As a card-carrying baby boomer (I guess officially, with my AARP membership!), I was 10 when most of 1968 happened. It was a pivotal year, no doubt — though in my consciousness, ’69 left a deeper impact.
AARP magazine does a fine job of using the Web as a story-telling device to revisit the year. This online special section kicks ass over the print edition’s article and timeline. No offense to the mag; its layout is really good and compelling to flip through. But the online version, with its audio clips of interviews, slideshow, interactive timeline, trivia quiz, “AARP Radio” and all the articles and reader reminiscences (and invitation for audiences to submit their memories), is a pleasure to experience.
Recommended reading/viewing for nostalgic boomers as well as anyone interested in the history of our country. This photo above, from the timeline, is a good reminder that with an unpopular war being waged and a lame duck president in office, Richard Milhouse Nixon took the presidency away from the Democrats. That’s one of the darker legacies that 1968 left us.
I’m proud to be a Baby Boomer, because of all the historical implications my generation has had. Not the usual stuff about living through the Vietnam war and rock and roll and Kennedy and civil rights and the space race (all of which is true), but more the fact that simply having such a large cohort of people growing up at the same time forced society and industry and business and culture to change to accommodate us all.
