The Mythology of My Youth

Today I watched a Tik Tok video, posted on a social media site, that contained a multitude of media clips from the 60s and 70s…  threads.com/@george_schnell/post/DXaL5jcCpiO?xmt=AQF0Cwp0VwxK5qU4m4YpOYK9sSp6QWEmb1-pAeoXvyDrkwNs5S-71yK86E9G2Fsd7726GiWNhreads.com/@george_schnell/post/DXaL5jcCpiO?xmt=AQF0Cwp0VwxK5qU4m4YpOYK9sSp6QWEmb1-pAeoXvyDrkwNs5S-71yK86E9G2Fsd7726GiWNhreads.com/@george_schnell/post/DXaL5jcCpiO?xmt=AQF0Cwp0VwxK5qU4m4YpOYK9sSp6QWEmb1-pAeoXvyDrkwNs5S-71yK86E9G2Fsd7726GiWN

I recognized every clip - from Woodstock to The Dick Van Dyke Show, to news clips from the first moon landing, to the Beatles, to clips from popular movies of the time, like Midnight Cowboy.  What followed the post were hundreds of nostalgic replies from Boomers, many bemoaning what has happened to America since those days. Those replies are a reflection of the same sentiments I hear so often from my peers:

“Those were the days.”

“Life was so simple back then.”

“We’ve gone downhill since then.”

“These kids today don’t appreciate the good life.”

And on and on.

And indeed, so many things about those time were magical, and I do regret that largely due to the incursion of the Internet and social media into all our lives, there is a certain degree of innocence that today’s (and the future’s) youth will never experience. But I submit that my peers are looking at this video, a reflection of our youth, though rose-colored glasses. Because from my perspective, the pleasant, nostalgic fabric of that period is woven through with threads of horror, anger, fear, frustration, and a feeling of hopelessness.  

I remember three assassinations that made a deep impression on my vulnerable teen and early adult life - John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.  Everybody remembers JFK - the world stopped turning when that happened. But the murders of Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, in 1963 and 1965, were barely a blip on our radar.  I was 20 years old, a vulnerable college student, in 1968, when the assassinations of MLK and RFK brought on a sadness and feeling of hopelessness that were hard for me to shake off.  It was the same time that young men my age were being drafted and shipped off to Viet Nam, a hopeless war that took the lives of over 50,000 U.S. troops. The ones who survived returned home, not to a grateful nation, but to unmerited derision from mobs of protesters,  angry at an overseas debacle that was supposed to save the world from communism, yet seemed to go on forever with no resolution in sight. Scenes from protests around the nation along with horrific scenes of death and destruction dominated the news daily. Yet, in the video I watched today, I saw few clips of those protests, and no clips of the beatings and derision  endured by civil rights protesters from the early 60s.

Watching the video again, I noted that most of the clips were of TV shows with all-white casts, where the wife was a stay-at-home mom in pearls and heels who knew her place in society - while I couldn’t get a credit card in my name.  My reality was that white men taught almost all my college classes, and, when I landed my first teaching job, white men staffed almost all administrative positions in my district’s schools. Similarly, the fact that so many of my teaching colleagues were women my age and older was a reflection of the limited career options from which women could choose. It was perfectly acceptable, when interviewing for a job, I was told by a high school principal that I was mighty cute, but he wanted a man for the job, and my husband was instructed by his boss to eliminate secretarial applicants who weren’t good-looking. And an applicant of color?  Forget about it.

I enjoyed at the numerous clips representing the music of the time - the Beatles, Elvis, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the crowds at Woodstock.  I guess the music evokes more emotion in me than any reminders of that era.  I still think of it as the greatest music ever produced.  But I also remember that Janis, Jimi, and Elvis died of drug overdoses, that John Lennon was murdered, and that Elvis, at age 24, carried on a relationship with a 14-year-old girl, whose parents allowed her to move in with him at Graceland when she turned 17. That Woodstock was a financial disaster, attended by a crowd of young people - many of whom were disenfranchised, rebellious, and drug-addled - who gleefully trashed the farmland of a generous landowner who never recovered from the loss.

And I couldn’t overlook the overdose of clips featuring a wiggling, hair-tossing Ann Margret, a stunner who oozed sexiness and who all us teens wanted to be.  Those clips are a reminder that teen idol and sex symbol worship hasn’t really changed that much, except that our youth today are bombarded with such images, much more graphic and 24 hours a day, from a device we could never have even imagined in our wildest dreams, during our tender teen years. I do fear that an over-reliance on our cell phones are dumbing us all down, but I’m also amazed at the phenomenal barrage of information available to us today, at the touch of a screen, when researching just a tidbit of what we now learn each day would have taken us hours, and even days, poring over the contents of the library’s card catalog. Having worked with teens for decades, I can’t help but laugh at my fellow Boomers’ lamentations concerning the downfall of “these kids today.” Because I haven’t really seen a change in teens from the 1960s to today.  They’re the same, goofy, curious, risk-taking, hormonal, self-involved, fun-loving people I started teaching in 1969, barely having emerged from teendom myself. What HAS changed is the world around them and their adaptations to that world. 

I’m amused by that video montage, but just amused, not stricken by longing for a better time. Because it wasn’t a better time for most people. A popular political movement today pushes for a return to the post World War 2 era…a supposedly “simpler” time.  But it was a time when people of color were subjugated and racism accepted, when being gay was ruinous and even danagerous, when a woman’s job was to know her place, when polio, measles, and other childhood diseases killed, when the environment was beginning to disintegrate, when everything reeked of cigarette smoke, when we lived in stark fear of “the bomb.” The only thing I would personally exchange for that time is my health, energy, and peaches and cream complexion, which I took for granted as we all do at that age. The romanticism of that era is simply that - a romantic myth. I won’t be among the hundreds of respondents to that video like the one who said, “That was a good life I had.  I miss you, America…sad emoji.”  Is it any surprise he is a white, middle-class male? ‘Nuff said.