Did we know it was the Sixties when we were living through them?

[caption id="attachment_1353" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Wild times"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/thesixties.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1353" title="thesixties" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/thesixties-300x238.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="238" /></a>[/caption]

On one level, of course we did. When the calendar flipped from 1959 to 1960, we knew it was the beginning of a new decade, and when John F. Kennedy won election as president later in the year, we knew things were changing.

But "the Sixties?" A decade of upheaval and wild times? JFK didn't live long enough, because the "Sixties" part of the 1960s started -- by most accounts -- when the president died in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The race riots started the following summer, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident heated Vietnam up to the boiling point.

By that same token, when Dec. 31, 1969, because Jan. 1, 1970, the Sixties weren't really over yet. While there are certainly some people who think the Sixties ended earlier in December with the rioting and death at Altamont Raceway, I tend to agree with the folks who call May 4, 1970, the end of the decade.

That was the day that the Ohio National Guard killed four people on the campus of Kent State University.

<em>"Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio."</em>

But did we know we were living through that fabled decade at the time? Did we know that more than 40 years later, the main dividing factor in the baby boom generation is between people who think the Sixties were a positive force and those who think it was a negative force.

A look at the first two baby boomer presidents shows the divide clearly, with Bill Clinton on one side and George W. Bush on the other.

[caption id="attachment_1354" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Kent, Ohio, 5/4/70"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/kent_state1253913500.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1354" title="kent_state1253913500" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/kent_state1253913500-225x300.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

What I remember most about the divide -- even at the time -- was how much anger there was in the country against "those damn kids" who wanted to change the world.

I remember in the days after Kent State how many people there were who blamed the demonstrators for their own deaths, saying that if they hadn't been raising a ruckus, they would still have been alive.

Of course, if Nixon hadn't expanded the war into Cambodia, there wouldn't have been demonstrations either.

It's funny. Richard Nixon was the great villain to our generation, but we never dreamed how much worse it would get. At least Nixon didn't try to redistribute wealth upward and destroy the middle class. We have Ronald Reagan and W. Bush to thank for that.

But to answer the question posed earlier?

My guess is that the Sixties hit their stride -- and we knew it -- in 1968. Once Gene McCarthy challenged Johnson, and Johnson withdrew ... Once Bobby Kennedy got into the race and first Martin Luther King and then Bobby himself were murdered ... Once the rioting at the convention in Chicago happened and once Nixon and Agnew won in November, once all that happened, the Sixties were in full stride.

For all the talk now of hippies, drugs, peace and love, with a couple of exceptions, the era from November 1963 to May 1970 was not a particularly pleasant time.

Most of what happened was bad.

Real bad.

There was Woodstock, true, and there was the Summer of Love -- 1967 in San Francisco -- and Scott MacKenzie's "San Francisco." If you were around in '67, you probably heard that song a thousand times. But I would be willing to bet that most of you have never heard the version of the song by Johnny Hallyday, the French Elvis.

I'll end this post with a video of that, but I'll say one more thing about the Sixties.

As bad as it was in many ways, I would love to do it all again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Symx3ysyq4U