Where Have All the Flowers Gone?
A meditation on how we got from “The Sixties” to where the world is today
I’m a child of “The Sixties”, even though I wasn’t born until 1955. I’m on the younger end of the generation we call Baby Boomers — a generation that could arguably be blamed for the current state of the world today. Scott, one of my life partners, has said that we should apologize to his son (who is 36) for screwing up the world and then tell him that it’s now up to his generation to fix it. Assuming that’s true, it makes me wonder how on earth we got to where we are today from where we were back in those heady times we call “The Sixties”.
The consensus is that, in the US, “The Sixties” was actually the decade that began in 1963/64, kicked off by the assassination of JFK in 1963 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and ended in the spring of 1975 with the fall of Saigon and the end of US participation in the Vietnam War.
In New York City, the cultural and spiritual center of “The Sixties” was Greenwich Village — a magical place where I spent as much time as possible during my high school years. If you’ve seen the musical “Hair” (the stage musical, not the movie), you’ve experienced some of what “The Sixties” were to me.
