We’re the lucky ones

A recent road trip playlist got me thinking about how lucky we were to grow up in the 1970s.

You won’t find a better decade for music, I can promise you that. We had rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Kiss and Queen; softer rock like the Eagles, Elton John and Fleetwood Mac; soul music from Gladys Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, the Commodores, the Temptations and the Jackson Five; folk icons like Paul Simon, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Carole King and Neil Young; and county stars like Charley Pride, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette.

I’ve skipped a ton, but that just shows you how great that decade of music was.

We late Boomers and early Gen X-ers came of age during a relatively tranquil time in American history. The military draft ended in 1973 and the Vietnam war two years later. So, we got to mosey our way through high school without worrying about being yanked away from our comfortable lives to fight in a war we didn’t understand.

We didn’t have smart phones, so we could make our dumb mistakes and move on. We dealt with gossip that lasted days, rather than online harassment that lasts forever.

No one had access to the Internet then, so we had to hang out IRL — every weekend. Brother Ed used to locked the gym doors at my high school because we hit capacity every home basketball game. Everyone came. We went to parties and hung out at the mall, which was even fun for people like me, who have always hated to shop.

We had less pressure on us than both previous and present generations. No one expected us to marry right after graduation, and, thanks to the passionate and sometimes painful advocacy of our parents’ generation, we women felt like we could pursue any job we wanted.

Our newsfeeds came in print or in half-hour segments on our parents’ TVs. We didn’t have to scroll through a 24-hour cycle designed to scare and divide us. Socially, we also took our triumphs and disappointments in digestible doses. We didn’t have to see pictures and videos from every occasion to which we had not been invited.

I went to a Catholic High School with wild ideas about how to keep us in line. We had a smoking lounge so people could suck in their fill of nicotine to get them through the day, but we got detention for not wearing our school-issued blazers. The drinking age in Wisconsin was 18, so our school-sponsored graduation party in 1982 included half barrels of beer.

I’m not saying that was right, but I am saying it was fun. (Most of my friends and I didn’t smoke, so the smoking lounge for us was more of a novelty, but it was there if we wanted it, which is crazy, right?)

In a lot of ways, we’re fortunate to have survived, and some of us didn’t.

So, I’m not looking back at that time in the hopes of recreating it. I’m grateful for the advancements in medicine, science and technology we all enjoy today. Those of us who have been well-seasoned by the varied spices of life should celebrate our role in the feast. Regretting that we don’t live or look the way we used to just diminishes who we get to be today.

Our memories and our music live on.

And I think we might be the luckiest generation to have come of age when we did.