That's why it fascinated us and still does. That, and good music. We didn't realize the jig was up until Reagan came to office. Most people turned inward, away from public service and the world at large, and concentrated on personal wealth and happiness, which is almost meaningless to a culture (If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at who She gives it to...)

It's over. Move on.

Will anyone who gives a shit what some history professor from the University of St. Andrews says please raise his/her hand??

If nothing else . . . the 60's were fun. Gerard de Groot . . . not so much fun.

At some time in the future, our best pal the Sun will run out of fuel. He will then swell into a red giant . . . expanding past the orbit of Mars. The earth will be a charred cinder. All of human history will have produced nothing of lasting importance.

Oh, well, thanks very much for harshing our mellow, Prof. de Groot.

Who's fascinated by the 60's? Baby boomers. As usual, the baby boomers look back on their own idealized pasts, and assume everyone else finds it as fascinating and monumental as they do.

I was born in 1970, and I don't know anyone my age who is "fascinated" by the 60's. No one younger, either. It's a part of history - there were some good things and some bad things, but it wasn't the pinnacle of life on earth, the way some boomers think it was. The only time I think about the 60's is when the clothes come back in fashion.

I was around for the 60s, and they were pretty amazing at the time. But they have long ceased to fascinate me. The constant and obsessive rehashing of this decade bores the hell out of me.

If you want to talk about fascinating times that really did change the world, that really created lasting importance (were all of us to leave our self-absorption long enough to see it), then talk about the 30s and 40s.

Sorry old timer (and that is a state of mind) but it was a gas! And many people were changed from empty "why am I doing this?" consumers, to wise humans with insight and self-knowledge. It was so NOT about individualism, or "self", or ME!

It was, and is, about us all as a part of the Whole - and, yes, I saw the Light, and experience life in the multi-dimensional reality that mystics and physicists are begging the rest of us to embrace - and you're so full of shit I can't believe I'm still trying to reach people like you. Why? Probably so you don't screw up some more of the young un's - who make far better teachers than students.

For the record, I'm 65 and still one hell of a drummer, speaker, teacher, writer, life-saver and father - of a 14 year-old prodigy who makes me feel small. Must have been all that LOVE I brought to the table . . .

Or maybe is was the acid...

One never know, do one?

well, i'm 27 and i can easily say they definitely achieved a hell of a lot more than we have. womens rights, black rights, war protesting, environmental issues, etc.

Well, here's the thing: Women are more demeaned and hypersexualized than ever and unplanned motherhood is rampant; New Orleans was allowed to drown because it's black; we've got another crappy Vietnam War going on; and the environment's quite possibly on its last legs.

So if we're talking about lasting importance, I'd have to give the 60s a failing grade.

In 1968, J Edgar Hoover told Johnson that if he tried to call upm another half million troops he could not guarantee the safety and security of the United States. But the Vietnam protests didn't effect the war.

The assasinatiion of RFK didn't have anything to do with Nixon's eventual election - it was the counter culture chasing all the fence sitters into Nixon's camp. Uh huh.

Abbie Hoffman's levitation of the Pentagon was all about seriously levitationg the Penatagon, not manipulating the media and getting coverage for protests. Hmmmm

To claim that the counter culture failed to make any lasting or worthwhile change, you'd have to ignore the era of "good girls don't," the intense power of conformity that was a way of life.

To be sure, "hip" capitalism ala Rolling Stone co-opted much of the do-it yourself attitude that pervaded the ethos, and people went on to raise families and give up on some ideals that just didn't work, but things like the enviromental movement, government sunshine laws, the beginings of the gay rights movement, the fact that co-habitation is the norm instead of something the neighbors looked on with horror and shame - all have countercultural roots that have become so mainstream we think of them as the status quo.

If these kinds of freedom don't matter, then the guys is right. I think they matter.

To know what made the 60's special you need to understand what makes a culture. Basically its a shared vision amongst a population of who they are as a people, (country, nation, ethnicity, whatever) and where they are headed. Usually this vision is able to be verbalized by the people of a given culture since it is so ubiquitous, as it must be by definition, it goes unnoticed. The really important part of a functioning culture is that this vision must be transmitted from generation to generation for it to be a viable culture.

What happened in the 60's is for various reasons the children of the newest generation rejected this cultural handoff from their parents. They looked at what their parents were handing down and basically said, "You're nuts!" and went off to start their own new culture based (loosely) on love. As you know they failed. So that is why the 60's are so special. Whether people know it or not, culturally it was the beginning of the end of our people.

The next chapter of the story deals with a new generation growing up, having rejected their parents culture and having failed to come up with a working culture of their own, they proceeded to fill in the gaps with what was at hand. Money.