The New Forty

By Barbara Groark

Hello to the Holy Cross High School (Delran, New Jersey) 1968 graduates, and welcome to the HCHS 68 Reunion blog. I’m posting this with the knowledge of the 40th Reunion Committee, though they are not censoring me too severely, and intend to post a new article about every two weeks till Reunion Weekend (October 9-11, 2008). I’m going to treat this like a newspaper column, with some serious and some silly, rambling discussions. I hope you will feel free to respond – I’ll be reviewing and posting responses – we can have a discussion thread – oooh, techno-savvy, hey? Some people may want to be a guest writer here, or start your own blog. Send me the link if you do, so I can advertise it on this page.

We’ll probably have one last post after the reunion to wrap up and maybe show some pictures, and I can post pictures here any time at your request. I hope we have a lot of responses, and I hope a lot of people whom the Committee couldn’t get to by now can be found and show up in October.

A former work colleague of mine, when asked if he saw the TV movie The Sixties a few years ago, scowled and said, “I lived through that time and I have no desire to relive anything about it.” I understood that sentiment completely. But I watched the TV show. I came away thinking they were kinder than I thought they would be. It was neither a nostalgia piece nor a screed but an awkward portrayal of how one fictional Catholic family was bombarded by the chaos of the time. It did not tie up all loose ends, but was a decent attempt at explaining a few things to the kids who weren’t born yet at the time. Now if we who endured it could start understanding it, we’d be somewhere.

Here’s some summer reading if you haven’t got to it yet: Boom by Tom Brokaw, the TV network journalist, who focuses on 1968 as the center of what people call the sixties and actually considers 1963 (JFK’s assassination) the beginning and 1974 (end of the Vietnam War) the end of that decade. This blog will consider 1960 (our grade school years, when we were learning Latin responses to the Mass) the beginning, and 1979 (the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s volcano) the end. That’s because most of what people hate about the sixties actually happened in the seventies, although it’s true we were in a rather serene island in our high school years. Brokaw reminds us of the news stories of our freshman to senior years – the Watts riots, the March on Washington, draft-card burning, rockets to the moon – and discusses the aftermath of the sixties in the 1990s and 2000s. The book presents interviews from people now in their own sixties and seventies who in some cases were the noise-makers of that time. Most by now are pretty critical of themselves in their youth, a sign of health. But how about we younger people?

This blog will use the general “talking points” of the Brokaw book as starting points but will talk about the topics from our younger perspective and often my personal perspective (hey, I’m the Decider). I believe the age we were when certain events happened had a profound effect on how we all dealt with them. For many years now, when I look back, I’m grateful I at least got a high school education before the feces hit the fan, and some friends are glad they got college completed by 1968. There is real cold anger, a sense of having been shortchanged and insulted, in our younger siblings, however, the kids who were in eighth grade at the time, or fourth grade. The big adult emotions of shock and grief were hard enough to handle for eighteen-year-olds. As for some of those just born in the 1980s, they are not even aware they are missing anything.

The Brokaw book is a good start of a really big and needed discussion, not co-opted by the extreme political and religious right, nor by just the same old people who were talking then. I’ve noticed lately the artist class is doing a lot of reviewing of our American basics in pop culture, even with just the re-doing of older songs on the radio or revivals of plays on Broadway. Maybe all that’s a sideways encouragement to the rest of us to recall ourselves, too, however high-tech we’ve become. I’ve been too appalled to speak for about thirty years. Our age group has got to start talking. Time to teach, but not in order to bring back any good old days. There’s enough to do for now and the future.

To paraphrase a line in the old song by The Who: “We won’t be fooled again!” – or at least by now we can only be fooled for a few minutes; then we catch on; there are some advantages to aging. I think we need to help our kids and grandkids to get through our current crazy decade, not by telling them to do what we did (anyway, I did much less than people thought I did, although I did inhale occasionally), but teaching them what we were taught before the feces hit the fan: how to survive the feces hitting the fan. And get on the YouTube and MySpace wild kingdoms besides.

Check out the documentary DVD The Weather Underground, also not a nostalgia piece, about some of the general noise of the sixties and seventies. Compare with the PBS special about Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law and organizer of the Peace Corps. Shriver and the Kennedy’s had idealistic college rich kids, the really smart people, preparing to be the next generation of leaders in the first half of the sixties with ideas of liberty and justice and clean drinking water and education for all; whereas the last part of the decade and into the seventies had the same class of really smart college rich kids becoming anarchists who desired to overthrow by any means – but bombing was the most fun – the government of the United States. Again, several of the surviving Weather Underground members interviewed in the DVD are not too proud of their old selves and even seem bewildered by what happened. Even they recovered themselves somewhat, even if it is while sitting in prison.

And besides that, when I look at pictures of myself from high school, especially senior year, I was not as fat as I thought I was then. I guess that’s the common “kid thinking” that we see in today’s generation, too. Some things are normal for the age group. [Question: “Puh, kids today, right?” Response: “Puh-retty much the same as kids every other day - except maybe there should be more dancing and fewer mosh pits. Hey, ballroom dancing is happening, at least for the middle-aged and the eleven-year-olds.”]

Another bit of reading I’ve been doing this past winter is to catch up with the Harry Potter series of kids’ books, just to see what Pottermania was all about, now that it’s wound down, and I’m a fan now as well. The novels are really “tales for young and old” as good kids’ books should be – don’t I recognize my old boss or colleague in the Ministry of Magic? Or some Holy Cross classmates or teachers at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? The author Rowling is all for the kids, as good as Star Wars was in its time. Though she deals in witches and wizards and Muggles, she has some hilarious social and political commentary worked in with these metaphors. I’ve concluded that every school is a Hogwarts School, though I don’t remember anyone being quite the equivalent of the evil Lord Voldemort (He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) at Holy Cross. We had Mervil Haas though. Still, she wasn’t as bad as some of the professors or bosses I’ve had since high school. But thank goodness for the Order of the Phoenix. I wish I’d known them then.