I am listening to Brendan Balfe’s radio retrospective on the 60s on RTE Radio 1 (his Five Decades historical series) and parts make me blink back tears, pulling up my own young child’s memories of those years. Somehow that decade has assumed a funky and fun, happy-go-lucky-but-with-cool-student-protests kind of aura. But this is just not what it was like (as the Balfe recordings underline); it was always a decade leavened with extreme anxiety, which undoubtedly contributed to the flip-side party atmosphere and shifting social mores. Just as the sheer unmitigated anxiety of the aggressive cold war posturing between the US and USSR in the 80s has for many been trivialised into a great disco anthem — Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes — so the 60s can be so easily boiled down to an extraordinary decade for rock and roll, fashion and parties.
But for many, including and perhaps especially small children, it was also a decade of unending fear and worry and anxiety. It is hard to explain what it was like to be a small child in a decade that witnessed the public assassinations of its leading politicians and social leaders; a war that went on and on until it became normalised (in some bizarre ways: a grade school fad was collecting POW and MIA bracelets honouring individual Viet Nam soldiers… I desperately wanted at least one but my parents would not indulge this strange fashion); nuclear threats; drugs and overdoses; weird, scary hippie street people; high profile serial killers and murders, some, like the Zodiac killer in my home area of the San Francisco bay, that directly threatened small children; starvation in countries in Africa and Asia, and then, the fears about ecological disaster, overpopulation, etc.
My very earliest memories are post-Cuban missile crisis era nuclear drills at school (!!!) where we learned to duck and take cover under a desk — now that would have helped a lot! But as tiny children we just learned, and accepted the idea of sirens and mushroom clouds. And also, the assassination of JFK (I was very small but remember the funeral because no cartoons were on TV; every black-and-white channel was, so drearily to a child, the funeral, with a little John-John Jr, about my age, barely beyond toddler-hood, bravely enduring the horror of saluting his own father’s coffin). Then Bobby Kennedy was shot and Martin Luther King, the latter being the first time I saw an adult cry, my black 3rd grade teacher at a memorial service at my school, when the flag was lowered to half mast (how amazing that this was done; what a progressive school). It seemed that if you tried to do anything to help people, you got shot. Hearing all those events on the radio clips, I cannot help but choke up — the horrible live coverage of the assassinations, the wonderful quavering speech at Bobby’s funeral by the late Ted Kennedy.
There was fear that your friends’ older brothers would be drafted and killed in Viet Nam; that your own younger brothers would grow up to die in such a war. There was acid rain and other forms of pollution, there was the fear of waiting at the busstop, as I had to do every morning, often alone and scared, when the Zodiac had said he would stop a schoolbus and then shoot all the little children as they came off.
No one ever, ever talked to kids about these things. We absorbed them and they affected us and our childhoods, even as we had ‘normal’ childhoods otherwise. We saw the pictures in Time and Newsweek of the Viet Cong soldier holding decapitated heads of enemy soldiers (a photo I am sure gave me a horror of anything to do with decapitation that endures to this day — I have never been able to watch a film with a decapitation and even the thought absolutely terrifies me). We saw the images of the starving Biafran children our age, with their distended stomachs. We watched the nightly news footage of the battles, the napalmings, the protest marches, the riot police. It was such a sad decade in so many ways, even though of course it had its wonders and excitements — the space programme and scientific breakthroughs, some great movies and TV shows, brilliant music (I was a Beatles fan by age 6 or 7, while summer camp bus trips and evening campfires were full of Bob Dylan singalongs); wonderful bright crazy clothes (I had Peter Mac shoes and a psychedelic dress in ‘hot’ pink, green and orange swirls that I wore with white fishnet nights and Mary Jane shoes to my grandmother’s 1967 wedding), baseball (this was the great era of the San Francisco Giants — Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Willie McCovey, listened to on a Sony transistor radio from ‘Santa’).
But only when the first Gulf War broke out — I was an adult teaching at San Jose State University by then — did I realise the legacy of unease and anxiety. At the first reports of missile attacks and bombings, that childhood terror flooded back. I rang my mother, a bit thrown that I felt so overwhelmed by this distant war as an adult. It turned out that this was a common reaction amongst a whole generation of my coworkers who grew up or came to adulthood in the 60s and early 70s and Viet Nam. Our students were, to our confusion, sanguine — students in an era of no draft, brought up on Sylvester Stallone movies. War was something they could cheer on. They were so disconnected. Meanwhile, this time around, small schoolchildren were seen as vulnerable and exposed. Programmes for addressing the subject of the war were swiftly developed; teachers worked with kids and their fears were discussed. That’s when it struck me that some of my own dis-ease clearly was the legacy of our being left to figure out this disturbing adult world of war, assassination, murder, protest, abductions, drugs and violence by ourselves in the 60s.
Can you ever truly address children’s fears? I don’t know — probably not. But you can give them a gentle supportive forum at school and home to speak about them, rather than leave them to worry and worry quietly and alone, as so many of us did through the 60s. Still, for western children, I think there is little since that has compared to the scariness of the 60s. And that sequence of assassinations, the sheer loss of good people, of Kennedys and King, still endures as a frightening burden all these years later for me. It still makes me feel so, so sad, and those recordings, those speeches, the truncated promise, those voices from a receding childhood, still can elicit tears many decades later, when I am far older than my so-young parents were back then.
Tags: 60s
