I was twelve years old in the summer of 1968. While my friends’ older brothers were scrambling to get into college or hitchhiking to Chicago to protest the Democratic National Convention, I was squished in the backseat of my counselor’s red Mustang on my way to and from day camp.

I was a serious little kid with dark hair, dark skin and big lips that would someday be expressive, but back then, looked swollen and silly. I was a passably good athlete and beginning to be interested in girls, but what I loved most was reading and making up stories. At that point, I was a year away from my bar mitzvah and the startling realization that most adults had no interest whatsoever in an increasingly troubling obsession of mine –contemplating why we humans were put on this earth.

As that summer ended, I did what I thought every pre-adolescent boy did, which was to prepare myself for adulthood by memorizing the world I thought I would matriculate into. In addition to daydreaming, I began reading newspapers, watching the news, trying to understand politics and religion, even forcing myself to listen attentively while my father explained how business worked. It wasn’t all hard work. I shoplifted dirty magazines, snuck into movies like Easy Rider and To Sir with Love, and stayed up late into the night listening to the lyrics of rock songs playing on the “underground” FM radio station in Philadelphia.

The America I finally entered in 1973 might as well have been a different country. It was no longer necessary to escape to Canada to avoid the war in Vietnam as Richard Nixon and then Gerald Ford limped toward peace with honor. And the radical movement and leaders I’d so admired became anachronistic, appearing more violent and extreme even as the political landscape became more liberal. Worse yet, rock music -- once experimental, edgy, and angry – was becoming pompous, self-congratulatory and watered down. It would be hard to understate the disappointment I felt.

Few would argue that as a result of the Sixties, civil rights improved for blacks and women. And for a while anyway, it seemed like stewardship for Planet Earth and our environment trumped or at least pulled even with corporate interests. But having grown up as a tail-end baby boomer with the War in Vietnam, the assassinations, the SDS and Weather Underground, and all the social, political and cultural institutions swirling and shifting to a fantastic musical soundtrack, I’ve often wondered whether the marches on Washington and protests really lead to an early end to the War, and whether young peoples’ commitment to love and peace resulted in improvements to society or perhaps if the militancy and excesses of that era actually ushered in a more intense form of conservatism.

In part, I wrote Backward-Facing Man to explore what it would have been like – who I might have known – what I might have done and felt and witnessed had I come of age a half-decade earlier than I did.