The lingering fragrance (is that patchouli oil?!?) left behind by the ever dwindling number of baby boomers shuffling off the planet brings to mind the lofty goals and miserly achievements of Generation Us.
Oh how we would change the world, heal the planet and bring the Age of Aquarius to the masses hungry for New Age slogans, bumpersticker politics and menus of brown rice and seaweed.
Wasn’t our generation going to end the wars, stop the racism and save Mother Earth? Wasn’t our generation destined to repudiate our parents and grandparents through the mind-expanding powers of marijuana and LSD? Wouldn’t we show the world how to care and share and live peaceful lives of healing and happiness?
Do I have it right so far?
And do I have it right when I suggest we look back at the wreckage brought about by the hippies and the beatniks and rock ‘n’ roll and sex and drugs and tuning in, dropping out and making love not war and try to not laugh? Or cry.
Everything bequeathed us by our parents, by the world and society is worse today. Big cities just a few decades ago were beautiful thriving and safe.
Today you would have to think a long time before failing to name a single city improved over what it had been in 1955. Or 1965. It certainly would not be San Francisco. It couldn’t possibly be New York. It couldn’t even be Ukiah.
Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo and Akron are cities I’m comfortable writing about, and today they are crumbling, hollowed out and dangerous, and have been since the 1970s.
It happened because baby boomers had revolution and other romantic fantasies on their minds. So they held demonstrations where they yelled and rioted, and then went back home to their parents’ house in the suburbs, took off their headbands and Che Guevara t-shirts and settled in to watch themselves on the 5 o”clock news.
Great work, kids. Now the colored folk who live(d) in those 12 square blocks on Cleveland’s east side can spend a few decades rebuilding their neighborhoods and lives.
Armed with ignorance and self-righteous fury, we went back to college and marched and whined, demanding “classrooms without walls” and to be able to give ourselves our own grades and have coed dorms and no more ROTC on campus. Bold, courageous and revolutionary, eh?
Then we all went to Woodstock and next we moved into communes where we planted tofu and organic wheat, got married to redwood trees, had kids who went to Free Schools and then we decided this “back-to-the-land” stuff was strictly for farmers and cut off our hair and took jobs with non-profit organizations that helped Afro Americans rebuild cities we destroyed five years earlier.
Our motives were selfish, stupid and lacking any sort of historical or intellectual foundation other than a few 15-minute lectures on how America and capitalism were responsible for all the misery in the world. Raise your hand if you have questions.
Our generation celebrated the cheap thrills of drugs in exchange for hard-earned wisdom of the ancients, the Bible, the seekers and the scholars.
We hated our parents and everyone else over age 30, but elevated celebrities like Janis and Jimi and Eric Clapton to sainthood. We repudiated the great, striving literature of Faulkner and Chekov for the watery stuff of Ferlinghetti, Stephen King and scores of best-selling mediocrities.
Drugs were our sacraments and our downfall. We adored and advocated drug use with any fashionable buzz, starting with marijuana, then on to hashish, cocaine, opium, speed, Valium, Vicodin, Quaaludes, crack, heroin and fentanyl. We boasted of sampling every drug in existence with the lone exception of tobacco, because cigarettes are bad for your health.
Now we’re all 80 years old unless we’re already dead, yet I’ve never heard anyone from M-m-m-my G-g-generation apologize for the ignoble mess we’ve made of everything we touched and a lot of things we didn’t.
Let me be first. I’m truly sorry I trampled on every garden I ever saw, set fire to admirable traditions and customs that deserve/require protection with a duty to pass those beliefs and honors to the next generation.
I wish I hadn’t sent my daughter to Mariposa School. I’m sorry I didn’t go camping with son Lucas. It was the Golden Age of bad parenting, if that explains.
I also apologize for Disco music, Dan Quayle, Fabian, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tiny Tim, head shops, Bernie Sanders, Paul Ehrlich, sandalwood incense, Gonzo Journalism, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Weather Underground, Easy Rider, Pink Floyd.
(Tommy Wayne Kramer is California’s only Board Certified Columnist; Tom Hine, his caretaker and the author of the ever-popular “Assignment: Ukiah” series, is a licensed private investigator.)
I know TWK does his thing with broad brush and buzzwords and tries to be funny making shit up but this one is kind of a crock from my point of view. (And I say this as a fellow buffoon, with memories of Max Alvis, Jack Kralick, Johnny Romano, Birdie Tebbetts, Hal Lebovitz, the Tribe in Tucson, and all the Wahoo I still want to some day drink a beer over…)
I was there in hippie world and we just lived our lives, we didn’t tell others what to eat or smoke or do, we just did our own thing. (How would that even work? Go to town and try to get the rednecks to hold hands in a circle? Never happened…)
Society wasn’t affected much by our pot smoking, dancing, free sex and generally living for now. Remember where the government and laws and the presidents were back then? It wasn’t a patchouli revolution.
Agree with you, Paul, as a former commune guy way back in time. I also looked askance at this column, much too broad a brush.