> Nostalgia is a Melancholy drug! It's major effects include melancholia, self-pity, inertia, selective remembering & a willingness to pay money to see Bob Dylan & the Greatful Dead. > I worked thru my own 60's nostalgia in the mid-70's when it was all still fresh. I realized by 1976 that "the revolution" was never to be. A semi-institutionalized state of hippie communalism, rock-n-roll, dope & screwing in the streets would not sweep the nation leaving me to a life free of alienating labor,foreign intervention, fundamentalist christians, inflation, mass-media propaganda, taxation & other such assaults on an acid-suffused psyche. I was not to spend my late teen's & early twenties at play in the Gardens of Elysium. > Lets get one thing straight. I'm not the only one who took this whole thing personally. You see, the mainstream myth of the sixties is the myth of idealistic youth in rebellion against the materialist ethics of their elders. Standing courageously against war & injustice, these idealistic youngsters were willing to lay it all on the line for a better world. It's a lovely little myth. A myth of selflessness & sacrifice. A Judeo-Christian myth. A liberal-socialist myth. A safe myth. But not what the 60's were about! > Youth left home, en masse, turning backs on authoritarian institutions, the traditional family, beavering one's life away in a nine-to-fiver for slave-wages & went off in search of personal freedom, new self-selection families, free sex, philosophical answers, kicks, creative inspiration, sainthood & adventure, not so much turning backs on materialism as pre-capitulataing a future when new technology ( based on information, illumination & self-replicating systems ) would put an end to forced labor & scarcity. We were definately pre-mature, like an infant born ahead of it's times! > As the young idealists came into conflict with the old establishment, the old defined the rules of the game. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun". Nevertheless, these "children" made them lose a stupid & evil foreign war, brought down a stupid and crooked President & provoked a national identity crisis. The Watergate scandal left the world's most powerful nation confused & rudderless thru-out most of the 1970's. > But they got their revenge, they did the one thing which could slow down the meteoric ascension of the youth culture. Either by design or stupidity, they brought back economic scarcity! No more, the free-wheeling tribes of the 60's. No more leisurely search for personal freedom, creative inspiration, philosophical answers, sainthood & Adventures! > Bam-Bam-Bam-da-ding-a-ding-ding-Get-A-Job!!! > Instead of a communo-anarchist hippie utopia, we were left with one not-ready-for-prime-time network TV show. And I spent the mid-70's doing my stint of sixties nostalgia, complete with melancholia, disillusionment & a healthy dose of post-Watergate conspiracy freak paranoia. > Meanwhile the upper-crust of the baby boom generation entered the mainstream & waltzed a dazed post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America thru a brief period of hip decadence combined with half-hearted liberalism; C0caine, disco, punk rock, Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, President Ford lets young Jack smoke pot in the White House with Bianca Jagger & lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of SEX!!! the 70's were actually pretty cool times! Too bad we didn't enjoy them more while they lasted!!! > In the decade of the 1980's... the Empire Strikes Back!!! President Ronnie Rayguns kicks off the War-on-Drugs, which has become a never ending Holy Crusade! Peeing in a jar to get a job. D.A.R.E. - A.I.D.S. ( bio-warfare or natures revenge? ), Some cold-blooded astringent geek with a PC posing as your own personal moral authority, A "Moral Majority" of Fundamentalist Christians sans the heavenly God & their new inquisition passing judgement on everything that does not jibe with a socially ordained order of a hell so in-place and complete that it makes paying taxes seem by comparison an act of incredible spontaneity & liberation. Never could work up much nostalgia for the 80's. In the 1990's some of the old optimism, confidence, cockiness, and, yes, even arrogance which made the 60's such a liberating time re-surfaced, if only as nostalgia... Woodstock's 25th. anniversary showed you can't relive the past! ( Clinton & Monica & the Cigar ) :sifone: > Now-A-Day's & Tomorrow... > the biggest threat to the status quo worldwide is that the new generation of youthful rebels to be will recognize itself. the technology is almost in place. the time for evolution is almost here. Fast-minded & fearless children of today are humaning the controls. the technologies of communication, information & the essentially feminine technology of self-replicating systems will bring an end to the era of limitations. With the new psycho-pharmaceuticals it's possible to learn how the brain, the mind, the nervous system and the senses work and use them to their limits. Relationship to life will be as a partner in creation and no longer will humans only be an evolved monkey definable by history, language, semiotics and pack-behavior. We will become self-defining and constantly evolving process reaching toward a virtually limitless lifespan on the way to the stars. :sunny: > the new species is about to emerge!!! eace: PEACE!
Damn......I thought it was just sex, drugs and rock n roll...I missed all this cool stuff....I went from a drug crazed hippy alcoholic, straight to a 9-5 establishment job with benefits....38 years later I'm still working, finally stopped drugging and drinking .....ignore pretty well anything that infringes on what I perceive to be my rights....we seem to either ignore big brother or fight big brother.....I ignore big brother......life is good... Thanks Doc
BE HAPPY for Optimal Happification click the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo4OnQpwjkc&feature=fvwrel"]Bob Marley-Don't worry be happy - YouTube
Very well put. I only hope we are able to realize our potential to that extent before annihilating ourselves.
the revolution almost won in the 70s, did win a few small victories, then lost big time in 80 with ragun but never died, never goes away, never will, and its a lot older then the 60s too. i'm not sure revolution is even a good name for it. right about nostelgia being a source of depression though. mine is always pointed not at the past, but toward a future that might or might not ever be and one human life is never long enough to see it all.
