So many young people gave up the best years of their lives during the 1960s. Some fought for ideals as lofty as freedom, justice and equality. It would be wonderful if more people could stand up for such things today.”The ’60s,” a new NBC miniseries airing Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m., dishonors these memories. It takes an entire decade of American history, so complicated and significant, and generalizes it with cheesy cliches.With some subject matter, such behavior is excusable. Network TV is almost expected to do those things. In the case of the 1960s, however, NBC is committing a sin against American culture. They peppered the story with old news clips and Bob Dylan songs and expected the audience to accept what they were seeing as the real thing.”The ’60s” tells the story of two families: one white, one black.White, working-class Bill and Mary Herlihy live in Chicago and have three children – Brian, Michael and Katie. Brian joins the Marines and ends up in Vietnam. Michael goes to college and becomes active in the anti-war movement. Katie becomes pregnant and runs away to Haight Ashbury. Together, all three children end up experiencing most of the major events of the 1960s.While registering black voters in Mississippi, Michael meets Emmet, the son of a local black minister, Rev. Willie Taylor. After his church is burned down by angry whites, Rev. Taylor moves his family to the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. After his father is killed in the riots, Willie ends up forsaking his father’s belief in non-violence and joins the Black Panthers.The Taylors’ place in the story almost seems like a politically correct afterthought. Most of the scenes in the miniseries are about the Herlihys. NBC, after all, doesn’t want to alienate its mostly white, middle class audience.So let’s look at the Herlihys; yes, the good, white, well-off Herlihys. Their stories would be interesting if we actually knew them. They are almost like cartoons. Nothings psychologically interesting ever happens with them. Half of the miniseries was over before Brian, Mike and Katie had any depth to their characters, and even then, it wasn’t much.So many things happened during the 1960s: Vietnam, civil rights, the Kennedy assassinations, Haight Ashbury psychedelia and Woodstock. Let’s find a way to get Brian, Mike, and Katie involved with as many of these events as possible, someone must have said.Brian smokes some weed, gets shell-shocked. Mike smokes some weed, watches Bobby Kennedy getting shot on TV. Katie, she smokes a whole lot of weed and some other stuff, too.Of course, they’re all OK at the end. An NBC miniseries can never have an unhappy ending. The three kids return from their adventures to life in the normal suburbs. They make up with dear old dad. All is resolved. They survived the 1960s.Unfortunately, many people didn’t. If anything, the legacy of the 1960s is a tremendous disillusionment in institutions and values once held so dear. Love of country is replaced by love for one’s self.In contrast, the 1960s were a time when people fought not for themselves but for society as a whole. It was a time of noble ideas and the tattered flag of such ideas lies on the ground not to be stared at, but to be picked up.Don’t watch “The ’60s.” Live in the spirit of the ’60s.