BY ANDREW BLOM // FEB 13, 2012 //

“Sunrise doesn’t last all morning.” George Harrison said that. In a song.  He’s dead now. Yet, for some, the things they said and did, and how they lived, tend to stick around.

Sadly, the ‘60s and early ‘70s are over; Harrison recorded his “All Things Must Pass” album in 1970. But you can pretend like you’re living in those times. You can listen to the music, wear flowers in your hair, drink the brown wacky acid they had at Woodstock and dance naked around a fire.

In the ‘60s, you could break away from the norm, from what was expected and what was approved, and people didn’t even care you were doing it. They may not have like it, like the Velvet Underground, for example, but they let it be.

Today, nothing really matters much. People tend to get offended by most things (it’s the reason why I can’t curse in this blog). You can’t say or do whatever you want anymore. You can’t express what you want artistically, because people only want what sells and they want you to do what everyone else is doing.

The ‘60s made people believe that you could change the world, that you could do anything. Fly a man to the moon. Or, maybe help elect Keith Richards president of the United States.

Today’s college students missed out on that innocence. We missed out on the feeling that you were at the absolute center of the universe when doing whatever with whomever wherever. There was purpose to one’s search for purpose.

We can’t keep pretending that things will go back to a better time. This is the “point of no return.” We can’t keep wishing for things that are never going to change.

The way people look now, how everyone’s the same, with the same ideas and shapes and colors, I’d say we’re in the midst of a clone war, and the dark side is winning. Everything that happened back then, there was a chance that it could spark something. I’m not sure I believe people have the power to change the world anymore.

This isn’t going to be a blog about how we need to start a revolution, or to start writing songs about change. We missed out on the good times, but some of the lessons tend to stick around. Not forever, though. That much we know from George.