The Sixties

 

The 1960s were a time of great social upheaval and change, in some ways more rapid and dramatic than anytime in history, in part due to technology. Yet almost paradoxically, for most people at the time, that change was happening "out there" in the wider world, in the currents of politics and the interactions of nations and civilizations. For most people, especially living in a small town in the Midwest, daily life at the end of the 1960s was much the same as it was ten years before. The high-visibility changes of the 1960s that one saw on the television news, that upended our culture in a seemingly chaotic way, would not impact most people's daily lives until the decades afterwards. 

It's strange for me to imagine that in 1968, which was so turbulent and chaotic on a national level in the media, I was still only vaguely aware of those things going on. Martin Luther King was assassinated not long after the above photo was taken. My father adored King and had gone to see him speak at the Iowa State Memorial Union when he visited Ames. He was a very passionate advocate of "civil rights." King's death would have been something that hit him very hard. Yet I have not the slightest traction of a conscious memory of any of that. Likewise my mother practically worshipped the Kennedys. I can only imagine her sadness when Bobbie was killed only a few months later.

I say all of the above with the conscious awareness that we are now living in a time when the passions of politics are greater now than they were even in 1968. The changes that happening in civilization may be ones that dwarf the ones of that era. 

I felt this most strongly during the pandemic in 2020. Walking to the grocery store, only a few hundred feet away from our front door, and seeing the quiet parking lot, I thought to myself, "this feels like 1968."  I couldn't quite explain it even to myself, but it was partly because life had become simplified and the world contracted again. My life back then consisted of home, grandma's house, the store, church, Downtown, the bank, the clinic, the park, and a few other places. 

Now we are living in the time after that disruption, and so much, especially technology, is now accelerating beyond anyone's ability to keep up. Every week is a revolution. The biggest change is that there is little barrier between our daily lives and the wider world of the culture anymore. Increasingly the firewalls have been breached and we are pulled along with great currents without the buffer of a time to adjust.  Keeping this in mind is one of the things that keeps me sane lately. 

I understand why people are losing their minds. I understand why they are so angry. The world familiar to many seems to be disintegrating and there is little we can do about it. In this ravaged time, I find refuge in the personal relationships I still have. My impulse is to reach out and buttress the connections I still have, like lashing ourselves together on a life raft in a storm lest we be swept overboard.