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I liken growing up gen-x as being born after a cultural neutron bomb had been dropped aka, "the sixties". All the structures of "the fifties" were intact but everything had died. The whole thing was a sham and a lie but few people would admit it. Maybe that's also the reason for the popularity of zombies since then.

This is good stuff, brother...

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This is kind of how I have been feeling lately. I grew up right outside of a dying city in a "broken-collar" neighborhood. So that desire to build something different was baked into all of my friends. Unfortunately, the opioid epidemic ran right over many of them. It has been frustrating watching how things have been unfolding. I would say that we are obsessed with using outdated 20th century ideas to confront 21st century problems. Anyway I'm happy to stumbled across your writings. I look forward to reading more.

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I'm a bit older so my disillusionment with the Sixties came in 1971 when I went to the record store to buy a copy of John Lennon's "Imagine." At the time albums cost $2.80 but the quirks of inflation had raised the price, unknown to me, to $3.10. So I stood there in the store, looking at the smirking face of a millionaire, and sang to myself "Imagine this album didn't cost $3.10."

I have long felt that the Sixties to a certain group of people is like WWII - the last "Good War." In the Forties the Allies were going to save the world from European Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. In the Sixties, the hippies/yippies were going to save the world from racism, sexism, and a few other things. But eventually all the yippies became yuppies and traded their Birkenstocks for BMWs.

If people get nostalgic for the Sixties after watching "Woodstock" they need to sit down and watch "Gimmie Shelter." Visionaries like Martin Luther King have been replaced by race hustlers like Al Sharpton. By 1975 it was apparent to Bob Dylan that the Sixties were dead. Too bad no one seems to have listened.

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Jul 27, 2022·edited Jul 27, 2022Liked by FFatalism

Interesting. My parents were married in the late 60s, but they did not at all like what they were seeing culturally and basically ignored it as we were growing up, which for me was 80s and 90s as I was born at very very end of the 70s lol. I didn’t even explore the culture of my “era” until I was almost an adult, though I am still “of” it in ways I can’t avoid, of course.

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I was a teenager in the 80s, in Luton, so your piece rings several bells. I was lucky enough to get out. My crowd were the anarcho punks. In my experience (and memory) we took from the 60s what we saw was worth keeping: the belief in peace and love as something to anchor to. Remember Crass?

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I may be a bit biased and perhaps the hippie thing had a longer shelf life in North America. I'm born near the end of the boomer generation and still retreat often to the 60s and 70s for those cultural touchstones where literally everything changed in a short period of time. That still amazes me. For example if you compare the period of, say, 1960-1979 and then 1980-1999, the first epoch is a more tumultuous sea change across any element measurable - politics, fashion, music, social mores, etc. (Yes, I'm grabbing punk as an outgrowth of what preceded it stylistically despite the internecine rivalry between the old legacy bands and say, The Clash, but bear with me). What annoys me to know end, however, is the smug hypocrisy of the elites who claim to have been from that era and somehow reflect its progressive and subversive values of the time. What a ruse. What we got was decades of hyper capitalist neoliberalism, war mongering and cancel culture. What's love got to do with that? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Here's my whimsical take on, among other things, how weirdly things have shifted: https://punditman.substack.com/p/time-kept-on-slippin-slippin-slippin

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