It was a decade of milestone moments. The Impossible Dream Red Sox won the '67 pennant forever cementing my love of baseball. I saw Jimi Hendrix at the first concert I attended, and hung out in Harvard Square buying records at the Coop, while gawking at the hippies. I got my driver's license; bought my first car, and made plans to attend Boston University, where I would launched Howard Stern's career.
It was a great time to be young. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and technology was amazing us at every turn. By the end of the decade, television had replaced radio as America's dominant media.
There was a lot of excitement and hope for the future.
But it was also a very troubled era.
I remember where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. (In church with my Catholic grammar school class participating in something called 48 Hours.)
Within the span of just a few months in 1968 my grandfather passed away and Martin Luther King was killed. Bobby Kennedy, too. The Vietnam War was spiraling out of control. Students peacefully protesting at Kent State were shot. African Americans looking to be treated as equals were attacked and lost their lives. People took the streets to protest.
Voters, who were concerned about what they saw as the lack of respect for the law, as well as societal changes that didn't quite fit their morals and beliefs, coalesced into something labeled the Silent Majority. They elected a President, who promised to restore order and traditional norms.
The 1960's was a "decade of extremes," according to Kenneth Walsh writing in US News and World Report. "A decade of promise and heartbreak."
I'm sure I'm not the only one of my generation, who has been thinking about the '60s, while witnessing recent events.
The struggle for racial equality was never won and now racism has reared its ugly head with a surprising ferocity. African Americans and other minorities legitimately fear for their lives, especially if they're in an area where someone might think they "shouldn't be." The list of senseless deaths is growing longer.
While many of us may not understand the logic or purpose, cities are burning again, as they did in the '60s.
The divide between and among generations in terms of personal beliefs sometimes seems as wide as it was during the days of Flower Power and free love, if not wider.
Current technology, which would amaze the astronauts of the '60s, has been both a blessing and a curse.
Countless lives have been saved by advances in medicine and emergency medical care. With today's technology, my grandfather would have easily survived that heart attack in 1968.
Computers and cell phones have improved our business and personal lives. Many of us have been able to work at home during the pandemic, because of high speed internet and technologies like Zoom and FaceTime.
We have direct access to books and music, making those weekly trips I took to Harvard Square no more than a back-in-the-day story. I saw Jimi Hendrix (with opening act Soft Machine) at the Carousel Theatre in Framingham when I was 15. My eight year old granddaughter recently attended her first concert via YouTube.
But technology, which we thought would be a unifier, has done the exact opposite. It has spread misinformation and given a loud and visible platform to those with extreme views. Too many have become intolerant of people with different ideas and are reluctant to learn when presented with information that disagrees with their version of the truth.
We've been through challenging times before. A new book, Lincoln on the Verge, chronicles the issues our 16th President faced as he prepared to take office. The disparities between the North and South that contributed to the start of the Civil War are strikingly similar to the philosophical, economic, and technological differences between various part of the country today.
Lincoln quickly learned that he had been elected because of the telegraph. It took a few days for word to reach Jefferson Davis that he was the new President of the Confederacy, because of the lack of telegraph services in the more rural south. This is not unlike the disparity in access to high speed internet -- or internet service at all -- in various parts of the country today.
But the biggest difference between now and then?
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln traveled by high speed train from Springfield to the U.S. Capitol.
We can only hope that the next Abraham Lincoln is somehow winging his/her way to Washington now.
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