The late 1960s gave white suburban youth concrete reasons to reject mainstream success

Evidence

THINGS MAY SEEM bad now, but some would argue that the late 1960s were worse. Nixon was president, the Vietnam War was raging, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and unarmed student protestors were shot at Kent State. Signs of environmental devastation were accumulating, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects and freeways were destroying the fabric of “blighted” ethnic neighborhoods. All the while, successful adulthood was pictured as a two-car garage house in a white suburb. To young people, this looked like a sham, and they were ready to quit. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 154

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar prosperity prompted adolescents to reject phoniness and seek meaning — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 890; The Great Recession failed to produce a sixties-style counterculture — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 218
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Postwar prosperity prompted adolescents to reject phoniness and seek meaning — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 890; The Great Recession failed to produce a sixties-style counterculture — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 218