What era shaped your consciousness? What years are your touchstone?

[Armstead]

Was watching West Side Story tonite, and it occurred to me that I still look at the world subconsciously through the filter of the 50's and early 1960's. My head carries the cultural tone and changes of that era, the good the bad and the ugly. Kennedy, Camelot, post Camelot. The period when America was stirring, but just before it all exploded in the lare 1960's. An awakening, both in a positive and negative sense.

Not that I haven't been affected and shaped by the years since then. But that period is what shaped my worldview and values and sensibilities. It's the template through which I probably subconsciously measure everything.

I guess most people are the same way. Everyone has a certain period that's a personal crucible, which is embedded as the basis of our reality. We may change over time, but our own defining era remains the foundation.

Do you have a particular era that shaped you?

[SocratesInSpirit]

1. I'm probably a bit young to answer this question...

as I was only in high school during the end of the Clinton era and am in my early twenties...but I have a feeling that when I look back I will say this era was the touchstone for me.

[RoyGBiv]

21. Late 70's ...

The Hostage Crisis and gas rationing made me pay attention, even as a child. Having to check your gauge to make sure you had enough gas to go out and look for gas woke me up to the political themes that ran through this.

And when Grandma realized I had developed a political consciousness, she made sure to help me fill it.

[WCGreen]

2. I think it was the time of Newton...

I was pretty young back then, you see, but that particular time in my life, well everyone was into the church....

You couldn't take a dump without getting some kind of ecclesiastic go ahead...

I mean, and then there is the weird guy from Cambridge, talking about the mysteries of life as if it were a math equation...

Only he was still true to the church.....

Imagine that.....


So yea, that's why I look at that as the time of my life that effected how I look at everything....

[Crazy Guggenheim]

4. Man that plague was tough wasn't it?

[WCGreen]

6. Dude, it was horrible up in my neck of the woods....

[SocratesInSpirit]

7. LOL

"You couldn't take a dump without getting some kind of ecclesiastic go ahead"

And if you did they'd burn you for witchcraft...

:rofl:

[Armstead]

8. Well I was alive then too, but it didn;t effect me

I was too young in Newton's day to pay much attention.

[two gun sid]

3. Late 60's early 70's...

MLK and RFK assassinations, Tet, Chicago convention, Nixon, Watergate, Bloody Sunday. I was just a young kid and it was all there on my television screen.

[WCGreen]

5. All kidding aside....

I have great memories of the black and white fifties... TV made everything seemed to be cut and dried...

It was a reflection of the cold war mentality....

Us vs. Them....

But there were cracks in the veneer...

And that is what spawned the sixites...

I came aware, politically, in the late 60's early seventies when I started to look at the hypocrisy of the adults around me...

So yea, I was thrown in the furnace in the late 50's early 60's, dropped in the mold as the 60's came to an end and came out as rock hard metal after the helicopters left the US South Vietnam embassy with the sycophants hanging on for dear life only to be thrown back to the wolves.....

[Armstead]

9. I remember the first tiome I saw a color TV

It was at a regional "Progress Exposition" and they had a tent with a movie Screen with a color TV projecting the Ed Sullivan Show.

Ed looked a little purple -- don't know if that was the technology or his natural complexsion.

[WCGreen]

12. I saw Johnny Quest the first time I saw a color TV up close....

When my dad finnaly bought one for the family, we wanted to watch Julia, Dianne Carrols show about a single black woman...

He said, and I quote,,,,,

"I didn;t just spends a couple a hundred bucks so you kids could watch some spooks...."

Great times growing up......

:sarcasm:

[seemunkee]

10. from the end of the psychedlic era to the early days of punk

I would trace it musically from seeing Jimi to the death of Sid Vicious.
Yet somehow I missed the banality of Disco.

[Redstone]

11. Well, I spent the summer of 1966 with the hippies on Harvard common,

and learned a lot from them, regarding dope and alcohol and sex.

And then there was the Spring of 1972, when I tried to find out how my Big Brother had really died in that Southeast Asian country...it turned out that he had died the way we heard he had, but it took until 2001 for me to find that out...

Enough. No more tonight.

Redstone

[hyphenate]

13. Oh, yeah

I would say 1966 to 1972 for the most part. The peace movement, the entire nuclear scare, the whole era of love instead of war. The music particularly. I was 10, seeing the world through more adult eyes than I ever wished.

[Armstead]

15. My formative years were just before that

I was affected by the late 60's too, but I think my own seeds were planted in the years just before that.I remember it as a period of awakening, with one foot in the old while dipping a toe in the new.

