"The Sixties..."

If anyone is old enough to remember the sixties, the big deal was what were we going to do with all of our leisure time because of all of the technology that was about to enter our lives and free us up from the hardship of doing anything.

The big concern was identifying the right kind of companies to invest in who could channel all of that free time. About that time, AMF's stock started to soar along with Brunswick's; these guys were positively positioned to benefit from all of this leisure time that we were going to have and have to fill some way.

People were going to have more time to bowl; to hike new trails; to ride off-road vehicles; to take trips to far-off places. An investor could not go wrong in this heady atmosphere of promise. Anything was doable and anything was possible. We could send satellites into space and even land on the moon...

But the leisure concept seemed to be just that and nothing more.
Most people did not discover a world of leisure. In the 70's, booming inflation made it harder and harder to save money and now two people had to work to make the disposable income formerly earned by one. College tuition's continued to rise along with rising taxes causing people to begin to think about spare jobs to supplement their incomes...

Around the same time, executives who had struggled all their lives were starting to think about new careers that were more closely aligned with their interests. It was no longer going to be a question of pursuing those jobs that paid the most money although you hated them but instead finding a career say for example to take advantage of your love of pasting stamps in journals or collecting hub caps or digging for mushrooms. Yes, there was a whole new world out there that could make you happy that would combine your love and making money--not tons of it but enough to get by...

And then it happened. First JFK; then Bobby; then MLK. And we grew old together very fast!

At the beginning of the seventies, we awoke one day to find ourselves knee deep in a recession. At the same time, we were regrouping and rethinking our roles as we left the sixties and entered the 70's. The sixties had seen us change from naive idealists into graying pragmatists.
Vietnam was getting worse. There was a growing schism between the individual and government. Selfishness seemed to be a growing tendency among those who had gone through the love generation and now felt the impact of all the deaths of our leaders.... ; there was little point to anything since anything good would die or be assassinated; the only thing to do was make money lots of it and walk over anybody who stood in your way...

The Baby Boomers in the 80's were in full sway! We faced up to the Cold War and Reagan was making us feel good about being Americans again; although he never thought much about the problems of the have-nots.

And at last the Wall fell (Thank you, Mr. Gorbachev). America was back as number one. Vietnam was behind us. And Bill Clinton made us all optimists again!...

And now this!

How will the historians see this period? Will it go down as four years when America was never so polarized; never so torn apart; where narrow interests drove the country; where people saw their jobs go to distant shores? where the government for the first time could not provide succor to the people of one of its greatest cities; where the people finally realized that corruption reached its ugly tentacles into the very top of our government; where people had lost their confidence in the system and something fundamental was broken in the compact that was supposed to exist between government and the people.

Only time will tell. But all the signs are there.

And the polls are a bellwether some say of a government in stasis.

Americans, thankfully, are wonderfully resilient and we can expect that someday off in the future, groups of people will gather to talk about a period which by then will have been diagnosed, analyzed and investigated over and over again, a period in which many people went to jail or were ruined for violating the public trust.

And so it goes...

Les Aaron

And so it goes!