1968 + 50

Hindsight is fascinating.

This year, 2018 there are going to be multiple anniversaries of events that happened half a century ago.

1968.

It was a year had many life changing events including civil rights battles, political assassinations, and even some good stuff too.

I was there, but I wasn’t too.

I was just an eight year old kid.

My youth was the 60’s and 70’s, yet I really didn’t pay much attention to the events of the world.  As kids, we didn’t care.

News came to us in the daily newspaper, but I wanted to read the comics.

Instead of 24 hour cable news channels, you had to sit down for the half hour national news from CBS, ABC, or NBC at the scheduled time when it was delivered live in the early evening.

Radio stations were mostly music with brief newscasts.  WOWO radio was the dominate station in Fort Wayne, (and still is).

I was reading this pictorial history from the Atlantic today and noticed that it was 50 years ago that the Beatles released their White Album, but I wasn’t into music yet.  I was just 8 years old and it wasn’t until I turned 11 that I bought my first record.

Many of you who read this weren’t born yet, or like me you were just a kid and enjoying kid stuff.

And living through those times in the 60’s and 70’s were not personally life changing for the most part.  What mattered more was what was going on in the lives of the people around me, my parents and friends.

A couple of closing thoughts:

Despite the ability to know anything, anytime, on demand, don’t get sucked in to the day to day news that will be hardly a memory years from now.  It will wear you out, unnecessarily.

Let your kids be kids.

You might think that I’d be emotionally scared from living through a year that had so much turmoil, but no, it was just a blip because I got to pay attention to kid stuff and not adult stuff.

As I mentioned at the beginning, Hindsight is fascinating.

20 years from now or even 50, I wonder what events in this year will be remembered?

Here’s the link to the Atlantic story that inspired this piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/01/50-years-ago-in-photos-a-look-back-at-1968/550208/