Graham Chaplow
Making small talk at the supermarket, the checkout girl asked if I was watching the rugby on TV that night.
"No," I replied, "And I won't be watching the yachting either."
Worried I'd come across like a Luddite who just stole Christmas, I explained I did like certain sports, that I'd been a triathlete some years back, with a HBPB 10,000m title to my name, but preferred a greater emphasis on the arts and culture on TV.
The checkout girl looked perplexed, so I elucidated how I believed Lorde was our greatest musical export, and considering she'd just released a new album three days earlier, it'd be nice to see her performing new songs on TV in NZ to celebrate the fact, and to help promote it (with a statue of Lorde in Auckland, similar to that of Colin Meads unveiled in Te Kuiti).
To which the checkout girl replied, "Yeah, I'd love that, too. I'm not watching the rugby either."
This just after the much lauded series What Next with John Campbell and Nigel Latta screened on TV, hedging us down some preconceived optional A or B paths of bug-eating, future-proofing righteousness, when all I could think, considering it's the 50th anniversary of 1967's hippy Summer of Love this year, was how fanatical the media still think New Zealanders should be about rugby (and yachting) in 2017, when in 67, sport wasn't even on my radar.
I was the same age as the checkout girl back then, with hair just as long. My friends and I saw music, art, literature and movies of the day as political forces to be reckoned with, with The Beatles' Sgt Pepper, Bob Dylan and bands such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane from the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco at the forefront of a sexual revolt and new age of enlightenment and new ideas that turned every notion our parents once had of the world just after WWII, on its head.
We were the first generation in donkey's years not forced to go to war. By 67, apart from a few Kiwi troops in Vietnam, we were rid of the birthday draft for military service, free to soak up all the world had to offer. Woodstock began the melting pot of ideas for the Internet.
Luckily I'd had one progressive young rugby-playing teacher at Napier Intermediate who, while elated when my skinny frame beat the very athletic school swimming champ at breaststroke, was far more enthusiastic over an essay I'd written about delivering the Daily Telegraph on summer evenings, and made a point of encouraging me around that fact, which really resonated, filling my young head so full of confidence back then, it set me up for years.
And our young forward-thinking music, art and English teachers at Colenso High, who saw music, poetry, literature and art, and how they came together around school productions, as vital ingredients of the school curriculum, and far more integral in building individuality, filling our hearts and minds with the tools to strive, and totally at odds with the much greater emphasis the head and senior staff squandered year after year on the school First XV.
Our art, psychedelic music, long hair and 60s Mod fashion put us at odds with our peers, the establishment and the rugby playing fraternity (called "queens" and "queers" in Emerson St and in some cases beaten up by rugby fans either celebrating or drowning their sorrows after clashes at McLean Park during the 1966-69 Shield era).
Some waivered, reverting back to the people and things we were so opposed too. Peers and parents alike insisted it was a fad, that our music and new thinking wouldn't last.
But things just got better and better, and for Baby Boomers who kept abreast of new ideas in music, movies, literature and the arts during the decades to come, the "Class of 67" is still very much alive.
Campbell and Latta's What Next missed a golden opportunity. Like the old French adage says, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
It's not the general populous who need future-proofing, it's the perpetual control over our hearts and minds by staid old entrenched politicians, governments, businesses and outmoded institutions we need to look out for.
Graham Chaplow is a retiree, volunteer teachers' aide and award-winning writer.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz