Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Expired


This is my offering for expired which is this weeks topic for Illustration Friday.

For many, when the sixties expired, so did a way of life and a philosophy of how it should be lived and what it ultimately meant.

There's a great passage from Hunter S Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
where he talks about the sixties movement being like a giant wave that eventually broke at it's highest point and rolled back. For many, that seemed to happen as soon as 1970 came around.

I'm sure that it would not have been as immediate as I'm suggesting in this illustration but for many, it did seem like there was a pretty prompt return to conformity. If you listen to the accounts of the people who were a part of it then the party seemed to end quite abruptly.

It's one thing to look back on it all now with the benefit of hindsight but what would it have been like for those that were actually there?

Did they believe that the rising tide against conformity was going to last forever?

Was it really the dawn of a new age?

Or deep down, did people really know that eventually they'd have to give it all up and get back to what was perceived as "the real world".

Maybe they were too out of their minds on drugs to care either way. I like to think there was more going on that though.

So all those that decided to return to a quieter way of life, did they return to the straight and narrow or were they in actual fact the one's that left the beaten track and wandered into the wilderness?

I don't know.

I'm the romantic type. Notice that I've not drawn in a road in the direction of Wall street.

5 comments:

Ren said...

Well-thought and well-developed approach to the topic.

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Anonymous said...

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Gregor said...

I want to see this college assignment of yours.

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