IT WAS TWENTY YEARS . . . OK, THIRTY-FIVE . . . YEARS AGO TODAY

It was twenty years ago today . . .

Jeez, it was actually thirty-five years ago, as I pause to marvel that I am still lustily singing along with Sergeant Pepper as though it were 1968. My pause is more than momentary, though, as I stop to contemplate my singular un-enthusiasm at the coming year’s political campaigns and conventions. I would call my state-of-mind “cynical,” were I not so listless, wanting to dismiss the candidates as a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Then I remember that that metaphor was most memorably invoked by the infamous George Colley Wallace . . . ironically, in 1968.

Then my wandering mind juxtaposes my sleepy lack of enthusiasm to a time a full thirty-five years ago when I built an entire summer’s worth of plans around being in Chicago for the momentous Democratic National Convention of 1968. Nothing, no threat of bodily harm nor dire parental sanction, could have kept me and my wildly idealistic companions away.

Thirty-five years have elapsed, and my story is a remarkably unremarkable cliche of the ensuing decades. Impassioned protest. Smug intimations that if the world were left to us we could finally set it right. BA in sociology. Avoiding (dodging) the draft. Vietnam. Marriage. Graduate degree. Children. The compulsion to get ahead and make it. A suburban home and Volvo. Self-doubts. Disillusionment. More self-doubts. Divorce. The gaps that separate me from my children. The sobering acknowledgement of one’s failure, finitude and mortality. Starting over. And over.

Despite all the changes and metamorphoses, there is a small, not entirely rational part of me that will forever be stuck in 1968. I know that I am not alone. Objectively, we can look back at 1968 and clearly see our naiveté and blindness, the glaring fallacies in our grandiose plans for a new social order, the ease with which we were co-opted into obedient lockstep by the Jerry Rubins and Abbie Hoffmans, whose deeper motives were far removed from altruism.

Objectively, we can look back and clearly see that we in our own way were no less self-centered and self-indulgent in 1968 than the aging-out Boomers we have become in 2003.

Objectivity, however, cannot overrule the gut sensation that our exuberant, youthful energies, however misguided and excessive, were at least fixed on ideals of harmony, understanding, justice, equality and on the convictions that we could convert those ideals into reality, if we could just get folks to listen.

But all pretensions of idealism were challenged to their limit that Summer of 1968. Martin was dead. Bobby was dead. Vietnam was a hellish abyss into which were sinking deeper each day. Dick Nixon was poised to reemerge from the shadows of political oblivion. And we marched, and shouted, and screamed, and were met with force that begat counterforce. And the more Insightful among us realized at that moment that even the noblest of ideals do not translate into reality quite so easily, if ever at all.

We know rationally that idealism did not die in the Summer of 1968. But many of us will forever reminisce about what we lost that August, the way we reminisce about the loss of innocence and the passing of our youth. Many of us will forever believe that that summer was the pivotal moment after which is because more and more difficult to convince young people of the middle class than ones sights should be set higher than perpetual partying, climbing the corporate ladder and amassing a repertoire of electronic toys.

That summer in Chicago we talked ourselves into believing that the whole world was watching. Many of us who were there are still, thirty-five years later, having trouble getting accustomed to the idea that much of the world is not so interest in watching anything more substantial than reruns of Friends.

No, things have not been the same since the Summer of 1968. The greater part of me will watch the 2004 convention and campaigns with appropriately mature interest and concern. But, I confess that the little part of me that hovers between exuberant youth and jaded middle age would just as soon put All You Need Is Love on my cool new MP3 player and have someone wake me when it is all over on November 2.