Hi all Im doing a speech about the 1960s and I really would love your help. I just need to know what the sixties were like from hippies who were actually there. Did anyone go to Woodstock? Please Help!!! K
I wasn't a Hippie in the 1960s; I was a Toddler!!! So I suppose I don't qualify to help. But I would recommend you emphasize in your speech the fact that the 1960s was the first decade of the 20th century that challenged the social mores & values of the previous 100 years or more!. The 1960s coincided with the 'coming to maturity' of the 'baby-boomers' of World War Two.They were the first generation to be pampered by the optimistic post-war world.Full employment,increased leisure time,the emergence of 'teen-age' culture. Before 1960,western society only valued hard-working,church-goers who went to 'war' because it was 'patriotic',made lots of money & glorified this lifestyle with the trinkets of capitalism:an automobile,a large house with a swimming pool & membership of macho clubs & societies. The Hippies challenged the notion that 'war' was patriotic.That 'making money' equated to 'success' & that 'consumer luxuries' were the only desirable ideals in the materialist lifestyle.The Hippies valued spirituality,a oneness with Mother Earth & nature,a celebration of life through music,flowers & dance.It may sound feeble now but these ideas were 'revolutionary' when first espouced in 1965 or whenever.
A decade of great change and leftist movements, women's rights, civil rights, worker's rights, voting rights, academia, rationality.........
you may have a point there. yet a lot of good things did get done, or started that got alot done in the 70s aside from the political things, and what are more widely considered milestones; the automobile, though popular, was not yet god. PERSONAL computers as we know them now, wouldn't exist yet for a couple of more decades. smother's brothers and kingston trio were still hot. peter paul and marry were brand new. railroads still ran passinger trains, several a day on most major coridors and even some of the smaller railroads offered passinger service. and greyhound ran A LOT of bussess. even competitor trailways, with plusher buses, ran nearly as many schedules as the railroads (though less then 1/4 as may as greyhound). electricty was considered cleaner because, at least in the western u.s. a greater percentage of it was generated by hydroturbines at dams, then by combustion fired powerplants. a lot of little dams that had generators that no longer do. infrastructure was mostly unionized and hired a LOT of people. retailing was MOSTLY mom and pop. doctors still made house calls, and while a lot of today's medical tecnology did not yet exist, were better diagnosticians then we have today, even if there was less that they could do about it. even the cheapest restaurants used real dishes, and you could get a job washing them in all but the smallest villages. although drive in's woud soon appear. the first drive through window was jack in the box, which was their gimic, selling point. blarg, i am a damd old windbag. well i graduated high school in 66 so age wise i was right in the middle of it, except i was living in a town of 1025 people and before i turned 18 we had moved to a company village on top of the summit where the general store and gas station had less the 50 post office boxes. ours was #34. we had zip codes when i graduated high school but i don't thing we had them yet when i graduated from the 8th grade. =^^= .../\...
Woodstock. Speak of Woodstock and enlighten the generation. It was beautiful and could be enough to inspire some people.
The '60s would not have been possible without the '20s. The Lost Generation of the post World War 1 '20s was the first generation to seriously question ten-thousand years of patriarchal domination. Jazz was far more revolutionary than Rock-n-Roll, and, after the coming of Jazz, Rock-n-Roll was simply inevitable. The '20s was so disturbing to the patriarchal mind that it necessitated the ultra-conservative backlash of Fascism in the '30s and '40s. While our '60s generation simply picked up the pieces and was only disturbing enough to generate the mild conservative fundamentalist backlash we see today. The Lost Generation truly broke the mold allowing the '60s Boomers to flower,,, for a while. Consider a '20s archetype like Mae West! We used to hang iconographic posters of her on our walls in the '60s, because she was still more wild and unapologetic than we were. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather live the '60s over and over again if I could, and everything you said about the '60s was true, I know because I was there. But I also know it was the painful, eye-opening reality-check of the Lost Generation that first turned the old cob-web world upside down.
