The Sixties Are Back
I was sitting in my room quietly reading U. The National
College Newspaper listening to some King Missile, when it
suddenly hit me. Most of you haven't heard, the sixties are
back.
Calm down, you look nervous. Didn't you like them the last
time? Oh, I forgot, how could you? You were only three years
old when they ended. But that doesn't prevent you from hating
them to the bottom of your heart, does it? You'll make a good
material money chasing yuppie yet. Unfortunately that was the
eighties.
Welcome to the nineties, the decade of the reborn hippies.
Yes, it's true, the sixties are back, but their wearing the
nineties' clothes. I remember last year when we started the
environmental club in my high school. It was ecstatic. I looked
around and thought, this is the nineties. Nineteen ninety became
the year of environmental concern as thousands of clubs began to
spring up all over the nation. And when Lucky put green
marshmallow trees into Lucky Charms, I could hardly wait for what
was next.
Hussein, no less. It had to be true. We were heading
towards a recession. We needed a good war. But the EFFORT put
toward supporting or protesting the war was incredible. Rallies
abounded across the nation. Not knowing what to do, some
protesters adopted the sixties sit-in, while others became more
creative, developing new forms of protest and support. But one
thing was sure, activism had arrived and the sixties had
returned.
But don't dismay, it's not going to be like before. We HAVE
learned from our mistakes. Honestly. This time we're getting
serious. Instead of having sit-ins and being arrested and
smoking pot while we have acid dreams of the way the world should
be, we're writing letters to our congressmen and taking
meaningful political action. Instead of working against society,
we're working within society to make it better.
Drugs in the nineties are out. Talk is in. In the sixties
we were trying to find ourselves by looking outside to drugs,
this time we're looking inside ourselves. We're trying to find
out why we used drugs to escape before and how we can solve our
problems so we don't have to escape.
Fashion becomes the sixties in the nineties. But don't
expect it to mirror exactly. The nineties will become their own
fashion. Start watching for homemade necklaces and handsown
bracelets, given to each other with deeper meanings than just
friendship.
As for the sexual revolution, prepare for a different kind.
We'll finally be able to talk freely about all the things the
sixties allowed us to do. Sex will become not just a shared
experience between two people, but an understood experience as
well.
You still don't believe it, do you? You're still living in
your oblivious non-caring world of the eighties. Well, you'll
find out soon enough, believe me. As the cliche goes, the
nineties are going to be a decade to make the sixties look like
the fifties.