What's Going On!

Boomers had a dream, and maybe our dream was naïve. A lot of us believed we could live our lives and build the world around two basic precepts: love and peace. We believed we were the generation that would do away with war. We believed that we would do away with greed, and in its place we’d create a world that would revolve around compassion and camaraderie, personal and political liberation. Those of us who had turned eighteen had to sign up for the selective service and got draft cards, which we had to carry around in our wallets. It reminded us that we all had the possibility of being drafted and shipped off to Vietnam. I sat in front of the television most nights, seized by the images of firefights, by the images of G.I.s’ flag-draped coffins being unloaded from cargo planes one after the other. I was one of the lucky ones; I drew a high draft number, and was thus spared from going to war . Instead, I did what seemed like the most logical thing to do at the time, bombarded as I was with those images --I started taking pictures. I was 18 years old and it was 1969 and these are the photos I made of this time and America.