Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
I went to a funeral service of an old friend last week. He was a few years older than me but only a few. We hung out and partied quite a bit when we were younger. His death was the latest in an increasing succession of old acquaintances passing on. We’ve lost at least five of our peers in as many years. There should be nothing surprising or significant about this, yet it comes a shock every time. Who ever thought we’d get old?
I grew up during the late sixties and early seventies, smack dab in the middle of the hippie counterculture movement. The youth movement was king then. Young people were the activists and trendsetters. Free love, mind-expanding drugs, and anti-war political activism were our creeds, our guideposts. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, some of the most dominant bands in the world, were mostly young guys in their twenties. Political activists Fred Hampton, Bobby Seals, and Abby Hoffman were young, too. My generation grew up with our own music, our own politics, and our own culture. And it eventually became subsumed into the mainstream culture. And then archived. After all, the album Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones is fifty years old. So is Harvest by Neil Young. So is the “classic” film The Godfather.
Our generational contributions to the culture, which seemed so significant at that time, are becoming artifacts of a lost age, soon to be tucked away into a dusty corner of the attic. The Who and The Stones are still touring, although members are presently in their late seventies and early eighties. While their contributions to the arts cannot be underestimated, they are now doddering shadows of their former selves, sort of like the animatronic dinosaur exhibits at the museum. They’re dropping off, too. Charlie Watts, gentleman drummer for the Rolling Stones, recently passed away. Iconic singer and rock star David Bowie passed away in 2016. Soul singer Bill Withers and songwriter supreme John Prine are also no longer with us.
So what? People get old and die. That’s a law of nature. Things change. That’s a law of nature, too. Cultural norms change. That’s human nature. We know these things, yet we still find it hard to acknowledge that our past is gone forever. We reminisce, we go to our high school reunions, we buy tickets for fiftieth anniversary commemorative concert tours (see Roger Waters), and—yes—we listen to classic rock radio. We go to vintage record stores to repopulate our vinyl LP collections with old Band and Dylan albums. And, like many of our parents, we listen to the latest music embraced by our children, shake our heads, and wonder what the hell is wrong with them.
Looking backwards isn’t a bad thing. If we don’t understand our own history and what caused it, we will relive it—but this is an adage which does not always ring true. Today is a case in point. We understand the causes and effects of fascism, but unfortunately now, we seem to be on the verge of repeating the mistake of allowing it to rise again. Ironically, that phenomenon is a byproduct of another sort of nostalgia, a desire to make America great “again”, a sentiment harking back to what is—I imagine in whatever goes on in the mind of a MAGA—an America of suburban lawns and white picket fences (enclosing white families) in a world safe from fear, doubt, crime, and thought. And so, the personal becomes political. When Senator Tip O’Neill once said, “All politics is local,” I wonder whether he intended the term “local” to signify memory or personal longing.
We all desire to relive and recreate (as much as possible) our own personal histories, a desire that increases exponentially after the age of fifty—partly because looking forward has become so much more frightening. Celebrating that fiftieth birthday, crossing the half-century mark, means we’re probably past halftime and into the waning seconds of the third quarter of our lifetimes. This is fertile ground for midlife crises, regrets, desperate new beginnings, and obsessive remembering.
Memory is as reliable as we want it to be. To a seventy-year-old, the dimly remembered sixties probably seem like a halcyon era of lofty ideals, unbridled freedom, and infinite sex. We remember what we want to remember. The discrimination, sexism, misogyny, and institutionalized racism of that time remain unfocused in the background of these reminiscences, foggy in our recollections. We remember Woodstock but not the Altamont Speedway; the Chicago Democratic Convention, but not the casualties of the University of Wisconsin bombing, and on and on.
If we do look around us—or forward, we see young people once again manning the helm for change. Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, X Gonzales, and other young people are at the forefront calling out for change. They’re the new breed, the changing of the guard, the new hope.
And for all the honest efforts of the sixties generation to change the world, we failed, eventually straightening up and becoming mainstreamed into the American consumer culture. We finished school, got jobs, got married, had kids, bought houses, and saved for retirement. We became our parents, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Fall is here. The leaves are changing, the crops are ripe, the birds are migrating, and the animals are fattening up for the long sleep of winter lying before them. We might look back fondly at the possibilities of the spring garden and the fullness of summer, but winter is coming. My generation is passing; we lose members—famous, infamous, and insignificant—every day. Soon our time will be past, and memories of our contributions to society will have faded. Who will remember us? Who remembers what the youth of Athens was doing in 50 B.C.? Who knows what Victorian youth believed and did in dark alleys back in the day? History will have some of these answers, but the core of those generations’ sensibilities is probably gone forever. And for all we might fret about what a great loss this would be, the truth is that our generation was probably neither more nor less than any others. It was just ours.
Winter is coming.