Soren Chapter 5 the 1960s

(This is the fifth in a series of writings I am doing for my Great Grandson Soren. Hope it gives him a glimpse and a curiosity about the lives of one of his grandparents.)

How to write of the sixties?
God, it’s complicated.
Am I just getting old?
With a new young President John Kennedy
We were on the road to Camelot.
The place where only happiness lives.
Trouble was, a terrible war in Vietnam
Another stop on the domino idiocy road.

Kids born after World War two.
Soldiers came home, went to bed.
Twenty years later 70 million Baby Boomers.
Registered for a military draft. Just a number.
Yeahh, “when your numbers up you gotta go.”

That’s how it started, “Hell know we wont go.”
The government lies, The government lies.
Question Authority, Did they ever.

Communist, Castro in Cuba Russian Nuclear Missiles.
President Kennedy’s supreme test.
Nuclear, total destruction or what?
Our military says, just bomb em.
Kennedy waits, talks with Russians
World is saved for now.

Kennedy shot in Texas, Lyndon Johnson President.
Doesn’t know where Vietnam is. Need to continue war.
Why? Yes of course that domino shit again.
Evening news anchor reads names of the dead.

Baby Boomers “Hell no we wont go.”
Feminists Betty Friedan pleads equality for women.
Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring,” pleads for the planet.
Black youth demand right to sit at a drug store soda fountain.

With 400 Juvenile Delinquents on lower East Side
Your Great Grandpa teaching them vocational skills.
They-re teaching the horrors of Getto life.

Veitnam war protests take over the streets.
Kent State U, National Guard shoots protester.
On her knees screaming girl reflects its horror.
The country mourns. Are we are lost?

LBJ seems lost. He does wonders on home front.
New rights granted Black people.
Grandpa bob takes 400 kids to Nations Capital
They hear Martin Luther King. “I have a Dream.”

Civil Rights Movement in full protest.
Anti War, the Feminists, Civil Rights,
Protest crowd streets. This is the sixties.
Like our President King, too is assassinated.
As cities burn.These are the days of rage.

Beatles are visiting from Liverpool singing
Strawberry Fields Forever. As young girls scream in ecstasy.
And Warhol, art known as pop. A Campbell Soup Can.
Transcendental Meditation, smoking pot helped.
Foul language, dress as you feel, burn your bra.
The new road to enlightenment.

Honestly. As Watts in Los Angele's burned.
And Jerry Lee Lewis was rocking around the clock’
Fred, your uncle on August 14-15 1969 with 400,000 others.
A music wing ding, happening at Woodstock NY in the rain
Listening to Jimmie Hendrix, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Lead Zeppelin on and on.
In the muddy, and loving every minute. Go figure?

The Vietnam catastrophe was ending.
Russians send Yurie Gargarin to space.
We send Alan Shepard. So began the space war,
As the sixties ended it was clear.

America, the US of us will never be the same.
50 thousand US lives lost, millions in Vietnam died.
Civil rights for blacks, women on the march to equality.

We lived through a culture breach.
Maybe, the end of innocence?
Or the beginning. The age of doubt?
Anyway it was one hell-of a ride.
Changed who we are forever.