dissent was against the law and the press was entirely controlled by the regime. These miserable Communist ratholes were embraced as the antithesis of fascism while their own country, a country where dissent has almost always been tolerated (barring a few short emergency situations), whre there is a presidential election every four years and a full congressional election every two years--a country where the government doesn't own the press (though sometimes the contrary seems a possibility!) was despised. The hippies dismissed all these "petit bourgeois" freedoms as illusions and embraced carbon copies of Hitler and Mussolini because, they claimed, they fed their people.
So I guess according to the hippies, if Hitler and Mussolini had merely "fed their people" (instead of merely making the trains run on time), they would have been "morally superior" to the United States of America!
Does this means if President Bush "feeds his people" that he can declare himself "president for life" and outlaw all dissent, and then be supported by the Stephen Spielbergs and Michael Moores???
These Sixties hippies are the scum of humanity!
You mean the generation where only the Dad had to work? The generation where they said, "gimmy a bucks worth of regular"? You mean the generation that purchased brand new homes on *one* income where Mom was actually able to say home and raise the kids without having to worrying about making the mortgage every month? The generation that had secure jobs, great, affordable family medical benefits? The generation that not only had secure jobs, but actually had retirement pensions? The generation that left lights on without worrying about paying the electric bill? The generation that used and wasted resources like they were endless?
Oh, that generation.
I was born in '48, so I was 20 in '68 and not really a child ... almost 3 yrs (early out) of Army and sex, drugs, rock n' roll with mini (or less) skirts attacking my senses.
There was a serious barrage of anti-Americanism going on and it was easy for a curious and quasi-educated mind to think, "Yeah ... that sounds about right."
Travel was free, interesting and the nation opened up to anyone who wanted to hitch .. (twice from Boston to the west coast in two years)
Work was everywhere so money was no problem and the whole idea of being phoney or 'plastic' was anathema. A great sense of wanting to be honest and sincere was everywhere.
I don't think I would have had a better education than my real-life experiences from '65 to around the late '70's.
We are always looking through a glass darkly from our present position and only later can we parse the rights and wrongs of who and what we are or did.
Street people smell(ed), not 'hippies' ... we were waaayyy too into ourselves to be dirty.
We talked ... a lot .... to more people about more things face to face in a month than most people do today on the keyboard in a year today. Our minds were flooded by choice with everything imaginable and there was a reality of power, realizing most 'straights' had no clue.
I was not an actor on the stage ... I was the choreographer, and really enjoyed flitting from society to society with others that had no fear and bothered to know and care.
Sex was a tool, drugs were a tool and freedom too was a tool to acquire knowledge of real, live people and what they thought and did.
Nothing is forever and in the end .. it's all rather entropic, isn't it?
So now I'm pushin' sixty and I look back at my youth with envy and nostalgia, realizing I had been part of an amazing generation ...
and I'm thankful.
Spielberg doesn’t belong in the same trough with Moore as he has celebrated American culture throughout his career.