We Thought We Were SOOOOO Cool!

(J.D. Stetson) I remember (vaguely) my late teens and early twenties.  I was beyond cool.  At least that’s how I remember it sometimes.  I was on my own, living in a time and place where I basically had a license to do anything I wanted.  My life was cool; my music was cool; my friends were cool; even my ’65 Dodge Dart was pretty cool – well it DID have an eight track!  It was a time of peace marches; of REV-O-LU-TION; mind-altering parties; incredible fashion (can anyone say tie-dyed T-shirts and bell bottoms?); incredibly progressive music (in the real sense of the word); and burgeoning political power to the young.

I remember:  John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., H. Rap Brown, Abbie Hoffman, and the Berrigan Brothers.  I remember Jimi, Jim, Janis, the Beatles and all the others that made our music new, exciting and relevant. 

This all started kicking around in my mind as I watched the various clips that have been loaded onto “CRF-TV” at CLASSICROCKFOREVER.  I’ve gotta tellya that I had to laugh at the costumes, the frenetic antics while the bands pretended to play and the audiences tried to look cool while go-go dancing away on little mini-stages or stairways.  The music is still as good as ever or at least a lot of it, but the rest failed to live up to my memories.  Failed completely.

 

Being twenty-something is a very cool time of life.  We are growing, trying to “find ourselves” and trying to understand our place in this great big world.  We are stepping beyond the controlled world that we’ve always known as “home” and trying to define what will become the home of our future.  It is a time of successes and failures.  It is a time of trial and error and experimentation and finding out our limitations and our willingness to push out beyond those limitations.  It is a time before all the responsibilities of maintaining a home, supporting a family, striving for promotions and looking toward retirement tend to wear us down and out.  So we look back at our youth with nostalgia, and the memories become somehow more and better than the reality.

 

Yes, we are older now, but we can still push at the limits.  We have experience now to add to our energy and imagination.  Many of us now have the resources to help define what will become of this “home of our future”, this planet earth.  As I listen to some of this music that still reveals such great composition, encouraging lyrics and musical virtuosity I realize it can either bring me back to a past that I remember fondly, but that is more imagination than reality, or I can continue to push at the limits of what I can do.

 

You and I can still make a difference.  In fact, we now have experience to add to our energy, imagination and purpose.  It is just a matter of choosing to keep on being really cool.  What’s your choice?