After the Sixties, Volume 14 #1

The Sixties, My Son and Forrest Gump

My son hates the sixties. He says he hates the "look" that typifies the decade, shuddering as I lap up the reruns of old TV favourites and early Bond movies. I get mad. The "with-it," intelligent, university-educated and intutitive parent of the nineties reacts emotionally. Typically "me-generation," I jump in, taking his attacks as a personal criticism of everything my life has stood for. "But you love Star Trek," I flail in defence. "Where would your sci-fi be now if it wasn't for them? And where would humour be if not for Monty Python? And--"

The baby boomer who railed at her own parents now rails at her offspring, defending those years of my youth as some magical springboard for freedom of thought, civil rights, peace and back-to-nature. As my face reddens with fury, he refers me to images of placard-toting rebels, women burning bras: "You were all a bunch of pot-smoking hippies, angrily demanding attention. How immature."

His attack on my generation's maturity reduces my defence to self-righteous blusterings. His rebellion is a quiet one, a calm reevaluation of everything we baby boomers look back on with pride and nostalgia. The parents we attacked hit back verbally, even physically. My son remains calm, smiling slightly at the trap I'm guilty of making for myself.

Acutely self-absorbed, wilfully perpetuating our own space in history, we continue to demand attention, forcing our romanticized images of the sixties on our children, reminding them that we invented street fashion and chuckling smugly when they still play our music and we know more words. We fought so desperately for the freedoms they enjoy. They can claim nothing, at least nothing we are prepared to give value to. And they won't fight as we did, because it was we who taught them to be reflective about everything--including us. My wise son teaches me it's time to give them the voice that we so nobly claimed was everyone's right.

So quietly my son and I begin to discuss both the absurdities and the values of my early years, and the inheritance they have afforded his age. No glitz, no rainbow-coloured glasses of memory. An attempt to be true to all that was good and all that was bad.

With a finely tuned sense of justice, he pours out his own fascination with the very decade I thought he wanted to attack: the Kennedy era, the Cold War, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, women's rights and the start of the earth movement. I'm impressed by his frank admission that he has read about these things by choice, not because he owed it to his parents. I'm more impressed by his ability to relate these happenings to his own world.

More than we had ever hoped was possible, the "next generation" is serious about the issues we so desperately wanted to raise and change and fix forever. In our never-ending belief in the need for protest to get heard, we have failed to realize that our kids got the message some time ago. Our loud flauntings only make the message less credible. It was our McLuhan who warned, "The medium is the message."

Then just as my son and I reach this amicable plateau, along comes Forrest Gump. As the nostalgic images sweep across the screen, my heart drops. Vietnam is reduced to a joke about heroism, the peace rallies and hippie movements to drug-besotted, self-centred rebels or people escaping the horrors of child abuse.

The resolution is an idyllic nineties pastoral scene where the mentally challenged hero reaches a yuppie haven of financial success and social recognition, and the physically and emotionally challenged second lead finds himself through "real" friendship, reconciling all that was wrong with the war by marrying a Vietnamese girl (who counters the politically incorrect South Pacific stereotype of sexy Asian girls by being correctly unpretty). This bland image of fruition--a nineties version of small-town home-grown values--won Oscars and the approval of most baby boomers I know. Blindly they support the ridiculing I am now so desperate to avoid. And typically they're even serious about it.

I look at my son who simply shrugs. He's seen it all before.

Kathryn Lingwood is a freelance writer and editor in Toronto.