COMMENTS

11 responses to “Open Thread Update: Pivotal Events”

1. Some of the most epochal events of my lifetime were assassinations: of JFK when I was in grade school, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy when I was in junior high, Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone in San Francisco when I was in college in Berkeley. Also when I was in college, the bodies of the people who so tragically died at Jonestown were coming home, mostly to Oakland (just next door, so to speak). I wanted so badly to become a peacemaker…but peace seems ever farther away

   Reply to Diana

2. The War in Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement in the sixties has shaped my entire life: my thinking, feelings, political views and actions. They essentially shaped who I am.

   Reply to Rhea Lewin Geberer

3. Hurricane Katrina. My home, job and lifestyle gone in a flash.

   Reply to Diane

4. Even before I was old enough to know what politics was, I had been introduced to its conflicts. My father was Republican, worked in the defense industry and voted for Nixon in 1960. My mother, on the otherhand, was a Democrat, an artist and voted for Kennedy. I can still hear them arguing, often quite loudly and often at the dinner table.
   But it was the Civil Rights movement and the naked brutality of the police and the hatered directed at “negroes” that transformed into becoming a Liberal.

   Reply to Art Chippendale

5. One of the pivotal moments for me was in the 1960s when students at Stanford University, where I was a student myself, went to the South to register black voters. I didn’t go, but I was quite moved. Ever afterwards I involved myself in improving race relations and helping people of color and immigrants be treated as full-fledged human beings and citizens of the US.

   Reply to Judy Kramer

6. What is the name for those of us who were born before the “boomers” & after the “greatest generation”?

   Reply to Fruitman Ilene

7. JFK, moon landing, Woodstock, Vietnam. And I don’t even live in the US! Just shows how much you guys dominate the world.

   Reply to CLT

8. For me it was World War II and The Holocaust. My Jewish parents escaped from Austria (barely) in time, but most of their friends and relatives did not. I remember their worries during the war, their search for who remained alive for a year or two after the war ended, and years of looking at pictures of the (many) people who didn’t make it.

   Reply to Ron Kokish

   1. Dear Ron,

      My parents were also from Vienna and luckily were able to leave due to the good graces of Dean William Ralph Inge, the then dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in England. My father, an English teacher wrote to him. Dean Inge made arrangements for my parents and brother to leave. They landed safely in England and just like your parents had great losses of relatives. I was born several years later in the U.S.

      Reply to Susan Immergut

9. Space race. Influenced my hobbies and room decor (along with baseball) as a teen, choice of college major (engineering), and career paths (US Air Force and private industry / aerospace). Now apparently even as a grandfather — my grandson showed me his “stomp rocket” recently and I got to thinking about how to measure altitude like I used to with my model rockets over 50 years ago. I hate to think our best days are behind us, but, the moon landings and Apollo 13 were among our very best.

   Reply to Eric Wallace

10. I came of age in San Francisco in the Sixties. In terms of shaping my personal development, it doesn’t get any more epochal than that!

    Reply to Doug Perry