wise beyond my years hippies

i want to know one thing.. were the sixties really that good or is just over glorified by the media.

regrets?
stories?
words of wisdom



<3 Jacq and Jill

 

we tried our hardest not to let the 60's pass but at around 11:59 pm on dec 31st, 1969 we realized our efforts were in vain

 

The relative *goodness* of the 60's would depend upon one's perspective. The establishment was completely freaked out by the movement(s) and did everything in their power to keep the status quo in place. Much to their dismay, the young people of that era worked just as hard in the opposite direction. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but my experience was that the decade represented an awakening among young people that there was a better way of achieving happiness and living their lives. When I look back on those times, I certainly have a nostalgic feeling of "what-if" we had REALLY changed society - as rapidly as we expected to do so. Who can really say what how the world would be today had our ideals and philosphies become mainstream? What was accomplished wasn't probably realized by those who fought so hard for change. It came upon US society gradually and morphed into the 70's then sorta lost steam in the mid 80's. We certainly changed many things for the better, but there are an equal number of things that simply remained the same. Now here we are in a new millenium, and we are at war again, the USA is divided along political party lines, and we have been attacked by fanatics who use religion to justify their actions. I get an overwhelming feeling - at times - that the more things change - the more they stay the same.

 

I get a tiny sense of what the 60's were like from my experience in the 90's dealing with the WWW movement. We were tapping in to this big collective brain, and there was this collective understanding that we were changing society forever, and it was scary to a lot of people. We were tapping into the technology way deeper than many of our parents could understand.

In the early days of the web, we were all trying stuff to push the limits of the technology, and there was a bit of an unspoken rule not to fuck with others, lest they fuck with you. We didn't have virus scans, adaware removal, or any of that crap. There was communal trust. Then Big Money got involved, and the viruses, malware, Bonzi Buddy, and all that other crap descended like a typhoon. By '00 regular scans of your system were routine, because any visit to a site could result in something bad happening. It's hard to remember back how innocent and naive we were in the early days.

Anyways, am I drawing parallels that don't exist? Do any of the old hippies here see some of the same social reengineering patterns between the 60's (in real life) and the 90's (in virtual life?)