The End of the Age of Aquarius

Posted by Void on 08/02/2005

I graduated high school in 1975.
The world was in constant change from the time I was little. New paradigms all around. Students protesting an unjust war, many minorities fighting for equality. A great human awareness of our place on the planet and in the cosmos. Even the pop music carried the message.
O Brave New World, that hath such things in it! The opiates of the masses – TV, religion, the double-edged sword of technology.
Some eye-openers – Kennedy’s assassination was the first time I developed in interest in American politics (my mom was English, and a Queen made a whole lot more sense), Barry MacGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” which was the first time I became aware of war as something more than Army Men shooting rifles at some vague, dehumanized Enemy. A Life Magazine article with the first pictures of a human fetus in the womb. Martin Luther King’s assassination. [Update 11/22/2006 See comment below.]
The space race, John Glenn, Apollo 1 burning on the pad, men on the moon.
One day a college student’s voice rang across the campuses – “Oh my God, they’re killing us!” and the Age of Aquarius ended. The hippies became real estate agents and business executives. *My* generation became dopers and freaks, because the beautiful future we looked forward to no longer existed. We just weren’t prepared to live in the new Dark Ages.
Nixon’s resignation. Leisure suits. Disco. What a wasteland the ’70s were.
The space shuttle. Reagan’s Evil Empire Speech. The Challenger disaster. I was working on a telemetry system for Edwards AFB when that happened. There had been a great movement to engage the public in the space program, and in technology in general – the Teacher in Space idea was a very good one, even if the main lesson learned was that space travel is still dangerous.
I would go in a heartbeat.
I guess what bothers me is what bothers everyone my age. The human race makes the same mistakes over and over. It seems like the written word might have been helpful if only people would back away from the TV and read once in a while.
Opiate of the masses.

Categories: Media, Religion, Science, Technology, Television. Tags: , , , .

One Response to The End of the Age of Aquarius

  1. hoffman
    11/22/2006 at 2:49 AM

    Hi,

    I am writing to ask you to remove a hyperlink to [link removed].

    As you may know, [link removed] is owned by a white supremacist group and hostile to Dr. King’s legacy and the civil rights movement as a whole.

    Unfortunately, because many sites link to [link removed], often accidentally or citing it as an example of an unreliable source, it consistently comes out at the top of the results for searches related to Dr. King.

    If you want to link to a site more sympathetic to Dr. King’s legacy, I suggest The King Center at http://thekingcenter.org/.

    Editor’s note:
    No, I didn’t know that. The site I originally linked is offensive and I have removed references to it.
    My apologies.

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