The end of the 1960s – “Nothing was changed, but everything was different”

So, here is another quote from “Dreams Die Hard” by David Harris – him in prison for having burnt his draft card and encouraged others to do the same. He is visited by a former mentor, Allard Lowenstein..,

Everyone involved in the decade would have their own date for when the Sixties ended, and that cell time with Allard Lowenstein would be mine. It had been ten years with little in the way of simple summations to explain it once it was over. The best and worst in us had fought it out with the best and worst of ourselves. No one had won and no-one had lost. Nothing was changed, but everything was different.(Harris, 1982:281)

It puts me in mind of this from Hunter S. Thompson, from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” “It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant… There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back.”