(no subject)

[mamculuna]

Being addicted to this meme, I'm now doing 1969 (thanks to midnightsjane).



My sixties fit the stereotypes. I had hair to my waist and I rode a motorcycle. What I usually remember about that year is how crazy the war was making us, the napalm and bombing on TV every night, and no way to make our voices heard at all. The first half of it was all anti-war demonstrations, often verging on violence, and how I began to see in myself the potential for violence. I got used to tear gas, and was willing to run out with a wet rag on my face and try to throw it back (I don't have much of a pitching arm, though). I got shot at and T (then my boyfriend) got attacked by plain-clothes police provocateurs. The National Guard was in trucks outside my house enforcing curfew and checking my ID when I walked home. I learned that democracy and freedom are very possibly illusions of the comfortable (those of you reading this without knowing what the police were doing to demonstrators in those days may think we were the provocateurs--I promise you we weren't). It went on all the time. I lived on cigarettes and malted milk, and weighed about 100 pounds (not exaggerating). I was so high on adrenaline I was shaking and not sleeping. It went on for months.

In the summer, T went back east to work for his father for a couple of months and I got even crazier. I had people to hang out with but nobody else I was really close to. At the end of July I went up into Mendocino and stayed out with some people on some land up there, but that was sex, drugs, and rocknroll--just more craziness.

What I wasn't even thinking about was that in addition to all that, I was also in one of my first phases of working like a driven person. My job (working in a student support program at UC Berkeley as a tutor coordinator) was OK, not high level or high stress, but I made it that way. I worked maybe twice as many hours as I was paid to, took on horrible work (doing statistical reports with not even a calculator, etc). It was the first time I'd gotten into that real workaholic thing and I thought it was just how work was supposed to be. But when I went back home to visit, instead taking some days off, I quit.

I remember sitting on the plane going back east and having the clear vision that I was destroying myself. At the time, I only perceived the physical part, so when I got back to visit my family I used the visit to quit smoking, and while I was doing that, realized that the whole situation was poisonous. I came back and found that my cat had died, the fourth one to succumb to leukemia.

I was desperate to live a different life. T came back and some new, saner people moved into the house where we were living. We started to garden in the back yard, to work with food coops, and cut out all the politics and other madness. We bought some land up neat where I'd been visiting (he still owns it, spent all these years building up there, but never lived there). The next year we got married--a hippy wedding, in the garden with the sunflowers blooming and the corn in tassels.

And a new cat found us. They always do.

Comments

[eastertheatre.livejournal.com]

Wow -- that was just stunning. I read it to my fiancé and he said it was like "looking into the sun." Thanks for giving us a glimpse into that time, and into the you of that time.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It was an amazing thing to live through.

[ann1962]

I love this meme too. Thanks for sharing this.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Thanks for passing it along. I've loved reading yours.

[ann1962]

Why thanks!

[usedtobeljs]

Wonderful, evocative, and probably a little frightening to remember. [hugs]

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I though about asking for another year! But as so often happens, writing about it was good for me--let me see it in a different way.

The sixties veterans

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

At Berkley you saw it all earlier than most of us. I tried to talk to people at home about what had happened after the spring of 1970. If they weren't in the middle of it they didn't understand any of it. We all changed dramatically and the rest of country had no idea why.

Re: The sixties veterans

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Yes, though even some of my friends in SC had similar experiences here (four kids were killed at college here as a part of a protest, more civil rights than anti-war though). It is equally hard to explain it to kids growing up now, I think. Although the evil of the government and the suffering of the Iraqis is like Vietnam, the feeling here is not--it's just a pale ghost of the frustrations then.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I learned that democracy and freedom are very possibly illusions of the comfortable (those of you reading this without knowing what the police were doing to demonstrators in those days

Sounds like the second half of the 70s in the UK. Phalanxes of policemen guarding Fascists as they marched through immigrant areas always ready to beat the living shit out of counter demonstrators. The miners' strikes where the police launched unprovoked attacks at the drop of a hat and arrested people travelling to demonstrations. The SPG beating people to death. The most frightening thing was the obvious collusion between the police and the National Front.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Exactly. And in these supposedly "free" countries. And terrifyingly, too, many people in the rest of the world didn't really see what was happening over there at the time.

Before that, I was involved in Civil Rights in the South, though not quite so intensely. A lot of that collusion of police and racist groups happened there.

[wombatina.livejournal.com]

Growing up in the east bay influenced me without me knowing why. I was 9 in 1969 and knew of the Berkeley Barb, Patty Hearst and my uncle the gun-runner who had the entire sewer system schematics for the city. I didn't "get it" but I know it had a profound effect on who I am. As soon as I was old enough, I would take BART to Berkeley and hang on Telegraph at the crepe shop. That would have been around 75. My mom was born there, but she went to Catholic school and was a nice housewife by then. I think she hated it.

I hope we get to meet some day...

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

You're lucky they finished BART so you could enjoy! The whole of the 60's it was a big muddy hole, that you may remember even though you were so young. My kids grew up partly there--and both have moved back. So I tend to spend a good bit of time there still.

I hope so too!

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I knew you were a kindred spirit! I didn't have the same experiences, growing up in Canada, but the things going on in the States were a huge part of my world. I watched from this side of the border, and wondered where it would lead. In 1969, I got married. We moved to BC in 1970, and found ourselves in the Slocan Valley, back to the land hippies, with many American expats as neighbours. We had our share of the sex drugs and rockandroll, but I managed to stay away from the more destructive parts of it. I worked full time as a nurse...possibly the only hippy in the Valley with a full time "straight" job.