Musings on a sad anniversary
For many of us in the Baby Boom generation, the bubblegum and Howdy Doody of the 1950s gave a sense of security comfortably structured around the ideas of family and school. The sour dollop of McCarthyism was sufficient to urge participation in scouting and other youth organizations. It wasn’t perfect, but it really was an okay time in which to spend childhood. And absolutely nothing about it could have prepared us for the traumatic shocks that so horribly stained the following decade.
In the aftermath of the stunning horror of President Kennedy’s assassination we were encouraged to stand together, to remain strong through and beyond our shared grief. We were similarly bolstered following the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, but our coming of age had become irrevocably scarred by the bloodiness of the times, that carnage punctuated and amplified by the Vietnam War.
In a way, some of us held onto our sanity by momentarily losing our minds to drugs. Some of us resolved to look deeper and try harder to make the world a better, safer place. We freaked, we studied, we marched, we protested. And we became old enough to vote. We had entered the 1960s listening to songs about cars, blue suede shoes, and surfing. By the end of the decade our music had changed to political laments, celebrations of love, and pleas for peace.
Fast forward to that terrible September morning in 2001. It was terrifying and devastating. We cried, we prayed, and our leaders promised to bring the perpetrators to justice. But then our collective grief was studiously fanned into a growing conflagration of anger and fear accompanied by an increasingly loud xenophobia. From lapels to front porches, our flag became nothing more than a yardstick with which to measure the patriotism of our neighbors. Once more our youth were marched off to a questionable war. Some of us found solace in the music that had grown out of our earlier time of struggle. And as we remember the events of fifty years ago, some of us wonder what music comforts today’s generation.
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