Actually, it was New York at that era that really burned itself into my brain. I grew up in the country, but lived there temporarily and visited family there often....I'm still a sucker for movies or TV shows of late 50's early 60's NY.

[rug]

23. Born in 1950

raised on the East Side. What gets me about that movie is that whole neighborhood was destroyed to build Lincoln Center. The East Side was destroyed to build luxury housing. Working class NYC has bever recovered. That little piece of rudimentary class warfare has stayed with me.

[HEyHEY]

14. I was "shaped" in the late 90's early 00's but it doesn't agree with me

I shoulda been born in about 1942.

[Armstead]

16. The 00s weren't a great time to be shaped

But maybe that's an advantage, because things can only go up from here.

Well, maybe they can go down, but i prefer not to think about that possibility.

[BlueIris]

22. Thanks for acknowledging that.

As someone whose post-college formative years began in the fall of '01, I feel uniquely warped. I actually think this generation of younger adults has got it pretty rough. Not saying it's worst than what the Vietnam generation had to go through, or what other generations enduring great conflict and adversity struggled with...but still. I feel a great deal of connection to the class of 1929. I recently attended my sister's college graduation from Berkeley, which, for students of her major, was conducted in a building next to a gigantic statue of a bear that had been a gift to the university from the class of 1929. This was when I was sure we were a hair's breadth away from going to war with Iran, and I remember staring at that thing for a long time before going into the building to watch the ceremony.

I'm feeling pessimistic today, so I have to disagree that things "can only get better from here," since, at best, we'll get to enjoy but a tiny, tarnished fraction of what America should have been before the ascension of Bush destroyed it. My adulthood, and, I expect, a large portion of the rest of my life, is going to be so much more difficult than it should have been for so many painful reasons, not the least of which is my awareness of the fact that none of this was supposed to be this way.

[BlueIris]

17. '92, '96-7, 2000 and 2004. Duh. nt

[castiron]

18. i look at the world through the liberal hippie Christian eyes of

the 70s. I think the happiest moment in my life was roller skating to disco. Jesus was benign, the neo-con revolution was an unaborted infant, that crazy bi-centennial train was chugging through town, and my dad was all young and shit with long hair. Sigh.

[Armstead]

24. Yes I remember when Jesus was benign

At least in my part of the country, religion was not a political issue growing up at all.

The only rea; religious battles were at high-school football games between the public schools and the Catholic high school.

Otherwise no one much cared about each other's religion. My father was a big deal in the local Christian church, but in no way did it have anything to do with politics.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

19. This is a hard one to answer...

But I suppose my formative years were the late fifties at the earliest, into the middle sixties...

From grammer school through college, into marriage and new motherhood..

I was like a sponge during the early part of those years...absorbing and not reflecting much then...

I'm still being shaped, though, even today..... :shrug:

[libodem]

20. wwII/babyboom generation

midcentury...'55, I think we got the worst of it and the best of it. End of Elvis beginning of the Beatles.
all those Donna Reed values and beliefs from the '50's and the revolution of the '6o's. I thought I was a little hippie in '68. I wished I could have run away to Haight-Ashbury and lived on the streets. But I went to High School in the'70's watching the 5:00 o'clock news with the death count of our boys in Viet Nam. I hated that damn war. And I hate this one in Iraq, now. It's just a big ploy to build permanent bases to ride herd on Iraq and Syria. What a sham for Big Oil.

[mitchum]

25. 1970s and it made me the hedonist that I am today...

I don't really miss the POP culture of the 70s (clothes,TV, music, etc), but I certainly miss the POPULAR culture (hedonism, cultural tolerance, acceptance of recreational drug use, etc)

[Armstead]

29. Boogaloo Down Broadway

[Arugula Latte]

26. My before/after was 1980.

Before 1980, I was a child and the world seemed like a mostly friendly place.

In 1980, I entered high school and found myself amidst a bunch of snobby, preppy asshats whose parents voted for Reagan. The world seemed turned upside down. The greed and ugliness of the era smacked me in the face. I couldn't understand how people could agree with that piece of shit Reagan. Little did I know how bad things would get after that ... We had a little respite in '92, but that sure didn't last long ...

[Lars39]

27. Mixed bag.

I grew up with grandparents and parents that lived thru the Dust Bowl and Depression and who still lived much like it was the late 1800's in many ways, with parents that had to pick cotton to eat and move north to find jobs. I watched moon landings,Viet Nam on the nightly news, Watergate Hearings. Taught to play fair and treat everyone equally under the Kennedy and MLK influence. Taught to treat the environment right. Learned that the future held hope, and that anything was possible.

[blindpig]

28. The Pleistocene n/t