Oh No, Not the 60s!

Yep. It's here! The 40th anniversary of the epicenter of the 1960s' Counterculture -- Woodstock! Who would have thought those bearded or braless, long-haired, tie-dyed, doped-up 20-something hippies would one day be collecting Social Security and living in 55+ retirement condos in Florida?

I just finished Tom Brokaw's seminal book on the turbulent times between the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy and the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon. Forty years ago I was graduated, out of the service, married and a new father so I mostly wandered the sidelines of the counterculture, albeit at the time with a bit of envy. As the saying goes, "if you can remember the sixties you weren't really there." Nearly as disconcerting as the recollections, my oldest, who was two in 1969, gave me the book, and I'm way too young to have a 42-year-old son.

Those 11 years curved American society in unimaginable ways. As a teenager in the fifties there was no such thing as a "youth culture." We were merely little adults biding our time till we got old enough to mimic our parents' lives. We had our music, of course, which infuriated our elders enough to provide some daylight between us, but for the most part any "generation gap" -- again an unknown concept -- was more of a generation notch. Youth fashion? You're kidding! It was a time when waistbands actually went around your waist, and you only wore sneakers to play basketball.

And then, as in Brokaw's title, Boom! "Sex, drugs and rock and roll!" "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Assassinations, protest marches, sit-ins, urban rampages, campus bombings, police "riots." Pot, lots and lots of pot.

JFK, LBJ, MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, Tricky Dick, Ho Chi Minh, Gene McCarthy, Gloria Steinem, Rosa Parks, Charles Manson, Jane Fonda, Timothy Leary, HAL.

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Pentagon Papers, Equal Rights Amendment, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Roe v. Wade, Articles of Impeachment, The Feminine Mystique.

Selma, My Lai, the Haight, Berkeley, Washington Mall, Kent State, Woodstock, Watergate, Watts, Tet, the moon.

SDS, Black Panthers, Green Berets, Freedom Riders, silent majority, Chicago Seven, NOW.

Black Power, Agent Orange, radical chic, I Have a Dream, Free Speech, flag burnings, communes, Paris Peace Talks, flower power, Hair.

And that doesn't even touch the music -- the anthem -- for the times. True, the mayhem went too far too often. But at a personal level it was a great time to explore life as irrelevant social taboos crumbled.

I was alumni director at my alma mater during those days, attempting to mollify my infuriated board of directors over what they perceived as unseemly campus activism. I remember many testy discussions about the war and the wider counterculture. I also remember them as decent, well-meaning people as opposed to some of the local leaders of the anti-war movement who were truly contemptible. The life lesson I still retain: Issues come and go; character is indelible.

Like them or not the 60s had an indelible effect on what America is today.