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To boldly go where we have gone before! to the 1960s and back...

 


I love Star Trek.  Firstly, being made in the mid 60s, it offered up a hopeful view of the future in a decade that witnessed more than four assassinations of prominent national figures.  I know, I appear to be fascinated by this decade, and yes, to a certain extent I admit to this.  It was one of those watershed moments in American history.  Beginning with Kennedy's murder in 1964, the whole decade just started to go to the dogs.  

For some, the sixties represented freedom.  As a child growing up in suburbia, I was sheltered from much of the craziness happening just 8 miles away in Topanga Canyon--southern california's equivalent of Haight Ashbury.  But, later on, I began to grow some awareness of the leftovers of the sixties--for me it was the wearing of Levis and platform shoes when I was 12, and the floppy hats with tie dyed t shirts.  This was the time of the Watergate hearings--a time for the loss of innocence for an entire culture.  American innocence and arrogance was DOA.

And yet, for me, the sixties always represented Hippies.  The Summer of Luv.  Irresponsible 
young people who dissed their parents for a fashion statement (and that was questionable at best).  It was also represented by discord, discontent, and 

disestablishment.  And yet, one cannot help but remember this unfortunate decade like the above gathering-- young people trashing their cerebral spinal fluid with such wholesome things as LSD, Peyote, and psychedelic mushrooms.  Mind expansion my ass.  I think that many of them followed Tim Leary, in having their collective brains shot from a cannon into the upper atmosphere.

I often think of this ridiculous cultural atmosphere with trepidation--how could such heights coexist and contrast with such dregs?  It's true that not every decade is so very very violent and yet so ridiculous in terms of fashion and debauchery.  




Lest we forget, that this was also the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and Women's Liberation, and the Civil Rights Act, it wasn't all bad. But then we must also remember those deaths I alluded to above, of which JFK was just one.  And, yet again, one cannot forget that these were the same people who gave us Adam West as Batman.  Holy Ketchup Batman!






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