“1969” from “Remembering Eternity”
“The Vietnam War dominated the attention of Americans and citizens of other nations, but the famine in Biafra generated images (of skeletal children) as horrific as any coming out of the war zone. Eleven months earlier, in what constituted the largest demonstration in the country’s history, two million Americans had protested against the war. The first draft lottery drawing, to select inductees to the Armed Forces, occurred in December of the previous year. April of that year saw the inaugural celebration of Earth Day, with 20 million people in the United States participating in a grassroots display of environmental concern. Domestic society was culturally spasmodic. A large majority of the baby-boom generation, in typical youthful style, rejected the conformist values of their parents, choosing fanciful clothing, psychedelic music, anti-establishment politics, open sexuality, and drug usage as symbols of their rebellion. In the summer of 1969, the Woodstock Rock Festival, the jubilation of that generation—the 500,000-person, living, loving, loud, licentious, and intoxicated emblem of the flower-child culture: mad, rhapsodic, and fantastical—burst into bloom in Sullivan County New York like a rapid and rank inflorescence of light-gray-blue lupines, lavender asters, and cadmium-yellow primroses.” https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B01B9SZ1DW
