Holidays in Heck Read Online Free PDF

strength and will that we didn’t know we possessed, to run away as fast as we did.
    We cared. My generation of Americans was the first to really care about racism and sexism, not to mention the I Ching, plus, of course, the earth. “It’s important to preservethe earth’s resources,” I remember saying to Windflower, a pert blonde. “You and I will have to double up in the shower to get this tear gas off.” Also, we were committed. I recall several people whose families had them committed.
    We changed the world. Life has never been the same since that “youthquake” of forty-some years ago. Think of all the things we wouldn’t have if not for the uninhibited freedom and creativity of the 1960s: Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream, Narcotics Anonymous twenty-four-hour help lines, Cher, the Volkswagon New Beatle, comedians who use the word “bullshit” on network TV (after ten PM), cats named Chairman Meow, retro 1960s clothing fashions, retro 1960s hairstyles, retro 1960s music fads, herpes.
    As a generation, perhaps we weren’t the “greatest,” but we certainly were the greatest surprise, when we returned from college drenched in patchouli oil, spouting Karl Marx, and wearing clown pants and braids in our beards. Members of the Greatest Generation pride themselves on all the tribulations they survived, but many of them never got over that one. Mercifully, most members of my generation did. It’s been said that we never had to make sacrifices. Not true. Lots of us are awake by nine o’clock in the morning and have jobs.
    We got married, had families, straightened out, got married again, had more families, straightened out (really). There can be no greater sacrifice than that a man lay down his lifestyle for others. And—“we are all one”—for himself, too, once he figures out that golf is more fun than hacky sack and decides he wants a Lexus. But that doesn’t mean I won’t pay fifty cents a cup extra to make sure that my coffee has been organically grown and ecologically harvested in a way that does not cause political or economic exploitation.
    Speaking of sacrifices, the Veterans of Domestic Disorders Memorial should be engraved with names of those who perished in order that the world might be, you know, groovy. Several prominent rock musicians come to mind, although celebrity drug overdoses could send the wrong message to our own kids who are under the impression that, yes, Dad did have funny hair in the 1960s, but he spent the entire decade singing “Kumbaya” at folk Mass.
    There were those poor students who died at Kent State, except I can’t remember their names. That’s a problem with engraving names on a 1960s monument. What with the ingestion of this and that and people giving themselves monikers like “Windflower,” it’s hard to remember anyone’s name from back then. But this is a detail. The important question is the concept and design of the memorial.
    My wife, a member of Generation X (and I’m betting that
their
monument will consist of a Prada backpack with a
Brady Bunch
CD inside), thinks the 1960s memorial should be something that would allow members of my generation to contemplate the driving force behind the era. She suggests a mirror. I’d like it to be slightly concave to produce an image that is slimming. My uncle Mike (Marine Corps, Iwo) proposes a large ditch with a donkey in it, although he puts that in somewhat different words. But the donkey might be misconstrued—many Veterans of Domestic Disorders being, these days, Republicans. A competition should be opened, with invitations extended to the most talented architects and artists born from 1946 to 1964. (No burnouts who live in yurts or belong to crafts collectives, please.) I trust this competition will produce something with dignity, grandeur, and a place to stash a roach if the park police come