Things I hated about the Sixties:
1. Girls were treated badly. A girl who had sex before marriage was gossiped about and tainted. A girl who had multiple sex partners was outside the pale, an outcast.
Being a lonely bit of a bookwormish kid, I hung around with my older brother’s friends, and how they talked about girls educated me. If girls and women gossip, they had nothing on the boys, who were merciless.
The absolute worst were girls who grew up in female-dominated homes and read romance novels! If a boy said, “I love you,” they believed it, to their considerable detriment (never listen to what a man says; watch what he does).
2. The beginnings of the “celebrity culture,” which is in full flower today started with the Beatles. They were OK when they were doing sprightly pop tunes, but when they went to an ashram in India and aspired to become philosophers, they put my face to sleep. Since when did melody boys from Liverpool become pompous moralizers?
It’s just gotten worse with time, with entertainers jetting off to Malaysia for an after-party while spouting vapidities about the climate. Stay home or shut up.
3. Maybe because we grew up in a university town, we hated the “duck and cover” bomb drills.
The government was miserably behind in this. If you were close enough to have to “shelter” from a nuclear blast, you’d better just stand up and take it, rather than have your skin peel off agonizingly later.
We kids did not take it seriously (neither did the adults).
P.S. You can’t live without skin, it’s your largest organ.
4. The unending dog’s dinner that was Vietnam. The lower-class, poorer boys were drafted, the better-off ones slipped the noose.
Cleaning up after the family’s dinners at night I had to listen to an endless rendition of the body count on the television news. It was OK that 67 of “our boys” were bagged that day because we “got” 309 of the “gooks.” Therefore, we were doing better.
As an anxious reader of the evening Star Enterprise, I read letters to the editor that would gas off on how the boys in ’Nam were “not really soldiers” as they had been.
“We went to the war and stayed there for four whole years! We didn’t come home until it was won! These kids just get dropped in and then pulled out nine months later, what is that, they are not really fighters.”
The “kids” who got “bagged,” well, that was too bad. The boys who went were shamed when they came home from ’Nam and the boys who escaped it were shamed for not going at all.
5. The Paris Accords. While Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger were cluster-blathering about the shape of the treaty table, after unimaginable days in hell, my friend would sit smoking with his buddies watching the Vietcong trudge up all night bringing up fresh ammo and supplies, and they were not allowed to fire upon them.
That was credited to the clever negotiations. Unhappily, the bullets and rockets that would descend on them the next day were strangely real, not power points. Shock!
I am sure many of you can add to this list!
Kaaren French lives in Brownsville.
