A view of the 70's

[Jean Lorrah <a21711f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kenny wrote,

>Tell me Jean, are you speaking from experience? As I've said numerous
>times before, how can middle aged, middle classed, middle Americans
>second guess Page or Plant circa 1974? The experiences are just too
>different for any meaningful insight. Your conjecture ain't worth shit.
>Have you ever had underaged girls of every shape and size fuck you every
>night for months on end? How would you respond to the temptations? Any
>vice you wanted could be yours, sex, drugs, sex, evil ... whatever.
>
>Then imagine some self righteous person wants to judge your behaviour
>20+ years later! You know, they'd be doing it all over again if they
>weren't so tired ...

The reason you were unable to quote anything from my post to support your
accusation is that there is nothing in it second guessing Page or Plant
circa 1974.  There is no judgment made.  I have no experience at being a
rock star circa 1974.  I _do_ have experience at being a young woman circa
1974.  Do you?  
Not the fame and fortune, but the sex, drugs, and what you choose to call
"evil" were just as available to me in the 1970's as to anyone else.  What
you forget is that what you now categorize as evil, in the 1970's we thought
of as good, as a break with the "establishment" that had failed us, a new
morality that we would pass on to our children, who would grow up without
the hangups we worked so hard to get rid of.

You seem to have forgotten the incredible innocence of the early 1970's--by
the end of the decade it went the way of all camelots, but it flourished
from the late 60's through the early 70's.  It was not decadence, although
it certainly can appear so to those who did not live through it.  It can
also look like ignorance, or stupidity.  But for the generation of young
people experiencing it at the time, it was a strange form of innocence.
Perhaps a desperate innocence, an attempted antidote to the harsh experience
of the 1960's, but the antithesis of the cynicism that became the hallmark
of the 1980's.

We trusted each other in a way no other living generation can comprehend.
We knew that we could save the environment, love was all we needed, and
recreational drugs and recreational sex were not only safe but beneficial.
Whether we were right or wrong is immaterial; at the time, we _believed_
these things.  It is also immaterial that there were cynics profiting from
our naivete.

Innocence always carries the seeds of its own destruction.  As for the older
members of the generation this particular innocence was akin to regaining
one's virginity, its life expectancy was inevitably short.  But while it
lasted, it was a transcendant experience.  

Go ahead, Kenny--sneer as much as you like at such foolishness.  Before you
bash, I agree that not everyone in the general age group shared the
experience described--when I got my first teaching job, here in the Bible
Belt, I discovered that large numbers of people had completely missed it.
And some people were more aggressive than others about trying every possible
experience--I readily admit that there were some I wasn't willing to risk,
and some people I wasn't willing to trust.  But that doesn't mean the time
didn't happen.  I was there.  So were Led Zeppelin.  The fact that the era
crashed and burned doesn't mean that it never existed.  Jean

Jean Lorrah A21711F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (alternate Jean1@xxxxxxxx)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/3439/ http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4165/