by Cindy
Have you read In the Unlikely Event, by Judy Blume? I just finished it, and I'm sort of relieved that I didn't enjoy the retro ambiance of it more. Nostalgia is a habit I'm trying to kick.
Although I was only two years old in 1951 when the plane crashes she writes about took place, I do remember the Fifties pretty well: buttoned-down, uptight conventions like wearing a dress and white gloves to go shopping with my mother, and the the startling fear of crouching under my desk as a grade schooler, waiting for the Russians to bomb us to smithereens.
Of course I remember the Sixties with much more enthusiasm and clarity, and that's where I get into trouble.
My teenaged daughter once said to me in exasperation, "Mom, I am so tired of hearing about 'your generation!'"
Huh? I had no idea I was talking about it that much. But it's true I've always thought of our Boomer generation as incredibly cool, even magical. Who else in the history of the world ever wore such outrageous clothes, protested as loudly against the atrocities of life, partied harder, danced and sang with unquestionably the most monumentally awesome rockers of all time and just generally lived on the edge?
The answer, of course, is everybody. Everyone's youth is the most magical era of all time, whatever the cultural ingredients were. Sometimes I think about my grandmothers, who were young adults during the Roaring Twenties. I bet if you stacked the Sixties up against that era, they'd come out even on the blow-your-socks-off scale.
Look at our parents, The Greatest Generation. They left college or interrupted careers and family lives to go to war. They did things that truly were monumental and earthshaking, and they never bragged about it or portrayed themselves as something special.
Or think of our own teenagers in the Eighties. What I know about the Eighties is that I wore suits with big shoulder pads to work. (I was busy, with five children and a full time job.) But for my kids, the Eighties are a touchstone the way the Sixties are for me. The difference is, they don't think they rocked the world. They have perspective.
The more I think about all this the less fun it is to pretend that I am any cooler than anyone else simply because I walked the Earth during the time of Woodstock and know the words to all the best Motown songs ("Standing in the shadows of love, I'm getting ready for the heartaches to coooommme...")
Some things will always be fun to remember, of course, and that's the way it should be. But memories can't really compare to "the good old days" we're living through right now, every one of us, every day. That's cool.
There is almost a cult like worship of the 60s from some in the younger generation--and even among my peers. Gary loves to say the we missed the Sexual Revolution by 10 minutes. We were too busy at our job of working and living in the basement of the funeral home to get through college. Our nightly "fun" was watching TV to see if Gary's number was going to be called in the Draft for the Vietnam War. He was one number away when the Draft ended. We had no time or money to go to Woodstock. I was in a motel room in Newark, NJ flying back from my junior year abroad the day that Kent State took place, and I remember thinking to myself, "What in the hell has happened to my country?" The highlight of the 60s for me was having my favorite cousin take me to the State Fair in Michigan to see the Supremes in person. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. For me, the biggest legacy of the 60s (besides my love of all things tie-dyed) was our belief, as a generation, that we could change the world--in the face of the "don't rock the boat" attitude of most of our parents. That's what I miss most about the 60s--our hope in the future, our unswerving optimism that if we all joined hands--we could make the world a better place.
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