I was in the middle of the whole ’60s vibe during my high school and college days on the Left Coast. I visited Berkeley, Haight, and all the other centers of the New Age in America. All I saw were scummy people and scummier looking neighborhoods riddled with drugs and venereal diseases. I then joined the US Navy, served as a hospital corpsman, finished college, got married and raised two children. Meanwhile, I saw friends and relatives who followed the New Age narcissistic mantra fall into drugs, alcohol, multiple failed marriages and early deaths. In the 1990s I thought that perhaps the first boomer elected as president would prove the worthiness of my generation. Instead, it proved what I saw 30 years earlier—scummy people leading scummy lives with absolutely nothing to show for it except a heap of social and financial carnage and destruction. As I near retirement and look to the next four to eight years, I sense that we are in for another absurd and violent ride that we saw in the ’60s. I pray otherwise, for the sake of my children and grandchildren.
