In the month of May

David Seaton's News Links
This May is the 40th anniversary of the Paris riots of 1968. Much is being written about the meaning and the "legacy" of those days, whether the left still exists or "where are they now" pieces, you name it. A time when Paris still could dictate style to the world and a Paris Hilton could be nothing but a decent hotel.

After giving it some thought, I've come to a tentative conclusion that the period we call "the 60s", which I would place between the election of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States and the oil embargo of 1973, were such an exceptional, dreamlike time that it is practically impossible to relate them to anything that has ever happened before or since.

Today and tomorrow look more and more like history as we have always known it for centuries. Times filled with wars, epidemics, famines and tales told by an idiot, little like those days of serene prosperity and mass free love.

It was an era when, for the first time in history, it occurred simultaneously to millions of otherwise conventional young men and more importantly, to otherwise conventional young women, that they could have sex without having to stare across a breakfast table at that person for the rest of their lives... but miraculously, for a few short years, the girls still got up and made you breakfast... A period obviously suspended outside of natural time.

It was a era of immense personal liberation, where more important than being free, you were freeing yourself. Being free is often tasteless and odorless, but taking freedom is pure nectar.

The combination of a booming economy and full-employment allowed those who were young then to concentrate our fullest attention on the opportunities afforded us by effective birth control and the absence of all the ghastly, life destroying, sexually transmitted, diseases that plague young lovers today.

Opportunities which made the 1960s a paradise similar to the one Al Qaeda sells to its recruits.

I count myself blessed to have been young at the best time in the history of humanity to be young, when, in the words of Pedro Almodovar, "all love could give you was a broken heart".

If nothing else the May 68 of Paris gives us a festive symbol of all of it. DS