“Yeah, my blood’s so mad feels like coagulatin’/I’m sitting here just contemplatin’/I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation./Handful of senators don’t pass legislation/And marches alone can’t bring integration./When human respect is disintegratin’/This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’”
Eve of Destruction – Barry McGuire

Dear former hippies, love children, so-called baby boomers and others currently in charge of the country,

What the hell happened?!

I am so utterly friggin confused here. I so don’t get it. You guys were the Summer of Love people – hanging out at Woodstock, doing all the drugs, and free love for everyone. Y'all were going to take over the world and now Dennis Hopper is hawking you mutual funds. Dennis Hopper, for pity's sake! Wasn’t he the fringe-coated, cowboy hat-wearing rider in Easy Rider and the whacked out, drug-addled photographer of Apocalypse Now? Not to mention your protest music and songs of love now being used as the soundtrack for BMW commercials.

I mean seriously – how in the hell did this happen?!  At what point did you guys go from being the ones to save the world and “Damn the Man!” to being the man?

Have you looked around lately, have you taken stock of your peers? They’re the ones who screwed this whole deal up!  Share and share alike and communal living became being the world's greediest banker. Make love, not war became bombs away. How did you get from that place to where we are today?!

Maybe everything I have ever been told about that time period was just a lie, maybe it was a make-believe world made better and better with each retelling of the glory days, because Lord knows somewhere along the way you guys not only abandoned your beliefs, you pulled them behind a dark alley and stabbed them repeatedly and if that wasn’t enough, you pulled out your semi-automatic weapons and pumped ‘em full of lead just to make sure they were good and properly dead.

Seriously, what the hell happened?

I know idealism gives way to reality as we grow up, but a wholesale abandonment of everything you once held dear and true? Are you kidding me? Look, I wasn’t even a glimmer in my daddy’s eye when the sixties happened, so obviously I wasn’t there, but as a relatively young, thinking person, I’m straight-up blown away thinking about how your generation went from point A to point B and in the process made a glorious mess of it all.

Seriously, how in the hell did this happen?

Signed,

A very, very confused Gen-Xer

Article Author: Benjamin Cossel

A working journalist, Benjamin currently serves as a combat photojournalist and is the managing editor of a weekly newspaper in southeastern Wyoming. He’s worked as a reporter in Ohio, Arizona and done several deployments in the military crossing the globe. …

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