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Sharron Bassano's avatar

"... the endless year of 1968 has ended. If you come of age today, the references of ’68 don’t have any lingering, meaningful, or even relevant connotations." Yes. And yet, for those of us who were THERE in 1968 ( 69,70,71,72) , in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Washington DC, marching in the streets, participating in public protests, attending rallies, writing letters, sitting in, picketing, it is still the benchmark by which we judge the sincerity, awareness, and commitment of youth today. Sitting in front of a computer talking trash on FB and twitter appears meaningless to me. A very salient and timely essay Charles! You got my dander up, and at my age my dander mostly just lies on the Laz-E-Boy and whimpers.

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Cahl Shoren's avatar

The paragraph that made me rethink everything I taught I knew about the sixties, from Joan Didion's The White Album: “This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

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