Thinking Out Loud, Volume DXXVII

I don't remember much about the lady who checked me in to the Holiday Inn; not that she wasn't attractive, but it's just that the other woman behind the desk was so stunningly beautiful I couldn't take my eyes off her. No, I'm not a dirty old man, and it's not that I'm not accustomed to seeing beautiful women. In fact, I'm married to one that I want to keep, so I'm certainly not on the prowl, especially for one young enough to be my granddaughter. It's just that this one was so......so...DIFFERENT...from any others I've seen in a long, long time. She was probably in her early twenties, modestly dressed, yet there was something about her clothes, her glasses, and her hair that looked so strangely familiar, but I just couldn't identify it. What WAS it? About forty-five minutes later I was in my room, at work on my computer, when the perfect word to describe her appearance suddenly popped into my head.....SIXTIES!!! She looked like the 1960s!! After that sudden revelation, the first question that came to my mind was, "Are the sixties coming back?" I graduated high school in 1969, so that was the decade of most of my teenage years. That's what I found so attractive about that young lady. I'm fully aware that fashions for apparel and hair are cyclical, but the thing that worries me about that is I wonder if the attitudes and moral standards of those eras accompany the fashion trends. It seems to me that morality peaked in the fifties, and then took a nosedive in the sixties. If you want to pick out TV shows you can feel comfortable letting your kids watch, you can choose just about anything from the fifties without fear of any improper language, sexual themes, or subliminal messages. "I Love Lucy" and "Leave it to Beaver" are safe. The sixties brought us the hippie movement, while many of our college campuses experienced riots and social unrest. The sixties introduced us to free love and hallucinating drugs. As much as I dislike all those things I just described, I must also mention an attitude that was prevalent in that decade, and as much as I hate to admit it, I believe I can see it coming back. I call it by one word: Mediocrity. It concerns me when I see college students literally by the millions supporting a man who preaches a message that ridicules exceptionalism and praises mediocrity. He says you shouldn't have to work your way through college, because you deserve to have a government that will supply all your needs. It's an attitude that says we should all be cookie cutter citizens with all of us being equal, and if someone does work hard and gets ahead, we will take his excess earnings and divide them among those who don't. Let me pause here to say that, as a product of the sixties, I never was never a hippie, I never did drugs, and I worked hard to get myself through college. The reason I'm saying this is to make sure you understand that I'm not lumping everyone from the decade of the sixties into the same category, nor am I putting everyone from today's generation into the same boat. I also know that not everyone in the fifties had high moral standards. I'm talking about general attitudes of an era. In a recent phone conversation with my daughter, who regularly goes to the gym to work out, she told me that the people who are working out hardest are in their mid thirties and older. As I was saying earlier, the fifties was a decade of higher moral standards and more conservative thought patterns, a direct contrast from the "Roaring Twenties," which came into being during the socialistic era of Woodrow Wilson. The Fifties was the more conservative decade of the Eisenhower years. The sixties were the more liberal years of Kennedy and Johnson. Moral standards made a noticeable rebound in the eighties, the decade of Reagan. I know that our political attitudes in this country work like a pendulum, swinging back and forth, so here are my questions: Do our leaders guide us back onto the path of higher morality, or vice versa, or do we elect certain leaders to match changes in our attitudes? Do our styles of fashion go hand in hand with our political attitudes? Is work ethic cyclical? Are mediocrity and exceptionalism generational? One thing for sure, whatever situation we're facing today, it will change. Are the sixties returning? Probably so, and that, like all eras, will have a mixture of both good and bad. Whatever we face, we'll get past it just like we did before, and one thing will make it all worthwhile....Our girls sure are pretty!' Preston