pay no attention to that imposter
Turned 18 in 1981? Puh-leeze. Yeah, yeah, technically a "boomer" in the somewhat overbroad definition of 1945-1965 hatchings, but c'mon. I don't care how precocious he might have been: six years old at the end of the sixties doesn't entitle you to wear the tie-dye and patchouli. Now, as to your carpings, young Tillwalker:
The drugs...the drugs could be fun (or so I've been told—hereafter [*OSIBT] or just an asterisk). Yeah, some folks couldn't handle them (I do not wish to re-ignite here the lengthy set-to with mmoffitt of a couple of years back, entertaining though that was), and in retrospect I'm inclined to think that some of the then-popular ergot alkaloids would probably not be readily available to teenagers in a perfect world, though I suspect they might be usefully administered to subjects in their mid-twenties whose opinion-forming processes are just starting to calcify. I can find nothing ill to say about marijuana except that it remains illegal, and that fact, the persistence of the ludicrous "war in drugs" into the present century, is a damning indictment of the political cowardice of my generation. According to most of my informants*, marijuana imparts a delightful free-associative state: a musician of my acquaintance once compared it to a good jam session, adding however that in her experience actual jam sessions seldom if ever took any benefit from adding drugs to the mix. Cocaine*, I am advised, requires a special, not overrepresented personality type in order to approach it with the proper take-it-or-leave-it attitude, and heroin users, of course, pay a terrible price from time to time for spurning their own endorphin production. Still, that you've "never been into drugs" does not invalidate the experience for the boomers or, come to that, for your own contemporaries or juniors.
As to music, well, tastes do differ, don't they? If the music broomberg loves is crap, reflect upon Sturgeon's Law: ninety percent of everything is crap (except, I suppose, for crap itself, which is presumably 100%). Certainly much of the 1960s product was dross, and one-hit wonders like, say, the [link|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Alarm_Clock|Strawberry Alarm Clock] have been deservedly forgotten. Other ditties of the period live on, and have likely endured through a cultural process distantly analogous to natural selection. I recently heard a radio piece on the Brill Building songwriters (tunesmiths of American pop in the decades prior to the so-called British Invasion), one of whom was quoted to the effect of "If we'd only realized we were writing classics, we'd have taken more time with them." But again, what's crap to you is gold to others, and quite likely vice-versa.
"Casual sex"...well, that's a moving target of a definition if ever I heard one. My catting around days are a receding memory, but even back in the day I preferred coupling with an element of figure-and-ground. What I liked about the era, both then and in retrospect, was that young women having just discovered reliable and unobtrusive contraception after being raised from girlhood on horror stories of the shame ond obloquy attending unplanned pregnancies "out of wedlock," as the quaint phrase had it, were disposed to take these now safe-to-drive genitals out on the track. My elder brother didn't have it nearly so easy in 1965, when he was a freshman, and a colleague of mine, fourteen years my senior, used to horrify me with accounts of the sieges and strategems (most involving strong drink) he had to employ as an undergraduate in the Fifties to part the co-eds from their knickers. Believe me, Benjamin, by the standards of that milieu just about every coupling you ever enjoyed without benefit of clergy would have qualified as "casual sex," so let's have no sermons from your high horse.
And finally..."the greatest thing that ever happened"? Of course not. A lot of marketers pitch that message and a lot of boomers buy into it (not uniquely: say "greatest generation" to an eightysomething and watch him purr), but it was just one historical/cultural moment, and living through it was a matter of chance and not a mark of moral excellence. Still, and speaking as one who was far more a consumer of the Sixties than an actor in them (though my bride and I did make it together, not quite 36 years before we wed, to a campus demonstration on the first 1969 Moratorium Day), it was an extraordinary period quite distinct from each of the decades preceding and following it. I've spoken to people of my parents' generation about WWII, and they all speak of the exhilaration attending the sense of being swept up in great events. In their case they had a cause congruent with national policy (the defeat of Germany and Japan); the leading edge of the boomers began with a similar congruity (JFK's call to arms, to "bear any burden" in the "fight for freedom") and enormous energy which, redirected by disillusionment, found its expression against that policy, with the original exhilaration augmented by the shockwave of the bounce against those violated ideals. I do not say that I and mine are better than you for having lived through that moment; I say merely that we are different.
But every generation seems to pass through a period when the world is young and green and fraught with possibilities even as their elders lament the falling off in standards from their golden age. There is of course no reason for you to be jealous of broomberg (whose post probably implicitly carried with it the "slippery" sign), but a wholesale disparagement of the boomer experience seems unwarranted.
cordially,
