Imagine ...
                             Jimi Hendrix

playing his version of the “ Star Spangled Banner ” at the Woodstock Music Festival.  Meanwhile, the folks down at the U.S. defense department-staring unblinking down the throat of the horror known as nuclear war- think the unthinkable and decide they want a communications network that can survive a nuclear attack.  As a result,  the internet is born. The first oil storage tanks are being built at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, and in the mist behind the stage, the bow of the Exxon Valdez begins to take shape. The year is 1969.

The first “Earth Day”  was rolled out in 1970 and 20 million Americans across the country poured into the streets in protest of environmental abuse. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were all founded around this time. The year 1973 brought the first Energy Crisis , long lines at gas stations, and as some sort of punctuation to the Women’s Movement , Billy Jean King beat Wimbledon champ Bobby Riggs in a tennis match at the Huston Astrodome billed the “battle of the sexes”. Karen Silkwood, a nuclear lab technician, died in a car crash in 1974 on her way to a meeting with a New York Times reporter to document that a major U.S. corporation had falsified quality control reports on nuclear power plant fuel rods and managed to lose about 40 pounds of plutonium to boot. By the end of 1975, Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace over Watergate, and the Vietnam War was finally over. The United States had doused significant portions of Vietnam with agent orange in an attempt to defoliate the jungle, dropped more bombs than were dropped in WWII, and over one million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans could only be found walking in the shadows of what once was. Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975. The late 1970’s brought the federal solar tax credit to promote the use of solar energy, the discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica, birth defects and illness in the unfortunate people who lived in homes built on the toxic waste dump known as Love Canal and lastly, the spectacle of Jimmy Carter, in bright yellow rubber boots, walking around the control room of the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island assuring us that everything was going to be OK after the partial meltdown of the core. As a kind of surreal, washed out and pulsing background to the decade, by 1979, motorists were again lining up at gas stations and many stations were allowing purchase of only a few gallons of gas! Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. The Reagan administration ended the solar tax credit and increased the military budget. I guess they felt that government support for solar hot water heaters was anti free market but secretly selling arms to Iran to fund their illegal war of the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was a fine example of free market capitalism. I.B.M introduced the first personal computer in 1981. Oh, I forgot to mention acid rain.