I don't hate the 60s! Honest.

 

 Has anyone noticed the backlash against the 1960s recently?
 I once read a book, about ten years ago, that was about the 60s, and it began 'the 1960s are perhaps the most mythologised decade of all time'. Which I agreed with. However, in the last ten years or so, there's been something in the Zeitgeist that wants to re-evaluate the 60s, to explore it's dark side.
 I have to confess an interest. I love the 60s. When I somehow get hold of a time machine, that's where I'm going for a holiday. Youth culture and pop culture in general had an energy to it that's been lacking ever since, which is probably why it's been so romanticised. Woodstock, man landing on the moon, hippies - there was an innocent exuberance, which to our older culture can be charming. The 60s had an energy for change, but in a positive way.
 However, that would be to ignore the flip side of the coin, which is where this backlash is coming from in the first place. As a society, we can only ignore the dreadfulness of the 1960s for so long before it becomes decade-worship. The civil rights and feminist movements were a cornerstone of the 1960s, rightfully so, but they were the forced result of a culture that essentially punished you for not being male and white. The 60s could easily be a very dangerous time if you weren't part of that subset of the population. The 'establishment' that young people railed against was an oppressive regime that had had a long experience of silencing dissent. During the 1960s, most people were still aware of their place in society and knew to keep their heads down.

Kent state shooting

 Protests against the Vietnam war highlight the awful reality of actually having been around back then. Protests and demonstrations turned violent, and of course there was the Kent State shootings. The cold war had produced enough nuclear weapons for the repeated annihilation of all life on Earth, either by madness or by accident, and although protest was widepsread it was ignored.

JFK

 In Britain, to deal with the housing crisis, tower blocks had been enthusiastically built. However, the premise was flawed - tower blocks don't allow you to simply pile up indefinitely, there needs to be quite a lot of surrounding to space to let in light to the bottom and in case the things collapse like dominoes, so you might as well build normal 2-up 2-downs - the huge subsidises hidden, and whole commnuities were seperated. The pound lowered in value, and it became common for young men to go abroad for work. Britain in the 60s could be very, very, depressing.
 So why, then, has it been so mythologised? Why does our culture shy away from the bad side? Well, it could be that youth culture of the time is so appealing. Their fashions were ridiculous (but perfect for fancy dress), some of their beliefs were well-meaning but stupidly flawed (e.g free love, or no politics in the communes), it could be that they did amazing stuff in that decade (man on the moon, sexual and civil equal rights, forcing society out of its rigid old mentality), or maybe it's just that we would all like to outrage an older generation that we're outraging with our outragessness.
 None of these feel right. In my opinion, the 1960s are glamourised just because there was the mood of change. They had come out of the bland conformist 50s and the feeling was that they were making a much better, more interesting, society. Wages had been rising, young people had a lot more disposable income, and some more time before society expected them to settle down. We miss the feeling that things are getting better. We live in a world where politicians advertise themselves as managers of the economy, not changers of society. I lived through the birth of the internet, which was perhaps the biggest change to our society since the 1960s, but nobody really got excited about it. It just happened a bit at a time. Maybe this explains our new-found antipathy to the 60s - we know, deep down, that the opening years of the 21st century just won't be eulogised anything like the 60s.