Long Live the Sixties

The sixties, as I so fondly recall, were as much about about color as they were about love and peace and fairness. Color abounded on t-shirts that if not designed to, came to irritate the hell out of the checkout generation. It played center stage in the saga of civil rights unleashed on a Brooklyn baseball diamond years earlier by Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson.

Unmistakably color played out in the bedrooms, dorm rooms, and party rooms of the flower child generation. It pulsated in flashing lights wired to new found pre-electronic contraptions designed unwittingly to petrify the most forgiving Fire Marshall. Black lights (more purple than black), strobe lights, lava lamps and more beckoned the young to question authority, celebrate youth, and desire change. Light responded to music, to sound, to mood in mysterious bursts and glows. The chain reaction of electrical innovation led ultimately, and not unsurprisingly, to the Clapper, the quintessential rescue device for hippies gone to pasture.

That which was not electrical was pharmaceutical. Color which did not emanate through a chord, did with the pop of a pill, a chemical, or a drug. It was life described through a rainbow of psychedelic rapture.

And now as those revolutionaries of fad and facsimile become the uber population of assisted living it returns - color incarnate. The Apple store devotes a whole shelf to LCD color replaced by LED spectra. A rudimentary switch steps to the background as wifi, iPhone, and Internet step in to offer lights of yellow for wake up, of blue for calm, and purple to set the mood for love and rapture. $199 buys what hours of amateur electrical engineering effort struggled to perfect fifty years ago with electronic precision and certainty; the generation that yearned for it left too befuddled to understand, much less appreciate.

To be sure, the legacy goes further into the night. Boeing, not to be outdone by a bunch of Apple geeks and Phillips engineers is hot on the trail of this magical sixties color resurrection. It beckons air travelers aboard the newest 737 with softly sculpted mood lights for boarding, take-off, flight, landing, and leaving. Unsuspecting revenue generators sit calmed by slowly changing hues that mesmerize their senses into calmed obedience. Quiet transcends the flying tube as it hurtles through the atmosphere delivering its unsuspecting charges to their destination.

And so a small piece of the revolution lives on if only in the hearts and minds of the few still coherent enough to notice and drug free enough to remember.

Long live the sixties!