Why would a historian one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years from now be interested in your time and place? Well, if you’re a Baby Boomer and an American your time and place is the most important era in the history of mankind. Even hundreds of years into the future your era will be considered the most important time in recorded history. Who knows in what condition Christianity and the other currently popular religions will be in the distant future? Political movements come and go, artistic movements come and go and the most current is usually considered the peak of evolutionary development and therefore the most important. In the future race may be so long gone that the Civil Rights movement is of only minor interest, the Cold War is already boring to the youth of today and despite all the hubbub about coming ecological disasters I personally don’t worry about anything about which we are already worried since we as a people have an excellent track record of fixing problems once they’ve been identified. So why would the Baby Boomers' time, and I’m specifically referring to the 1960s, be the most important decade of all time?
At the very start of the Sixties, during John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in January of 1961, we Americans officially started the Space Race and in 1969, the last year of the decade, we landed on the moon. No matter how far science takes us in the future, no matter how many inventions, breakthroughs, revelations and advancements, human beings setting foot on another planet was the most important and impressive thing we’ve ever done or ever will do. Landing on Mars will just be traveling to another planet. Anywhere else we may go will just be one more place we’ve gone, after the moon. The 1960s will be remembered forever because of the moon landing as long as our written or oral history endures and we Baby Boomers were among the people who lived through it. Because of that we are important and will be remembered, forever.
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