"When Did "The Sixties" Really Begin? Here's Why It Matters" (I don't quite Agree)

[deutsey]

16. Thoughts on packaging time, by Utah Phillips

I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn’t live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it would get ‘em in serious trouble.

No, it’s not that “Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Nineties” – that whole idea of decade packages. Things don’t happen that way… No, that, that packaging of time is a journalistic convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that.

Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.
― Utah Phillips

Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go.
― Utah Phillips