love-of-words20:

I can’t imagine what it was like to be a kid in the 60′s. I think we really like the pictures of colorful hippies and we feel the power and pain in the photos of the civil rights marches and we’re properly horrified by footage from Vietnam but my mom was just a kid then. She was born in 1960. she said one of her earliest memories is of Kennedy being killed. Her parents divorced in 1966 and her father killed himself around Christmas in 1967. She was the youngest of four daughters and her mother didn’t always have enough money to feel them. Her older sisters didn’t pay her any attention, they were always trying to sneak out and get stoned. I think it must have been awful to have been a child in 1968. My mother would have been 7/8 that year, still feeling the effects of her father’s death. It was the year Robert Kennedy was killed, just like his brother and so was Martin Luther King Jr. 1968 had the highest fatality rate for US soldiers in Vietnam. She saw uncensored footage from the war on tv right after footage of civil rights marches erupting into violence. She heard her mother worry about kids running away from home and she heard about how we could go to war with the Russians at any minute. She told me once she had a lot of fear at that age. She said she felt like the world was ending.