whut??

I wan't born yet! My birthday is 1/1/70. My half-sister and my unhappily married parents were living in Pleasent Hill in a shitty starter house on Viking Dr. My sister was already all CA uber-alles at like 11-12. I am pretty she had already smoked pot then. So - I have no memories of 1969, but somewhat of the fallout a few years later? At 3 months of age, which would put us about April of 1970, my dad took a job transfer from the steel plant he was working at in Oakland to Seattle. My family moved to the (then) somewhat remote end of an island. My sister crapped a brick going from the CA high life to the spidery/forested PNW outback and thus started a pretty heavy crime/drug spree which lasted well into her adult life. 17 years later when I graduated high school, the reminaing folks in the house (my mom, my dad, and I) all split for points unknown and far apart from each other. It was your typical 1970's American dysfunctional gothic. On all vacations growing up, we had to go see relatives in CA. My parents took me through places like Oakland, Watts, Venice Beach (where my dad had lived as a really little kid in the depression), etc. My mother grew up on a farm, in all places, in Compton (yeah, the Compton of "Straight Outta..." fame).

One of my good friends grew up in a tiny Finnish farming town in the Upper Penninsula of MI. He was 21 during the draft but they never drew his number. His mother had just died after a lingering illness and he told his dad he wanted to go out west. Both his parents had had him when they were pretty old (I want to say like 40??) so his dad was kind of an old farmer duffer. He left with his dad in 1969 for San Francisco from Crystal Falls, MI. My friend was ready to come jubilantly out of the closet as soon as he hit SF, and he says he remembers walking around with his Dad somewhere and there was some leather dudes hanging around a bar and his dad goes, "Well, you can see some real cowboys in this town!" It was such a great story when he told it, like a monologue from Hair or something.

>The overall historical impact of the 60's is no greater or less than the 40's or 20's or 1860's for that matter but to Boomers it's a first person experience, so that's what makes it "special". <

That's why I was curious about the range of memories not only of the war, but the general Unrest of that time. VietNam was the first televised war. Nightly footage of combat, then the dead, wounded and MIA count like it was a baseball game. Being only 10, it seemed to me that that's just how war was. And then I grew up. I woke up. Our own National Guard Shot and Killed Four Students who were protesting on a college campus. Can you imagine that today? By 1975 I was 16 and clearly remember the indelible image of the last Americans scrambling into the hovering helicopter from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

And when they came home, the soldiers were not heroes like in other wars. They were vilified for fighting an unjust war, even if drafted. Imagine THAT. Welcome home you warmongering muttherfrukkers.

Maybe it's because I lived through it, but I believe the '60s blew open a part of our national psyche. It completely freaked out many parents who expected a continuation of the 50s lifestyle. I can't be sure, but I believe the 40s and 20s didn't have quite the impact of the late 60s. And just think of the accompanying music/soundtrack to these days and years.

Remembering those heady days reminds me of the late Walter Cronkite. That's another story altogether. He was inimitable. He was the nation's Dad. He was connected. Had mind, heart and soul and wasn't afraid to show it. Sad how that kind of humanity has been stripped from our newscasters who are all about image and ratings.

For those who were so young during the Viet Nam years, rent "The Deer Hunter." IMO it's far and away the tops of the Viet Nam movies, although "Platoon" and "Apocalypse Now" are close runners up.

Good lord. This is just the beginning. I remember the hot summer of riots and ultra-violence. The Black Panthers, Angela Davis, the Weather Underground or just The Weathermen*, Yippies, The Chicago Seven and the '68 DNC, MLK assassinated in April, Bobby assassinated just two months later, "The Days of Rage," Timothy Leary ... What the hell was going on? Everything we knew was wrong. It's been a whole new world since then.

* took its name from the lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", from the Dylan song Subterranean Homesick Blues.

And this year is the 20th anniversary of "Do the Right Thing" ... hot town, summer in the city ... rent that one, too.

yeow.