If you remember the 60's....

[underpants]

as the saying goes, "If you remember the 60's you weren't there". As a child of the 80's I think our saying should be, "If you remember the 80's you probably aren't remembering anything that actually happened"

[elocs]

1. Yes, I remember the 60s. The decade spaned from when I was 7 in 2nd grade

to my senior year in high school. I was very much there.

[Lifelong Protester]

2. I was there... to young to get in on the stuff that would make

remembering it impossible. That was the 70s for some of us!

The 80s totally sucked.

[texanwitch]

14. I was between six and sixteen years old.

Old enought to remember but not old enough to protest.

I liked the 70's better, I was adult.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. "If you remember the 60's…"

Well, some fragments, I guess. I think I was in Vietnam, I remember bits & pieces of being teargassed, I remember the giant vacuum cleaner-driven hookah with a 1-oz. bowl & 16 hoses at the Mifflin St. block party in '69 (or was it only 8 hoses? I was having a lot of trouble with counting…)

[southernyankeebelle]

4. It was the best of years and the worst of years. The age of birth control freed

women. Civil rights expanded. We elected a young president. The worst of times we say that young president killed along with his brother, Martin Luther King. War in VN. We all had to grow up pretty fast.

[Raine]

5. I do remember the 60's

and they weren't that good. The only thing good about them was that I was still young and had my whole life ahead of me, sigh.

[femmocrat]

6. I actually remember the 60s better than the 80s.

The 80s were a blur of child-rearing and reaganomics.

[donco]

7. Yep, high school, Marine Corps,

Vietnam and the years in a haze that followed.

[Kucinich Feingold]

8. The 80's seem to be more loved nowadays

I wasn't alive then but I will sum it up in this: The decade of greed :scared:

[Jennicut]

9. I was a child of the 80's, from 4 to 14 and indeed it did seem like the

decade of greed. And Reaganomics. It was also when we used to rent VCRs believe it or not, and we got our first microwave.

[lunatica]

10. I remember the 60s well. There was a roiling turmoil across the land

Birth control, women's lib, miniskirts, The Beatles, The Civil Rights Act, The Vietnam war, The anti-war movement, Joan Baez, violent demonstrations, Make Love Not War, The Chicago Democratic Convention and police brutality, Martin Luther Kind Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, The assassinations of John Kennedy, MLK Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, drugs, rock and roll and psychedelic posters, the Summer of Love, The Black Panthers, Hippies, Charles Manson murders, Woodstock, and much more.

It was a roiling turmoil. It was an amazing time, and it changed many things in this country. They're the changes the Teabag Party and the GOP are working hard to destroy. They prefer the 50s.

[amandabeech]

12. You forgot to name Nixon specifically, and I think that he should be singled out.

I really don't think that the '60s ended until that evil SOB left the White House.

I was in kindergarten when it started, and between my freshman and sophomore years at U-Michigan when the evil one departed, but I remember quite a bit that was on TV and in magazines and newspapers pre-65 and everything after it.

I had two friends who were a bit older go to Vietnam. One came back just the same and the other hasn't been the same since. The one affected by the war was an artist to his core, and I think that what he saw was just too much.

Obama is younger than me and seems disconnected from much of the important things that went on in the '60s and that you have pointed out. It was more than the sex and drugs and rock and roll that he seems to see as the only things that went on then. He wouldn't have been elected as a U.S. Senator or as President if something like the '60s hadn't happened.

[lunatica]

19. I agree. When I heard Obama talk about the excesses of the 60s

the first time he praised Reagan I was deeply upset. In my mind what Reagan did was take this country a giant step backwards to some pseudo-idyllic time before the 60s, when Americans could be Jingoistic to their hearts content.

But I still think Obama has it in him to be one of the best Presidents in our history because I see the potential in him. The thing is he has to let the times forge him into it instead of trying to return to what was (though it was full of delusions). Sometimes life creates the man. But on the other hand, I'm not holding my breath.

