Tuesday Voice

The sixties

By Ed Rogers

[Originally published on April 2, 2013. At the time, Paul Clark, aka motomynd, said of it: "one of the best, most all-encompassing, 'insider' perspectives of the '60s that I have ever read."]

Reflecting back on my life, as most of us old farts do, I realized that most people only know about the sixties through history books, newspapers, or bullshit stories that people like me tell. I don’t claim to have been in the belly of the beast, but I had a hold of its tail.

Flower power

    The story of the sixties was the story of Vietnam, because without the war nothing would have happened. No civil rights, no women’s movement, no anything. At the start of the war, all the way back to the early sixties, when Kennedy asked for volunteers, we still believed our country could do no wrong. If not for the war I’m not sure we would have changed our thinking. Nothing had changed in our parent’s lives, so there is no reason to think our view would have changed. We grew up in a world that had lived with lies for so long, people believed them to be true. They hated and feared anyone who opposed their belief system or even questioned it. For most of us, the war changed our outlook on life. Parents couldn't believe that their children—whom they cared for all those years and for whom they saved every penny to send them to college—would question the government they had fought a World War for.
    The conversion from the child who believed like their parents to the person that stopped believing anything the government or their parents said came when the first big lie fell. It was then that most of us knew there were more lies being told than just about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. But that was not the political turning point; everybody, sooner or later, discovers the sex lie. If sex was a sin...then call me a sinner.

The social lies are buried deeper. We were taught that the racial unrest was "their" problem and they should be happy to be living in a wonderful country like the USA. Women who worked outside the home were to be felt sorry for, because their husbands could not take care of them properly.
    Then there were the movies. Marijuana would drive you crazy. One joint and you would become a rapist or a murder. There were stories of teenagers holding up stores to feed their habit. They had talks in gym class, and pictures on the walls—all this to scare us straight. But after our first joint, most of us understood that our whole life had been a lie.
    Marijuana became the glue, the common link, between all protest groups. I can’t remember going to any meeting or rally where there was no Marijuana. It was not the killer weed they have today, where a couple of hits and you are a zombie. We were not tuning out, we were turning on. We really believed we could change the world. We had seen the light and once the American people saw how corrupt the government was, they would join us. There are a lot of the pictures from those days showing stoned-out hippies hanging in parks and so forth. Although they got all the attention, the hippies were a small percent. The powers that were at the time wanted to paint everybody who smoked pot or had long hair as unwashed pothead scum who wanted to overthrow the American way of life. The truth was, we were their sons and daughters. But we had become true believers.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan

The sixties gave the world some of the best music since the Irish Revolution...The belief that you could not trust anyone over thirty...You had to live for today, because there may not be a tomorrow. These ideas amplified the effect of the drugs of the day; they cost the lives of a lot of kids and that of some great artists. However, drugs had been killing people long before the sixties. These people might have found a way to kill themselves without the drugs. Take Jim Morrison: with all the drugs he put into his body, in the end he drank himself to death. Hendrix, Joplin, and a lot more were hooked on heroin. That is a long way from smoking a joint or doing a little coke. There are still a lot of artists from the sixties that did drugs but are alive today. I believe some people have a death wish and some don’t. That is the only way to explain it.
    As a side note, did you know it was Dylan who turned the Beatles onto smoking marijuana?
    After Nixon was re-elected everything died. The drug scene in Cali had gotten so bad, it was being reported on the news everyday. Americans preferred a corrupt government and hated us for saying the King had no clothes.The war ended, and the civil rights movement stopped after King’s death. The women’s movement lost its power, and membership dropped. There was nothing left that was worth fighting for.
    I married and moved to Northern Cali in the seventies. The music changed and the drugs changed. I tried to change, but I could not climb that mountain. That story didn't end well either. As the years went by, my hair got shorter and shorter and less and less. I have lived long enough to vote for a black president—I guess that is saying something.
    In a lot of states the kids who were smoking pot and marching on the streets back then are congressmen and governors today. I know everybody wants to sing along with Dylan: “The world it is a changing.” But don’t get your hopes up, yet. There are forces that will fight to their last breath to stop or roll back any change.

Copyright © 2015 by Ed Rogers