SOCIETY STILL REELS FROM '60S IMPACT.

Byline: JAMES BEMIS

I came of age during the 1960s, growing up in an Oxnard that had far more lemon trees than people. In those days, a kid could leave home in the morning and roam around town all day - riding bikes downtown, finding endless fascinations at the beach, playing baseball from breakfast till dinner time - and parents had nary a worry. I wish my children grew up in a world like that. Sometimes it seems like we live in a different country now.

The ``Back to the Sixties'' exhibit at the Reagan Library (which will close April 6) holds great interest for those who lived through that era. You can hardly walk through the display without contemplating how much of the shaping of modern America had its roots there. For many, the decade has always seemed too close, too personal, too immediate to see it in clear perspective. But perhaps now, like molten lava which has finally cooled enough to touch, we can begin, from the safety of 30 years distance, to examine the impact of that turbulent time.

Much of it's captured there at the exhibit - the bright, fluorescent tie-dyed shirts; snapshots of long-haired rock groups; the explosive growth of television, bringing the outside world directly into our homes, whether we wanted it or not; the symbolic and mysterious private code of the drug culture; and the riotous student demonstrations. Yes, much of it's there, but not everything. And what is missing may be the most important elements of all.

The '60s was a decade of ambition, excitement and splendor in plenty; it was a time to be bold and carefree. In America, little is left unquestioned or held to be sacred; there were few who were not drenched by the splash of the huge tidal wave crashing around them. And in its wake surged a flood which threatens to drown us still.

The 1960s set off a determined, sustained and largely successful frontal assault on the foundations of Western civilization, concentrated on its three main pillars - family, faith and property, institutions that for centuries had preserved individuality and, by dispersing power, sustained liberty. Building a ``Great Society'' came into vogue, which meant a top-down transformation of the nation, led by a progressive federal government.

Perhaps done with the best of intentions, within this transformation lay the source of much of our current sea of troubles. Societies cannot very well be rebuilt overnight without strong, vigorous forms of coercion, placing concentrated power in somebody's hands. That somebody was President Johnson, a mostly unlikely character to play the role of an American Caesar.

The government, with delusions of grandeur in those heady days, sought to become everyone's father (through the welfare state), mother (school breakfasts and lunches) and clergy (in defining new secular sins like smoking and praying in school), all rolled into one. A new morality was proclaimed, and sensible, civilized taboos about sex and shame were thrown over like crates of English tea into Boston Harbor.

Unfortunately, the new morality, not in step with human nature the way the old morality was, has created more problems than it solved. A whole generation of people has refused to grow up, essentially creating a nation of Peter Pans.

The utopian leaders of that decade pictured themselves as modern Samsons, pushing mightily against the columns that upheld the palaces of the Philistines, knowing that the old buildings had to be destroyed before their new ones could be built. Well, like the Old Testament strongman, these Samsons were blind, not seeing that those were not palaces being leveled, but the ancestral homes and hearths in which lots of little people lived, where they found shelter from the wind and the rain.

Many of us loved growing up in the houses that our fathers built and our mothers kept, where inside it was always safe and warm, the fireplace lit by the glowing of church and kin. We now find that we have no such places to proudly pass on to our children, only mounds of debt and a disposable, decadent culture that nourishes neither their minds nor their souls.