If you were 18 or over in the 1960s you needed a mentor or a good parent to survive those years especially if you were a male

 Why?

Because otherwise if you graduated or didn't graduate high school (which was pretty common then) you were going to get drafted into the Army and have a good chance of dying on the front lines in Viet Nam in the war then. For example, young men who didn't want to get drafted and wanted to fake Diabetes drank I believe it was called "Bali Hai" which was a very sweet alcoholic drink that mimicked Diabetes when you were medically tested for the military. Some people went to Canada in order to avoid the draft and some people settled there and never came back to the U.S. because they married and started new lives there. Others were young and drafted and went to Viet Nam and it was so shocking and disorganized and a meat grinder of young men that when they got Leave to go back to the U.S. they didn't go back and usually eventually were sent to jail for around 5 years for desertion.

All these things happened when people didn't want to die in Viet Nam as a soldier back then. I'm not sure about other people but I can say for myself I was very surprised to be alive at age 20 and 21. I had been told by many people that I was going to die in a nuclear holocaust as a soldier likely by age 20 or 21. So, for me, it was a great relief that that actually didn't happen.

I started to realize about then just how crazy and paranoid most people were back then on a lot of levels and began more thinking for myself just realizing that most of the world was completely crazy and mostly dying for nothing from all kinds of things. So, I studied more and more so I wouldn't be one of the early deaths that I witnessed mostly among more ignorant people here in the U.S. and abroad.

When I compare what is happening now in the U.S. to the 1960s and 1970s I would say the main difference is that less people are being killed by each other or by police or by soldiers than were in the 1960s and 1970s worldwide.

There are still people yelling at each other but they aren't killing each other at the rate they were in the 1960s and 1970s. This is despite all the school and market shootings you see all the time. So, less people seem to be killed by the police and by soldiers around the world than before and it's more just people shooting themselves and each other more now. You didn't see so many people (just average people) killing each other or themselves like now mostly because people believed in God and karma and "As ye sow so shall ye reap" then.

Now people often don't believe in anything including themselves so there is nothing morally to stop them from killing themselves or others anymore.

So, in some ways I think the pacifying nature of religion and a belief in God made people in general less violent whereas before the only people really violent were the police and soldiers and gangsters.

So, this is the main difference between the 1960s and 1970s and now.