Thursday, April 20, 2017

Are the 2000s Really a Change from the 70s?

I was watching a little TV the other night and a commercial came on advertising  flowers. A man and a woman were carrying flats of flowers across the yard, the wife just jabbering away. The husband wants to know who she talking to.
“The flowers,” she says. “they like it.”
The question that always pops into my head when I hear this stuff, “How do they know?” How can she possibly know those flowers liked hearing her voice – or anyone’s voice, for that matter.  Maybe these were the flowers that developed a spritzer inside to punish those who said something they didn’t want to hear.
I thought about this for a few minutes then suddenly remembered somethings that happened back in the 1970s.
Many of you remember the Wacky Seventies. It was a wild and crazy time. The 70s had Clara Peller howling, “Where’s the beef?” Remember? And The Fonz  standing with a thumb in the air, telling you to “Sit on it!”
And there was Cap’n Crud cereal, Alpoo dog food, Chef Girl-ar-Dee spaghetti (as opposed to Chef Boy-ar-Dee. We had at our disposal  Knockoff’s Sugar Frosted Fakes, Cult .45 beer, Taster’s Choke Coffee, and Chimps Ahoy Cookies.
I think the 70s was the decade in which girls began wearing jeans with large holes so we could see they were really wearing underwear. (Or maybe it was the other way around).
Remember togas, bell-bottom pants, and shirts with huge collars that were seldom buttoned? Remember beads and Roman sandals?
TV was great. We had All in the Family, Happy days, Hawaii Five-O. There was the Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky and Hutch and M*A*S*H*
Some of the best movies were made in the 70s: The Godfather (Parts I and II), Star Wars, Alien, Rocky,  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Jaws
Some hugely popular music arose from the 70s: Rain Drops are Fallin’ on My Head, One, American Woman, Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, and the great Merle Haggard singing “Okie From Muskogee,” and “Bonnie and Clyde.”
Not only entertainment was on the front burner during the 70s. There were giant steps made in the sciences. For space geeks, Stephen Hawking theorized the existence of Black Holes and, most importantly, developed The Big Bang Theory, which has provided us with a really funny sitcom all these years later. Truly wonderful television.
Huge developments occurred in computers. Much progress was made in lasers and electronics. Scientology was hot, as was the Mahareeshi  Maheesh Yogi and Transendental Meditation. (My wife and joined a TM class, and after being giving a near hours lecture on how it was supposed to work, were instructed that under no circumstances were we to divulge our mantra – the word repeated silently to yourself while mediating. We discovered later that everybody had the same mantra! Kind of took the zing out of it)
The Viet Nam War ended in the middle of the decade. “Tricky Dick” Nixon reminded us there were underhanded politicians, with Watergate. Nixon resigned, but we had Woodstock to brighten the times. Thank goodness for Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Boo to Roe v. Wade.
But I think one of the most important events occurring during the 70s came with the revelation that plants talked to each other and sang to each other. And the most amazing aspect of this was it happened in the Fourth Dimension! Yep, that’s what the girls were telling us. (To clarify, it was college girls who pushed this idea. As you well know, we all operate in the Third Dimension, but the ladies were sure it was the Fourth Dimension the plants were chatting in.) Guys laughed it off as typical female hootspa. But the girls were adamant. Some swore they were privy to the music, and a number of them claimed the conversations were on a higher plane when they were grooving behind other kinds of plants.
It seems to me that as the 70s gave way to the 80s the Talking Plants of the Fourth Dimension faded away also. College kids were wild and wacky forty years ago, but I wonder if there are fewer Snow Flakes. I don’t think they went anywhere, or if they did, THEY’RE BAAACK!
Maybe we should ask them if it’s the grass they’re smoking or the flowers that are singing to them that makes the difference, and why it is the boys have become as flaky as the girls. 
Do You think it's because the 2000s are as wild and wacky as the 60s and the 70s, and do you wonder if they will ever change?

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