To my grandchildren - Stuck in the sixties

Dear grandchildren, 

It is time you guys learn a horrible truth about your old granddad. It's better if you get it from me, from the horse's mouth so to speak, then from someone else.

From a cultural point of view, I am stuck in the sixties!! 

There, I have said it! There is the turd in the tomato soup, that horrific little secret that has been the subject of an elaborate cover up among family and friends. But I believe that for the sake of a healthy relationship there should really be no secrets between us.

You see, the sixties was an amazing, intoxicating, bewildering, fascinating and wonderful decade. Let me try and explain why.

I was born in 1948, so I am part of what is referred to as "the baby boom". In the years immediately following the end of the second world war, when weary combat soldiers returned to the welcoming arms of their girlfriends and wives, an unusually high number of babies were born. Like me, these baby boomers have now reached retirement age, but they had the incredible good fortune to be live their teenage and adolescence in the 1960s. They shaped that decade just as much as they were shaped by it.

Geopolitically speaking, it was the simplest of times. It was the time of the Cold War. There were good guys (us) and there were bad guys (the Russkis). That was simple. Anyone with a brain the size of a peanut could understand that. It was the time that black was black and white was still white and there was not a whole lot in between.

On the 'good guy side' you had people like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi. On the 'bad guy side', you had Nikita Khrushchev (or however it was spelled), Mao Tze Dung, Ho Chi Minh and a bunch of other commies. In Berlin, some bad guys built a wall: on one side of it were good guys, on the other side of it were bad guys. Simple!

In the sixties, NATO was not yet a four letter word. Terrorism was yet to be invented. The term Al Qaeda would at best be mistaken for some strange form of mathematics. Like today, huge arsenals of nuclear missiles were pointed at each other with enough devastation potential to annihilate the world's population 10 times over. But at least in those days the people with their fingers on the red button were smart enough not to use them. Nowadays we have Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. Need I say more? 

Of course, not everything was hunkydory in the sixties. There was still quite a bit of nasty business going on in Vietnam, but that happened a safe distance away, on the other side of the world. And we were told it was for a good cause, by politicians who in those days we could still somehow believe in. OK, in hindsight, we may have been a bit naive about that one...

Most of all, however, the sixties was all about peace, love, flowers, hippies, rock and roll and the space race, the latter culminating in the first landing of people on the moon in 1969. In the sixties we were mesmerised by cultural icons like Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Mary Quant, Twiggy and miniskirts.  The Eurovision song contest already existed, but  in those days participants could actually sing and needed no circus acts in the background or bearded lady gimmicks to conceal their lack of vocal talents. And Eastern European vote rigging still had to be invented.

Now just imagine that in the sixties, youngsters like your grandfather did not have computers, the internet, smartphones and iPods? We had no Whatsapp, no Snapchat, no Instagram, no YouTube, no Tinder, no Facebook and no Twitter.  Just how lame were we? However, in spite of the lack of all those modern gadgets, platforms and media, we DID communicate. Young people actually wrote good old fashioned letters to each other, putting actual pen to actual paper. And they spelled their words and sentences out in full rather than mutilate them into turbo language like 'C U L8TER' or 'WTF?'. And we had actual CONVERSATIONS with other young people. We were actually interested in them. They were interested in us. And last but not least, the term 'friendship' still meant something. In those days we used to have 3 or 4 real life friends instead of 300 Facebook friends and 5000 Twitter or Instagram followers. And yet, with those measly 3-4 friends we had great times, every day, and we got up to the most amazing, daring and weird stuff. 

Towards the end of that decade, it became fashionable to shake your fist at the establishment. The baby boomers, now reaching their twenties and totally fed up with the war in Vietnam and with the stuffy discipline that had characterised the generation of their parents, took to the streets and demanded change. Our idea of having a good time on a Saturday evening was to go out with your buddies into the streets, find the nearest riot and get bloodied by police batons. Good, clean, harmless fun... 

As Dutchies, our national sporting ambitions in the sixties were a tad more modest than they are these days. Dutch football fans would already be ecstatic if our national team won at least a friendly match against Belgium... against BELGIUM, for the love of God! We never ever qualified for any European or World Cup finals. And when the Olympic games took place, we usually did not harvest more than one lousy bronze medal, usually for something vague like clay pigeon shooting. That would already be cause for mass national hysteria, state sponsored celebrations, a polonaise in the garden of the Royal Palace (with the old Queen leading the parade), followed by a celebration tour in a horse drawn carriage in his hometown for the lucky medal winner. The local butcher would give the medal winner a basket full of sausages, the local baker would bake him a cake and the local mayor would donate a bicycle on behalf of a grateful town. All of this would be plastered  over one of the only two TV channels we had available in those days, to the delight of an entire wildly enthusiastic and grateful nation.

I loved the sixties. Still do. Perhaps it is because I loved this decade so much, that I got stuck in it, culturally speaking at least. I probably did not want these wonderful sixties to end. Like many of my generation, I sensed that I had been privileged to be a teenager and young adult in the time when rock and roll, the twist and flower power were invented. We were the "chosen generation". 

Don't take my word for it, check out my CD collection. That should tell you the whole story. And even now, with unlimited access to internet, Spotify and other platforms to download all the music I could ever want, what is it that I am downloading? Yup, exclusively that good old 'sixties stuff'. I rest my case!

Should you want to explore what these sixties were all about, that I have been ranting about in this blogpost, and should you have patience to watch two videos of about 10 minutes each, the two wonderful BBC videos below illustrate beautifully what the sixties were all about, at least in Great Britain. Trust me it was the same in our beloved country behind the dykes. Enjoy!

Hugs from

Tweeter Opa