Thoughts on Optimism: Childhood and The Sixties

Strange confluence of two ideas or thoughts today.......

As anyone who comes here more than once or twice will know I love all sorts of things from the 1960s.

Lately I keep reading about a relatively obscure girl group from that era called The Cake. I had heard of them before and ocassionally heard them on radio but never seen them. Now, thanks to the brilliant offerings on You Tube, there are two short videos to watch and what a revelation !: the most extreme, maybe druggy NY girl group you could wish for with weird staging, a singer who looks like Penelope Tree and stands catatonically still and two other girls who dance round her like a couple of eels on Vaseline

I cannot imagine anything so extreme yet so strangely 'entertainment' as this today. One of the clips is from an old 'Smothers Brothers' show --- real family viewing and yet here are these three cool chicks grooving away. That incongruous meeting epitomises everything I love about the Sixties.

Later in the day I was walking the dog through the corn fields nearby. The sun was beginning to hide for the night. Fat startled pigeons were flying out from the corn as we passed, greenfinches were chirruping, there was a quiet munching from the horses in the next field. A hum and tinkle of a party in the Big House rang across the meadow. I looked up into the sky and was suddenly in a more innocent time .... I felt a brief surge of that feeling you have as a child when you realise what an amazing and beautiful world you live in and feel full of a kind of wonder and feeling of optimism. It lasted seconds. In my childhood it could go on all day.

I know that I am seeing that era through rose coloured glasses and through the glasses of a happy childhood but where does that optimsim, that freedom go ? Where has it gone? Did life in the 1960s seem full of possibility to me because I was a child ( and do my own children feel it now ?) or because I grew up in a time when it felt like we were in a time of plenty.... full of ideas and ideals and possibility.

I know that, in reality, beyond my cosy, happy suburban childhood every kind of cruelty, evil, cynicism took place just as it does now. I know that there were wars, assassinations, homelessness, poverty and disease..... but somehow there seemed to be a kind of hope that it was possible for humnanity to improve itself and those situations.

That optimisim doesn't seem to be there now.

Is it me ? Is it because I am getting old or is the world actually a sadder, harsher, grimmer place?


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Reflective Cusp today.

Watch the video and laugh if you like (it is quite funny in its way) but enjoy the innocence and the freedom to look and move, think like those three cool chicks