Generation JKF About to Re-Live the 60's in Their 60's: Are You Experienced? [View all]

[McCamy Taylor]

There is something liberating about growing older. You lose the biologic imperative to reproduce. Meaning that sex is no longer the first, second and third most pressing thing on your mind. This gives you a chance to return to the days of your youth, when you had mental clarity, when you looked at a flower and saw a flower, not a path towards getting into someone's pants. When you saw a shiny, sleek, brightly colored car and saw a car, not the years of education it would take to get the job that would give you the salary needed in order to buy the car. When you dreamed about unicorns as unicorns without waking to scribble a pitch for a kid's television show.

What is Generation JFK? That is my name for those of us whose first political memory is the JFK assassination. I was four when it happened. I recall watching my ex-marine father sitting in front of the motel television bawling his eyes out. It was the first and last time I ever saw him cry. That made it a momentous event. Why was he crying? Because the president of the United States had been shot.

Over the course of the next decade, the members of Generation JFK watched a lot people get shot. We watched a lot of people refuse to be deterred by threats of violence. We watched as the young men we admired obsessed not over sex but over how to evade the draft. We listened as women learned to "roar". We were encouraged by our teachers to think for ourselves, to cast off the obsolete old and embrace a bright, new future of universal love and harmony. And we learned several important lessons, the most important being the truth of the Buddhist axiom: Attachment Is Suffering. For, if my father had not allowed himself to become attached to the notion that a single person, Jack Kennedy would save us from ourselves, his world would not have crumbled around him when JFK was taken away.

You can lose a person, a leader, a single battle. You can not lose love. You can not lose courage. You can not lose yourself. Entering your teens and twenties, when you suddenly discover "sex" and relationships, you can lose sight of yourself and courage and love. You may find yourself temporarily constrained by an almost overwhelming desire to fit in, to look cool, to conform--to procreate. But that too passes. And then you reach the calm years, the post reproductive years that William Faulkner celebrated. The years when you no longer give a damn about being "cool" or "buff" or "kissable."

If you are a member of Generation JFK, the 1960's formed you and continue to inform you. And, as Generation JFKers enter their 60s, they find the 1960s within.

Namaste.