The Good Old Days?

Another mass shooting at a community college in Oregon got me to thinking about the good old days, specifically the 1960s, the decade in which I grew up. Not that I had any choice, but if there was a decade in which to grow up, it might as well have been the sixties.

Still, it was a decade of contradictions. There was free love, rock and roll, miniskirts, bikinis, and Laugh-In. But two Kennedys were assassinated, as was Martin Luther King; our young boys were dying in Vietnam fighting a war they couldn’t win.

Every generation faces obstacles. My dad’s generation—the Greatest Generation—fought a World War; his father’s generation endured the Great Depression. And the Boomers? We seem to have faced a lot, from Vietnam and Watergate, to Desert Storm and Afghanistan; 9/11 and terrorism, the Wall Street and housing debacles, global warming, as well as a multi-trillion dollar deficit.

Billy Joel: “We didn’t start the fire/it was always burning since the world’s been turning/We didn’t start the fire/no we didn’t light it/but we tried to fight it.”

I’m not sure that our efforts to fight the fire haven’t been half-hearted. We started out with good intentions. In the 1960s we protested the war, stood up for the environment, and were anti-establishment. But the hippies of the sixties became the yuppies of the eighties, and a lot of what we battle today we brought on ourselves through unmitigated greed. My parents’ generation worked to give my generation a better life; the Boomers work simply to acquire more meaningless things.

The sixties was a much simpler time with much simpler solutions. But I recall, in the 1960s, my dad’s longing for his own youth, an era to which he, too, referred as “much simpler.” My father cared for a world which he would not live to see. In fact, he cared so much that he risked his life in World War II to save our way of life.

What, if anything, are the Boomers willing to risk to save our way of life for future generations and a world which we will not live to see?

The new millennium has seen no improvement, only a sense of sliding more quickly into a cesspool of greed as the wealthiest top ten percent threatens to kill off the middle class and the menace of Armageddon as the planet shrinks, and still no one can look at someone without judging them by color, gender, religion or ethnicity and, out of hatred the product of fear, cast stones.

Maybe that’s the way of the world. And maybe, too, it’s human nature, after reaching a certain age—an age that forces us to face our mortality—to look back with fondness at the good old days of our youth.

If that’s true, then one can only wonder what, in thirty or forty years, today’s youth will look back upon as good.

Photo Credit: www.normansennema.com

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