Thank you, Kat. As someone who was a teenager in the 60s and who threw her arms around it's music and culture, I look back on it now and recognize the shallowness and naivety that defined it. But at the same time, just under the layer of simple-sounding solutions I think that there was a grain of wisdom planted on that decade. Our confidence was great. We were going to change things for the better. And some things did develop. The Peace Corps, and all of its iterations, for instance, and the Civil Rights movement. But the divisions were bad, for sure, and that has only gotten worse since then. We just keep plugging along, each generation, and do the best we can.
Hi Denise, thank you so much for this deep and insightful comment. It's interesting because I never associated "shallowness & naivete" with the decade--just a heartrending earnestness and deep painful longing. Another reader emailed me that "The sixties were tricky with great fear, misunderstandings, grief, and the bonding of a generation." When I read that I realized that perhaps my lack of affinity for the era came from the fact that I never bonded with anyone through it, but only feel somehow saddled with making sense of it. When I despair too much I think of MLK, Jr's hopeful quote that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Thank you, Kat. As someone who was a teenager in the 60s and who threw her arms around it's music and culture, I look back on it now and recognize the shallowness and naivety that defined it. But at the same time, just under the layer of simple-sounding solutions I think that there was a grain of wisdom planted on that decade. Our confidence was great. We were going to change things for the better. And some things did develop. The Peace Corps, and all of its iterations, for instance, and the Civil Rights movement. But the divisions were bad, for sure, and that has only gotten worse since then. We just keep plugging along, each generation, and do the best we can.
Hi Denise, thank you so much for this deep and insightful comment. It's interesting because I never associated "shallowness & naivete" with the decade--just a heartrending earnestness and deep painful longing. Another reader emailed me that "The sixties were tricky with great fear, misunderstandings, grief, and the bonding of a generation." When I read that I realized that perhaps my lack of affinity for the era came from the fact that I never bonded with anyone through it, but only feel somehow saddled with making sense of it. When I despair too much I think of MLK, Jr's hopeful quote that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”