This was me in 1968. The preppiness of the outfit hides my inner hippie. Watching Tom Brokaw’s “1968″ on the History Channel after reading “Boom!” has been a trip down memory lane. If you missed it, do whatever you can to catch it on a rerun — it was excellent.

I watched it with DG tonight, and it wasn’t until we came to the assassination of RFK that she processed the fact that I had been alive in this era, and that I’d been involved, even as young as I was. My mom was at the hotel the night RFK was assassinated and I was staying up late to watch the news coverage because there was a chance I might actually see her. DG was horrified at the idea that her grandmother was there that night, and that her mom saw the events in real time. Her comment: “What a sad time to be alive.”

And you know, I suppose it was, though I don’t recall it that way. Looking back on a decade that saw the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, yes, it was a sad time. And yet, it was also vibrant and alive. Emotions ran high as the civil rights movement converged with the anti-war movement, but there was an enormous amount of passion and idealism afoot. My answer to her was yes, it was a sad time, but very much a time of commitment and change, unlike what I see today, which is an almost-defeated acceptance of what is, no matter how repugnant. Apathy has been substituted for passion. If I could recapture just a little bit of the mood of that time (without the drugs, actually…the drugs were never my thing) and join a movement of young people committed to re-centering values away from war and violence and back toward some of the idealism of that era, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Tom Brokaw has done a great job of capturing the mood, events, and magic of that time. Really, don’t miss it if you get the chance to see it.

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