Photo by Busy Beaver Button Museum | CC BY 2.0
Jerry Rubin, a “founding father” of the Yippies, is widely credited with having come up with the slogan “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” He no doubt did say that, many times back in the day, but it was Jack Weinberg, another leader of the 1964-5 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, who said it first.
Being old enough to remember a time when that precept rang true, I am finding it difficult to deal with the fact that fifty years have now passed since 1968, the watershed year of the fabled “sixties.” But even in Trump’s America, facts are facts; there is no denying that the commemorations taking place this year of the events of that year mark “golden anniversaries.”
I trust that I am not the only one who feels this way; that almost everyone who lived through the major political events of that year, as a participant or observer, does as well.
In the United States, 1968 was about race relations and the Vietnam War. Elsewhere, the concerns were different, but the spirit everywhere, on all the four corners of the earth, was the same. The imagination was in power.
Many a soixante-huitard, as the French say, has died since then, and many have become decrepit. By ordinary human standards, 1968 was a long time ago. Nevertheless, to me and, I presume, to many others, the events of that year feel like they happened yesterday.
The events of fifty years before 1968 felt like ancient history back then. Is…