I am ashamed of how my generation acted in the 1960s, and the only reason that I am not more angry at myself and my friends is because we were so very young. I’m still puzzling over why we lost our moorings. I’d say it was money. We acted that way because we could afford to. It was the first time in the history of the world that anything like this size of a generation had been anything like that rich, and it was a shock to everybody’s system. There’s nothing we did that Lord Byron wouldn’t have done if he’d had a good stereo.
You have this convergence: an extremely unpopular and possibly unwise war, and birth control. The sudden idea that nothing had any consequences. There’s that Philip Larkin poem — sexual intercourse was invented in 1963. And the drugs went everywhere in a year.
P.J. O’Rourke, interviewed by Scott Walter, “The 60’s Return”, American Enterprise, May/June 1997.
July 2, 2024
QotD: The ’60s
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