in the good old days...

Is it possible to feel sentimental for a time you were never a part of? I have been contemplating that question since this past summer when I went to a "dinner and entertainment" night at the arts school. It was wonderful. The entertainment was musician David Archibald and he was performing songs from the summer of 1967. There were a number of people in the audience who were obviously around for the summer of 1967 and were up dancing and singing along with all the songs. I, too, was already familiar with most of the songs, but seeing them performed, and seeing the audience, and feeling the energy and atmosphere and passion created by those particular songs made me wish it was 1967 again, except this time around I would be there too.

I don't know where I'm going with this, exactly...it's just something I've been thinking about lately. It leaves me feeling like I missed out on something, like somehow there were more people willing to stand for something or wanting to make a difference then than there are now. I feel like music and art came together as a voice where they now are too often products of a money-hungry industry. I feel like young people wanted to be a revolution, where they are now too often worried about just getting a half-decent job. And then I wonder if my perception isn't just a little skewed because people often look back on their youth with rose-coloured glasses, and that's how I have learned about the 60's and 70's - through the eyes of parents and others who "were there," and I pick up on their sentimentalism. That might be true, and yet there aren't legions of people proclaiming that all they need is love, anymore, and I guess that's where I start getting bummed out, because I wish there still were or, more than that, I wish there was again. Perhaps I am confusing sentimentalism with a desire for things to be different, and 1967's Summer of Love is the closest thing history offers as an example of how I wish things were now. I don't know, I don't know. I do know that there are a lot of things about society and politics and mainstream culture and lifestyles that could really benefit from a revolution right now. I'm 22. It's my generation that could make a difference right now, that could create another voice to add to the echoes of the hippies and the beats and all the dreamers and questioners of the past, so at the very least our children will hear our music and say, "We need to keep making this difference."

After all, the world doesn't belong to a single generation, it belongs to all of us. And wouldn't that be so much better than being 50 and looking back on this decade of my youth and sighing sentimentally, "Those were the days - we really stuck to the textbook and lived exactly the way society wanted us to."

BLEH!!!