If you remember the 60s you weren't there?

 This has been said of people of my generation. Why did they say this?

It was mostly I think caused by the Viet Nam War and what people had to do to survive these times that actually survived. From my generation's perspective it was trying to not die in the meat grinder of the Viet Nam War. People older than us were still messed up from World war II and the Korean War. But, something really changed with the Viet Nam War where we began to fight back against crazy people in government killing us needlessly.

So, there was a lot of dying in Viet Nam but also a lot of dying here on the mainland too either through suicide, accident or Marijuana or other drugs and alcohol. People did crazy things to cope then regarding all the craziness of everyone left over from the Great Depression, World war II and the Korean War. So, people were still sort of nuts that were older than us then and we knew they were nuts but also we were young and inexperienced with life (just like young people today).

So, Luckily I survived these times even though I knew many who died in Viet Nam or died from racing cars, suicide, drugs, alcohol or just who went insane from the whole thing.

So, this is why they said of us: "If you remember the 60s then you weren't there."

Mostly because so many people were so high all the time they almost didn't know who they were especially in college or in Viet Nam. Even the soldiers were so stoned in Viet Nam that they "fragged" their 90 day wonders who were naive Lieutenants who were too young and inexperienced and tended to get all the young men killed needlessly. So, when one of these showed up in the Army in Viet Nam some of the survivors rolled a hand grenade under their bunks and they were gone. So, Viet Nam was equally as insane a place to be as college on the mainland. Both were sort of insane asylums for kids trying to learn how to survive then in the real world. So, whenever we could we changed the real world to something better.

Those of us successful at changing the "REAL WORLD" that we lived in survived and the rest didn't or died relatively young.

This is a simple way of looking at what actually happened during the 1960s here in the U.S. and in Viet Nam.