When we last spoke we were crossing in to the full on media rampage of the sixties. We had television and radio and newspapers then. That was about it for mass media. We lived in an age where the sword of Damocles was precariously positioned over our collective heads. Society here in the U.S. was starting to crack. Splinter groups had always existed here. From religious to communists and even free love groups were found from coast to coast.
It took a national media to feed them to the bursting point. We saw and heard widely varied groups from the Beats to the John Birch Society. The draft continued on and we were wetting our feet in the Viet Nam situation.
The draft was a problem for some. An inevitability for others but since we were not at war it was not something that caused too much distress. Just something that some had to do and get it over with. Not long after the coup de tat in Viet Nam we started to send troops. Not as combatants, just as military advisers. In Hindsight it was a mistake of epic proportions to have backed the generals in their efforts to take control. Now a draft notice was much more frightening. The handwriting was on the wall. Go to Viet Nam and you stood a fair chance of not coming back alive. Suddenly there was organized resistance to the draft, quite small at first but as the war escalated, the opposition was louder, larger and much more visible.
Pop culture began to change too as the first of the post war baby boomers started to hit college age. They were taller, healthier, and better educated than any other generation of Americans. More were attending college, more had funds to concentrate on college without the need for hour of underpaid labor to support their educations and that gave them leisure time that had never before existed in college students.
Again technology gave rise to many new ways of entertaining themselves. Transistor radios, record players, and of course television contributd to their leisure time. Rock and roll was a growing trend and the British invasion was the key that tied them all together.
Folk music and the old troubadors of the great depression along with the embrace of Blues gave them a wider perspective of different culture and ways of political thought.
Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan all became heros to a growing anti-war sentiment among young people. For what it is worth I believe that a lot of that sentiment was fueled by the threat of conscription and the possibility of being sent off to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Still these poets and singers becam a binding force that tied distant groups together and the advent of cheap aand easy long distance telephone calls coupled with the coverage of the anti-war events by the television networks served to both polarize public opinion and to show that there was a national following of these sentiments be they pro or anti war.
Followed shortly by this little ditty that is rarely heard as it was originally recorded.
Domestic problems began to boil up to the surface too. Civil rights and the injustice of racism and classist laws were questioned at first and then openly challenged. The status quo was not willing to change and a war of sorts began to overwhelm the inner cities. Riots and demonstrations became the rule of the day.
As the sixties went on, technology did too. We finally launched geostationary communications satellites. It became possible to see events around the globe live and in full color.
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daisyjane
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Dr. Ziggy Mütter-Job
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Jonathan Wolfman
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Comments
A nostalgic trip down memory lane - thank you. Well done !
♥R
rated with love
Lezlie