Tennis reminds us that he remembers the '60s as "a dark and frightening era on the edge of apocalypse. All that frenetic energy, all that running from coast to coast and hair-growing and face-painting, didn't seem to arise out of exuberance but instead out of a very energetic and youthful hopelessness". Ours, he says, was the perfect response to a sense of nihilism that grew out of the cold war.

Most of us of a certain age remember air raid drills at school and pictures of atomic explosions (what the hell good was going to come from hiding under the desk? Years later we knew that the only place to be in a nuclear wsr was up on the roof, stoned, watching the light show in those brief, final moments. I have a vivid memory of being 5 or 6 and seeing a "Conelrad(sp?)" (civil defense) practice alert on TV. I didn't understand it was a practice and ran outside to my mother, sure that the Russians were attacking and a mushroom cloud with my name on it was mere minutes away.

We grew out of that and into the Kennedy assassination, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, body counts, Lyndon Johnson prosecuting the war, Martin Luther King's assassination, another Kennedy assassination, more dead GI boys and the certainty that, for most of the people I knew, Vietnam was in the future (it wasn't. I was lucky. But I didn't know that then.)and, finally, like Sauron out of Mordor - Richard Nixon. The 60's were about Death and the decisions many of us made - to live life with whatever joy we could find on a daily basis - were the logical responses to a future that didn't look real rosy.

So, yeah, we screwed up some stuff, we were wrong about drugs. It was a great time, an exciting time and a horrible time, all at once. Cary Tennis tells us to look again at the faces from those years, faces of people, young people, who were scared shitless, but determined to laugh.
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