FLASHREPORT

I got  Boom! for Christmas.  I resisted reading it for three months until I finally gave in a couple weeks ago.  It was worth it because it is not like other books that I have read on the sixties.

In other books on the decade like "Reunion: A Memoir" by Tom Hayden or "Sixties: Years of Hope and Days of Rage" by Todd Gitlin you get a very different view of the time.  From those book the reader would believe that Tom Hayden and his student protester buddies defined the entire decade.  After reading Brokaw's more than 600 page review of the era and some of the impact it is having on the present day it is clear to me that Hayden over time will be viewed as an interesting historical footnote and nothing else.  Brokaw makes only three minor mentions of Hayden in the entire book.

Boom! defines the sixties as the period of time that spans from the assassination of President Kennedy  in November of 1963 until the resignation of President Nixon in August of 1974.  The book does give great importance to the roll of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement in setting the stage in the time prior to the August 1863 March on Washington.

Here are some things that stand out to me from this book;

• Brokaw takes great pains to present the views on the War on Terrorism of those people he covers in this books.  They were using terms of Vietnam to describe the current situation in Iraq.  I do not think the analogy is fair to our current situation.  In fact, Brokaw even presents my main reason for disagreeing with him later in the book.  It has to do with the people that are fighting this War.
  
• On Christmas Even in 1968 the astronauts aboard Apollo 8 read the first ten verses of Genesis to the world as they looked upon earth from an orbit of the moon.  Tell me what sort of chaos would erupt if that happened today.  We would end up with some lawsuit over church and state. They say the decade of the 60s was a time of enlightenment and freedom but I am guessing that the Bible was considered more central to daily lives in the United States then as opposed to now.
• The time period did bring a great deal of change to the views of American on race relations, civil rights, politics, music, and gender politics. 
  
• Brokaw also goes to great pains that this decade set up the Republican revolution of the next three decades as middle America rejected the actions of the far left.

This decade certainly did define many of the people that "came of age" during this period of time.  It defined the views of these people in every way.

Iraq is not going to make the same impact on our country.  Unfortunately the nation is not currently impacted to the extent that it was during Vietnam. The "all volunteer" force we have now means that most people are not feeling any hardship during a  time our nation is at war.  How that would all change if many of the people falling into the demographic of men reading this blog had a draft number.  That would make things in Iraq much more tangible.

Most of the people that read this blog are probably between the ages of 18 and 48.  What will out generation be known for?  I believe that the coming Presidential race will have a defining impact on that.