The 70’s took ‘it’ back to the woods…
(continued from previous)
Thank God. I didn’t know there could be life without riots. I didn’t know there could be life without political assassinations. I didn’t know there could be life without scenes of war on TV. ‘Back to nature’ sounded really good, as if I’d been on the verge of a nervous breakdown or something the whole time at the ripe old age of twenty-two. We were the late 20th century cabin-dwellers. We were the FoxFire generation, looking for our roots in root cellars, attics, and storage sheds. We wanted the past not the future, evolution not revolution. We wanted little to do with cities, wars, hard rock, or hard drugs. We wanted real folk, bluegrass, and cosmic cowboys. We wanted our ganja as much as ever, maybe more, but no excess acid for a weak stomach, thank you, and for God’s sake, heroes and not heroin.
We didn’t really want jobs, but there weren’t any extra real jobs available for us baby-boomers anyway, so it didn’t really matter. We wanted arts and crafts; we wanted to do carpentry; we wanted to plant crops and raise goats. We wanted to go skinny-dipping at midnight in lakes formed by flooded limestone quarries. We wanted to go to Mexico. So that’s what we did. We ‘went native’ in every way possible. We ate health food and dressed in native costume and spoke Spanish. We held on to our youth as long as we could. That’s what it was all about, really, a country coming of age, finding itself in the morass of circumstance. Back then I never had much of a grip on anything but my d*ck anyway. Fortunately youth can cover a multitude of sins. By definition old age is ugly and youth is beautiful. You try to hang on to it as long as you can.
(to be continued)
The 60’s took ‘it’ to the streets. We were young; we were hip. We knew more than ‘they’ did. ‘They’ were over-30, therefore suspect of collusion with ‘the man’, ‘pigs’, ‘whitey’, Nixon. That’s the name that came to be associated with the forces of repression more than any other. He just looked the part. The ‘movement’ had its anti-Christ. It all started innocently enough in the early 60’s with racial integration and affluence. Here was the strongest country in the world, lecturing the rest of the world on the evils of repressive Communism and Socialism, maintaining a system of apartheid that contradicted its own stated goals and ideals. This was a country once the symbol of freedom in the world, bathed in the fire of revolution, playing FTSE with some of the most repressive regimes the world has ever seen, i.e. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, etc. The symbolism was not to be lost on everyone, certainly not on New York ‘beatniks’ and intellectuals inspired by folk music and high on the ideal of equality. The US was affluent now; there was money to spare, and therefore money to share.
streaming consciousness... 
davekingsbury 2:19 pm on March 31, 2016 Permalink |
We’re not the old people I knew in my youth, who were much more inflexible, so something good came out of the counterculture. Your post takes me back to gentler times …
hardie karges 3:21 pm on March 31, 2016 Permalink |
Think you’re right, less of a ‘generation gap’ now, find I’ve got quite a bit in common with millennials, not least of which is car-optional culture, positive sign for Amerika…
davekingsbury 3:22 pm on March 31, 2016 Permalink
Maybe the greening thing was an influence …