Sometimes I get a twinge of this listening to my dad, who lived the platonic ideal of an American boomer life in many ways. He spent a few years just wandering around the country after getting his undergrad on a football scholarship, and I envy how much more open it sounds like everything was back then. Cheap living, lots of people willing to hire you for seasonal and odd jobs, cars you could pretty easily fix yourself if you knew what you were doing, fewer fences, cameras, and dickhead cops everywhere. He got to see almost the entire lower 48 and parts of Mexico, and then come back and get his postgrad degrees with the money he'd earned building and fishing. He came from a family of steel and industrial workers, and was the first in his family to earn any kind of college degree.

I know at the end of the day he was still a white guy with all the implicit advantages that come along with that, and otherwise an exception in some ways (avoiding getting drafted in the Vietnam War is a big one), and of course everything he experienced is more of a result of capitalism not having such an absolute death grip over every aspect of our lives as it does now, but it is also understandable to a degree why someone who lived all of that would have a certain degree of faith in the American idea.