The Sixites

I recently finished reading a book by Tom Brokaw; Boom: Voices from the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the 60's and Today. Mr. Brokaw identifies the 60's as the time from 1963 to 1974 and, as the title suggests, he makes personal reflections and shares the reflections of others on the significant changes that occurred during this time. Vietnam, Civil rights, counter culture, politics, women's liberation all are viewed through the lens of 40 years looking back and today's perspective.
Brokaw was a young man at this time just entering his career of journalism and broadcasting in 1963, so his reflections are of a young adult, and his profession gave him some unique insight and opportunities to report the changes occurring.
At the beginning of the period that Brokaw identifies I was a 9th grader and at the end of the "sixties" I had graduated from college, married and was ready to start a family. So my experience in the 60's is a different perspective looking through the lens of a person growing up and reaching a level of maturity that passed for adulthood.
From Brokaw's viewpoint so many of the changes taking place must have seemed vastly different than his world as a youth, but for me and those of my generation, our natural need to rebel against the "way things are" made the changes of sixties something that I may have taken for granted. While reading the book I found myself reflecting on that period and some of the changes that occurred.
I know that growing up in Galesburg, Il, I can remember being told that there was a separate beach and pavilion for Blacks, on the opposite side of Lake Storey and across from the "white" pavilion and beach; but that by high school it wasn't uncommon to see blacks at the main Lake Storey pavilion and beach.
When I began college, there were fairly strict rules about dorm curfews, male and female visitors in the dorms, and in loco parentis, but by my senior year the opposite sex was allowed to visit your dorm room and overnight visits were unofficially allowed. We were experimenting with drugs at college, but I was amazed as a college senior of the incoming freshmen who had done more experimentation that we had.
I hadn't fully considered it until reading Brokaw's book, but just like the 60's influenced my left of center politics; for a whole another group of people the 60's influenced them to the right of center politically. Which helps explain that our generation that grew up in the 60's gave us two presidents: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Brokaw spends a lot of time on the events of 1968. That year was representative of all the turmoil and change of the sixties. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the re-election of Richard Nixon, the largest number of US troops in Vietnam occurred in August of that year,the summer Olympics in Mexico City, the riots in major cities after King's assossinations, and the Apollo 8 trip around the moon, to mention only a few.
We are all a product of the times we grew up in; and maybe every generation feels that the decade they grow up in is turbulent and world changing; but the sixties put a unique stamp on me and those of my generation and continues to have ripple effects to today.
How do you view the sixties and the changes that occurred and your memories of that time?

Perspective on D-Day and time

The recent 65th anniversary of D-Day provided me another lesson in the perspective of time and age. Simply, when I was born in 1949, D-Day had occurred only 5 years before(June 6, 1944). To an adult, 5 years is not a very long time: the 9/11 attack occurred 8 years ago. In 2004 (a short four years ago), you may remember George W. won his second presidential election and the earthquake and tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean that Dec.

Although as an infant and a young child, the world is such a small, small place that I wouldn't be able to understand or appreciate that the world had been at war and that war had ended only four short years earlier.(May 1945, V-E day ;Sept. 1945 V-J day) But now, with an adult perspective of time and age, I have a much different appreciation of how fresh the memories of the previous years must have been for my parents and grandparents in 1949 and growing up in the fifties.

My generation has always understood the "boomer" label given to us by the media. But unfortunately it has take me a long time to more better understand the perspective of the parents of that generation.

Zen and the art of Moving: Part 2

It now appears certain that I'll survive our latest move from Dubuque to Des Moines. There really wasn't any doubt, but still, moving is a young person's activity. The packing, lifting, carrying takes its toll on a 60 year-old body. It's not just the doing of those things, but the repetition of doing them many times over a few days. We were lucky in one sense that we moved out of our home and had 8 days before we moved into our condo. So I could rest up a bit between packing and unpacking.

A few observations: We used a Portable On Demand Storage system (PODS)since we were going to have some time between leaving one place and moving into the other. It worked ok. I was surprised how dirty some of our things had gotten sitting in the POD for 8 days. In spite of packing things tightly, and a system to keep the POD fairly level during tranport and storage; things shifted in the POD resulting in some minor problems. One POD wasn't quite enough for our belongings.

We waited until the last morning to pack the essentials of what we needed to live. That last morning we ended up having more to pack than I thought we'd have.

Having some equity in the house meant that we got to deposit a rather large check in our banking account after the sell. Of course, we had to write a rather large check off it for our condo, but it was nice to look at a large bank balance for a few days, at least.

It's great having a daughter and son-in-law in the town you're moving to. We certainly took advantage of their hospitality and willingness to help paint and unpack.

In spite of trying to be more zen-like in my approach to the move and the stress related to it. The best realization I got was that you need to accept the suffering and stress with any change and get through it.