From: Terry W. Colvin (fortean1@mindspring.com)
Date: Wed Dec 25 2002 - 22:28:19 MST
I spent the 1960s working as an aerospace engineer, building ICBMs
and the Apollo equipment, raising two stepchildren and two of our own,
doing some graduate work, teaching evenings as assistant professor, and
writing a book on statistical decision theory. The popular culture of the
1960s just passed me by, except when I followed my stepson, who ran away
with his girlfriend to the San Francisco Haight Ashbury Summer of Love. Of
course, I paid attention to the Vietnam War, and I remember watching
Johnson announce that he would not run again (as I remember the first moon
walk). What did I think of it? Confusion. I was too young for WW 2,
although I escaped from Germany one day before that war was supposed to
begin (although a week before it did begin), but I served during the Korean
War. I recognized the great danger of Nazism and Japanese Imperialism, and
hence the necessity of fighting them, and was only a little less certain
about the domino theory of the Korean War. My problems with understanding
the Vietnam War probably stemmed from the undoubted excesses of the
American anti-communist right. The fact that they had been so utterly wrong
about communist influence on American domestic affairs provided doubt about
their asseverations concerning international affairs in which communism
might be involved.
However, when I woke up to a wider social life at the end of the
1960s, I did not find myself in an unknown world. If you wish to say it
this way, I lived a rather Bohemian and intellectual life before the Korean
War, which was put on hold, so to speak, through the 1950s and 1960s by the
necessities of war and early professional and family life. So that, in many
respects, I resumed that life in the 1970s. However, as I remarked in an
earlier post, popular music had gone to hell and new-age superstitions had
multiplied.
John Forester MS, PE
--
Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1@mindspring.com >
Alternate: < fortean1@msn.com >
Home Page: < http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/8958/index.html >
Sites: * Fortean Times * Mystic's Haven * TLCB *
U.S. Message Text Formatting (USMTF) Program
------------
Member: Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood (TLCB) Mailing List
TLCB Web Site: < http://www.tlc-brotherhood.org >[Vietnam veterans,
Allies, CIA/NSA, and "steenkeen" contractors are welcome.]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:53 MST