I cannot say I remember the 1960s and 70s like they were yesterday but I certainly remember them well enough. Those we years of turmoil as our nation was transformed from that of our parents, the great depression, World War 2 and Korean War. They were the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” generation. And Tom Brokaw later described them as the “Greatest Generation” although I have reservations about that, I am also not about to dispute it.

As children of the “duck and cover” generation, always fearing the Russians (the USSR) was going to drop a nuclear bomb on us, we suffered through monthly drills and air raid sirens. We also were witness to the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States altered so that it now contains the phrase “under God.”

By the time we were old enough to see what was going on around us and digest it, we knew we did not like what we saw. The first thing to show itself was racial inequality. A group called the “Black Panthers” emerged whose mission was to protect the black neighborhoods from the all white police and others who felt it their mission to keep the black man in his place and if that meant cracking a few skulls, so be it.

At the same time Martin Luther King was forming peaceful marches to protest segregation even though the Federal Courts had outlawed such things in 1954, it persisted in the south where “Jim Crow” rules still dominated the cityscape and rural areas as well.

By 1965 the Vietnam War was beginning to ramp up to its height in 1969 and 1970. College students questioned the government’s reasons for our fighting such a war in the first place. They had rightly seen such an act as one of Imperialism which the North Vietnamese had been shouting for decades, going back to when the French were the occupying country.

The mid-60s also saw the rise of the women’s rights movement. Women were fighting both to throw off the yoke of government control of their bodies, birth control and abortion, as well as equal pay for equal work. They tried in vain to get an Equal Rights Amendment added to our Constitution. The argument from those opposed was the old refrain that there were laws in place which guaranteed their right to equal pay.

Then, finally, there were the hippies who found their leader in the former Yale Professor Dr. Timothy Leary. Leary extolled the virtues to using LSD even though he logic was without merit, he more importantly brought into public view a group of people who wanted to dress as they pleased, have sex as they pleased, and live however they pleased without being condemned by society.

For each of the above movements, and others I have not mention, partial success was achieved. In 1973 the US Supreme Court ruled abortion both legal and the right of every woman to decide. This also included birth control which women had been fighting for since the early 1900s when Margaret Sanger in New York City set up the first women’s health clinics in the lower east side of that community. For efforts she was shunned for her activities, even though she was a trained nurse, and then jailed for sending birth control literature through the mail and finally run out of the country in the late 19teens. Seventy years of struggle is now under attack as states have gotten the Federal Government to stop funding of Planned Parenthood and at least two large states, Texas and Missouri, have limited the number of Planned Parenthood in each state to one.

As for equal pay, women still only get about 75 cents on the dollar for doing the exactly same job at the exact same level as men.

Where people of color are concerned, they are part of the lowest income per capita in the U.S. and, of course, among the least educated and therefor the most incarcerated. Prison populations frequently approach 50% a black population in spite of there being 13% of the total U.S. population. They are still under attack by the white population.

Our imperialistic tendencies appeared once again in 2002 when President Bush declared war on Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They knew going in, however, that he did not but they felt he was part of a grand conspiracy with Al Qaeda to attack the U.S. There was no proof to support such a supposition.

And during the decades of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, it was the baby boomers who were in the halls of congress, in the board rooms, and in positions of great influence. It was our responsibility to continue and improve upon the changes and challenges which began in the 1960s and 70s.

But as I, a member of the baby boomers, look back over those decades I can only conclude that we have failed the succeeding generations, the Gen X’ers, the Millennials, and the Gen Z’ers. Our legacy to them is a failing health system, out of control global warming, poor distribution of the nation’s wealth, and an attack of women’s reproductive rights that we should have foreseen and been ready to beat back. We did neither.

And worst of all, children in schools today, even though their numbers a far fewer than the baby boomers, are going to overcrowded crowded classroom headed by underpaid teachers, and sometime under-educated.

It is now up to Gen X and the Millennials to right our wrongs, to re-energize movements started in the 60s to meet the demands of today’s society and to secure the future to our children and our grandchildren.