jaybee from UK
09-03-2004, 03:03 PM
You know guys/gals, so many people think the 60's were truly the decade of happiness, and everything began a slow, but accelerating decline starting with Kennedy's death in '63.
I get the feeling that there really was NOTHING extraordinary about the 60's. Since 1929, people lived with grinding poverty. Since 1940, war. Since 1945, horrific memories and burying of self in work to purge those memories. But of course, after a few years of the money rolling in, and a few years after the horror, people want to let their hair down. And they did.
Simply speaking, for the first time in 30 years, life was GOOD. But comparitively, the decade was outright tame compared to the adrenaline rush that followed.
You simply had millions of people worldwide who finally wised up and remembered it was time, FINALLY, to party. But how things went south. As Vietnam ended, Opec jacked up the price of crude fourfold. Bang, recession. And again in '79. Boom/bust cycles. Cut to 2000, we had NEARLY beaten the cycles, and entering a new era of prosperity. What happens? Bush fixes the elections, and a few months later, a couple of airliners decide to take passengers direct to their offices.
Do we crave conflict or what? Do we NEED kicks? As shit gets worse, we try to intensify our pleasures to compensate. Where is the peace? I can see what Tyler Durden meant in 'Fight Club'. He claimed that a little short-term violence "turned down the volume of life". Inner peace, of a sort.
When will the volume be turned down? When will things just be GOOD? Why does this world teeter from one crisis to another? When will mankind ever get its shit together? Why can't we just co-operate? Can't we consign conflict to a specified time and place so we can deal with it clinically?
Call me naive, but I've already bought into the dream that one day, we WILL all live together harmoniously and happily. Either that, or in a few hundred years the aliens will land on Earth to find a bunch of inert corpses with large traces of Bio-toxins.
My niece came into this world a couple of years ago. I want her to be safe, happy, loving and loved. Why must the fight for all these things be so fucking hard?
Since I was a kid in the 70's, I've seen images of people being happy, communing in peace, be it at the beach, or a barbeque, or a pensioners home. Such harmony should be the rule, not the exception.
Shit, it's the same damn piece of rock, and NONE of us gets more than 150 years on it anyway! Why don't we realise that our happiness, while it rests ultimately with ourselves, is still linked with others? That to treat others well causes happiness in ourselves? Why are there still people who don't get it?
AAAARgh!
Ignore me. I'm just a guy. If I were a good looking babe, I could have done the same thing that ex-pornstar Italian MP did in the first Iraq war. She offered Saddam a night of mind-blowing passion, withdrawing from and reentering her if only he withdrew and DIDN'T reenter Kuwait. I'm sure he'd have mellowed out enough.
Man, she had the right idea. Make love, not war.
Jaybee.
I get the feeling that there really was NOTHING extraordinary about the 60's. Since 1929, people lived with grinding poverty. Since 1940, war. Since 1945, horrific memories and burying of self in work to purge those memories. But of course, after a few years of the money rolling in, and a few years after the horror, people want to let their hair down. And they did.
Simply speaking, for the first time in 30 years, life was GOOD. But comparitively, the decade was outright tame compared to the adrenaline rush that followed.
You simply had millions of people worldwide who finally wised up and remembered it was time, FINALLY, to party. But how things went south. As Vietnam ended, Opec jacked up the price of crude fourfold. Bang, recession. And again in '79. Boom/bust cycles. Cut to 2000, we had NEARLY beaten the cycles, and entering a new era of prosperity. What happens? Bush fixes the elections, and a few months later, a couple of airliners decide to take passengers direct to their offices.
Do we crave conflict or what? Do we NEED kicks? As shit gets worse, we try to intensify our pleasures to compensate. Where is the peace? I can see what Tyler Durden meant in 'Fight Club'. He claimed that a little short-term violence "turned down the volume of life". Inner peace, of a sort.
When will the volume be turned down? When will things just be GOOD? Why does this world teeter from one crisis to another? When will mankind ever get its shit together? Why can't we just co-operate? Can't we consign conflict to a specified time and place so we can deal with it clinically?
Call me naive, but I've already bought into the dream that one day, we WILL all live together harmoniously and happily. Either that, or in a few hundred years the aliens will land on Earth to find a bunch of inert corpses with large traces of Bio-toxins.
My niece came into this world a couple of years ago. I want her to be safe, happy, loving and loved. Why must the fight for all these things be so fucking hard?
Since I was a kid in the 70's, I've seen images of people being happy, communing in peace, be it at the beach, or a barbeque, or a pensioners home. Such harmony should be the rule, not the exception.
Shit, it's the same damn piece of rock, and NONE of us gets more than 150 years on it anyway! Why don't we realise that our happiness, while it rests ultimately with ourselves, is still linked with others? That to treat others well causes happiness in ourselves? Why are there still people who don't get it?
AAAARgh!
Ignore me. I'm just a guy. If I were a good looking babe, I could have done the same thing that ex-pornstar Italian MP did in the first Iraq war. She offered Saddam a night of mind-blowing passion, withdrawing from and reentering her if only he withdrew and DIDN'T reenter Kuwait. I'm sure he'd have mellowed out enough.
Man, she had the right idea. Make love, not war.
Jaybee.