A fellow baby Boomer's reminiscences of the 60s made me wonder how typical my own experiences had been.

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What first started me questioning how typical my experience had been was a recent conversation with someone whose approach seemed to have been 180 degrees apart from mine.  This individual talked first about the muscle cars he had driven during the late 60s, and then went on to describe himself as a hippie, based on his shoulder-length hair, tie-dyed shirts, bell bottoms, and so forth.  

My first reaction had been to suppress a chuckle:  how could a true hippie have driven a muscle car?  This guy had obviously only adopted a pose of hippiedom.  But when I thought about it a little further, I realized that his experience may have been as  representative as mine. 

I thought of various other people I had known, including my next door neighbor and childhood best friend.  This friend had in one sense gone the dropout flower-child route, but he was actually a small merchant (“hip capitalism” was what we called it back then), and was quite proud not only of his store, but also of his large new Pontiac Grand Prix—the one with the hood as long as a locomotive boiler.

Up until that point, I had always figured that, figuratively speaking, you joined the team before you put on the uniform.  But how many kids had actually done it in the opposite order?  How many had first adopted the outward trappings of The Movement, and then used them as a basis for bonding with kids who also looked the way they did, based on things like commiseration about how badly people with long hair were treated? 

Even my mother knew middle-aged guys who started showing up at business functions in Nehru jackets with gold chains.  If guys like that got so heavily into the “look” of the times, what in the world could anyone have expected of kids?

 

(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.