To a degree, this was true. Homosexuality was decriminalised, abortion was legalised, there was a resurgence of feminism, the American civil rights movement was fighting racism, CND was pressing for nuclear disarmament, and so on. It was a period of enormous optimism, hope and creativity.
But this was only one side of the picture, because in other ways the sixties were very negative. I know people who found these years frustrating, damaging, hurtful.
The idea of "free love" that just meant women were treated even more blatantly as sex objects. The reckless drug-taking that led to overdoses and death. The squats that turned into disorganised, hedonistic squalor. The fashionable political causes that couldn't be challenged - the IRA, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Marxism, the Soviet Union. Men still undervaluing and belittling women. Trendy cults and therapies run by money-grubbing, womanising charlatans.
Because people loved the image of freedom, of progress, of cultural flowering, they overlooked the unsavoury aspects and pretended they weren't happening. Or they saw them as the actions of a few bad apples who were latching on to the "counter-culture" for their own selfish ends, spoiling it for everyone else.
Personally I found the sixties (and early seventies) far more positive than negative, maybe because I was too sceptical and too self-protecting to get involved in the seedier and crazier fringes. But I didn't always escape the chaotic squats, mind-bending drugs, dotty cults and political dogma. It was hard to avoid the wilder excesses entirely.
It was certainly a more optimistic time than the present, with its relentless austerity and elitism. Love and peace, man. Just do your thing, man.
