The truth the dead know

I am a child of the 80s. Which means that I've had a very ambivalent relationship to baby boomers.

On the one hand, as a teenager and young adult I thought they pretty much screwed the pooch. They had the chance to change the world (or so their mythology told us) but sold out, became yuppies, etc. Jerry Rubin went to Wall Street, yadda yadda. AND if they didn't sell out, they were burn-outs.

And of course, there was the music.
I love 60s music-- I grew up wanting to live on Haight and Ashbury.
I was probably the only kid in my high school who had a copy of "Surrealistic Pillow"-- not the greatest of 60s albums but it has some classics beyond Somebody To Love and White Rabbit( Check out Coming Back To Me, Today and Embryonic Journey).

The 80s bored me. The music was slick, overproduced and challenged no one (which is why I just didn't care for Michael Jackson. He seemed to be just another 80s star; slick and dull. His 80s songs never felt like pop gems to me. They just felt dreadfully superficial. His 70s songs...that's another story)

So my 60s heroes , were either burn-outs, sell-outs, or dead.

I had a lot of mixed feelings about the whole lot of them.
For example, The Grateful Dead.

I could never get into them because they seemed to symbolize what killed the 60s-- overindulgence.
I don't think I could have sat through an entire Dead show.

But I do love this song- I prefer the all-acoustic original but this is cool.




About my boomer ambivalence, I've reached a point where I have little ambivalence. They did the best the could given what they had. I started thinking better of them, when the book , "The Best Generation" came out.

I read it, and just couldn't agree with the basic premise. Beating back the Nazis was a brave and incredible thing, but it was also the ONLY moral choice. It was a fight against absolute evil. It was brave, courageous and heroic. The sacrifices were immense.

Yet, it was an obvious battle. The boomer generation had a battle at home to deal with. It was a difficult moral choice to make. How many boomers took on their own racist families, their own sexist parents? How many of those relationships were broken through the years because boomers confronted the evil in their own homes?

Think of men and women in the South that had the courage to buck their own communities, their own families because of lynchings, beatings, and a social apartheid that nearly destroyed the foundations of this country.
They too sacrificed--- some with their lives, some by giving up their identities as "southerners", or as children of their own racist parents. There was carnage there too but not as obvious. There was carnage on the sides of Latinos and Blacks
as well- we too had to fight the complacency and ills in our own homes (yes... we have a history of notorious sexism).

I realize that many boomers fought these home-front battles in different ways.
But the older I get the more I appreciate the battle they fought.


Here is Today from Surrealistic Pillow,



and Coming Back to Me



what the heck ... Embryonic Journey