It was the end of the 60s, people! My personal experience of that time was that my dad was in his heyday, he worked at IBM as an engineer. I remember seeing equipment like that in the early 70s when I visited him at work. People dressed in flamboyant clothes, had long hair, a lot more counter-cultural acceptance, in certain circles at least.
My whole adult life I wished I was living in a repeat of the 60s. Not because of the war or turmoil, sexism, racism, murder of people like MLK (sounds bad when you put it that way), but because of the freedom, the sense that america was moving forward. We didn't have our best days behind us. I never had that in my adult life.
Rose colored glasses. The 60s had the most terrifying increase in crime in living memory (one of many graphs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/...). Until MLKs death he and other civil rights movement leaders were incredibly unpopular (check polling of time). By most measures, now is less of a time when the best days are behind us.
