Baby Boomers, Critics of Millennials, Once Advised: ‘Ignore Anyone Over 30’
“Never trust anyone over 30,” said activist Jack Weinberg in 1964, rather offhandedly, during an interview in Berkeley at the height of the free speech movement. Much to his surprise, after Weinberg’s quote appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, it was picked up everywhere in the media.
The idea of betraying one’s elders — whether you were for or against that notion at the time— seemed to aptly describe the iconoclastic attitude of the counterculture to many. “Don’t trust anyone over 30!” quickly become a mantra for the freewheeling youth, and it remained so throughout the decade. People often believed the quote belonged to Abbie Hoffman, or maybe the Beatles.
People over 30 were — understandably — utterly appalled. But it was a catchy enough saying, so the kids thought, especially because it really seemed to bunch the proverbial sock-garters of the older, square establishment.
In reality, to exclude everyone over 30 from the counterculture movement’s ‘credulity’ would have left a gaping void in the the 1960s; some of its founding lions, like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs — not to mention Timothy Leary — were already well past their expiration dates, by that rule, by the dawn of the decade.