[amandabeech]

20. Praising Reagan really upset me, too.

My top issue right now is jobs, and it was clear when Obama picked his economic advisors before the primaries, that U.S. jobs was not going to be a priority for him.

Nonetheless, I was hopeful that he would make progress in other areas. Well, we have a health care law that doesn't address costs, and a lukewarm financial regulation law. They are starts, but more work clearly needs to be done.

However, Obama seems to be moving right on education and the wars.

I'm not holding my breath, either.

[ChiciB1]

24. I'll Take My Activism & The Turmoil Of The Times Over Anything I'm

seeing these days! While I realize we can't go back and that the 60's ACTUALLY were filled with MUCH MUCH upheaval... I also felt a sense of making some REAL CHANGE!! As a Boomer, I'm still proud to have been part of that time! They were "heady & exciting" times and I came ALIVE!!

Now I find cynicism walks beside me most of the time! Only questions, no answers for the most part, and then the bleak feeling of APATHY!

Yeah, it's a bummer that I state what is "my reality" these days and it DOES break my heart...
:hippie: :shrug: :shrug: :cry:

[State the Obvious]

11. Yes, I remember .......and it was Robin Williams who said it. nt

[Drunken Irishman]

13. I don't remember the 80s...

The only real event I remember was the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. I remember it because I was sitting under my grandma's table watching the swimming and couldn't get over how the East German swimmers had hair under their arms!

:rofl:

I remember the 90s very well because I was a kid in the 90s.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

15. I was there and I remember them...I came of age in the 60's

[Autumn]

16. The 60's. That was an amazing time.

So much change. In a weird way it was a very innocent time. A lot of turmoil. Some of us were stoned a lot:smoke: so maybe that colors my view of it.

[SteveG]

17. I was born in 50

So the first part of the 60's I remember well. The last couple of years though............

[jtuck004]

18. I've had amnesia as far back as I can remember. n/t

[yellowcanine]

21. I graduated from HS in 1969. So yes I remember the 60's

While the decade ended in 1970, effectively I would say that the "spirit of the 60s" continued to the 72 election with the crushing defeat of McGovern.

That pretty much ended the 60s imo.

High points: election of JFK in 1960; election of LBJ in 1964; Civil Rights Act of 1964; Voting Rights Act of 1965; 1963 March on Washington and MLK's speech. Vietnam Protests of the late 1960s and early 70s. Civil Rights gains, free speech gains, women's liberation gains, and environmental movement.

Low Points: Assassinations of JFK, Medgar Evers, RFK, MLK.
Murders of Civil Rights workers in 1964 in Mississippi
Police riot at 1968 Democratic Convention
1968 election of Nixon
1970 murders of war protesters at Kent State

[BlueMTexpat]

23. Me too! nt

[BlueMTexpat]

22. Pardon, but whoever would say that those who remember the 60s weren't there

is simply wrong. I was there and I remember well. Too well.
I remember two Kennedy assassinations, that of MLK, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam War, Civil Rights legisation passed, etc. - clear lows and some heady highs (and NOT chemically induced). But I didn't spend the decade either protesting or stoned. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, then a teacher in private schools abroad and spent six years outside the country living and raising children in a foreign culture. I was pretty busy just surviving, but I remember. When I returned to the US in the 1970s, I found my country to be changed, in some ways - too many, IMO - NOT for the better. I went abroad again in 1980 and returned during the last six years of Raygun - when it was clear that we were beginning a downward spiral economically and in terms of global credibility. People laughed at me - or were even nastier - when I tried to articulate this. We recovered both slightly under Clinton, but plummeted badly during Bush 2 to a point where I literally feared that we would never be able to recover.
That we have recovered at all is largely due to Obama's winning of the Presidency in 2008, but he has been too tentative, IMO, when we have needed bolder steps. That said, I support his efforts wholeheartedly.