Why is it that people refuse to repudiate their past even though they now realize that they were wrong?
People frequently jump on a political tide which is set in motion before their time. It is troubling if they jump on in huge numbers and give it a decisive momentum. We all make choices. We cannot claim that we had no choice but sign up for it even if nobody put a gun in the head.
It is interesting that those who used to say, “Do not trust anybody over 30,” now turn around to insist that they are sensible mainstream establishment guarding virtuous society. It is not you but lots of people from the same generation. It should not be difficult to separate yourself from them, including any shared connection with the past.
Every sustained movement reaches a critical mass after which huge number of people start to participate and it turns into a tidal wave. The fact that the tide is so overwhelming does not mean that you have to embrace it since you can not actively resist it in public. The scale of liberal tidal wave in fact dramatically increased after 60’s and 70’s. Large public display of support for Mao, Yasser Arafat, and sundry of left-wing terrorists was common. Jane Fonda was one of their icons, and China's Cultural Revolution was supposedly to usher in a new utopia. Not a single day had passed by without another talk of uprising, revolution, bombing, and imminent collapse of capitalist order. The mood was deeply unsettling and always angry. If you lived at the time, you would have had no idea that you were living at the zenith of prosperity. Somehow every institution was wrong, and had to be destroyed. This was espoused by large number of people.
You can claim that you were merely puppets hence free of any faults by being one of them during that time. That may be true. You could have changed and now be firmly against what you espoused. You could be now part of bulwark defending conservatism against liberal left.
So why is it difficult to say that the movement you once embraced grew on a massive scale and is now destroying the society from within, and you repudiate the past? If you were not part of it and always opposed to it, you were not at fault as I made it clear in previous posts. There were people who went to Nam and got condemned for merely being drafted to fight the war there. There were people who spat on veterans returning from the war.
If we track historical origin of some movement, it usually goes further back than we thought. Sometimes it goes way back. But there is a point when it is set in motion in earnest and that is usually viewed as a starting point. For example, when suddenly a huge number of people join. So many could view that moment as a real starting point.
I am confining this argument to a segment of boomer generation who espoused liberal left politics. If they had changed, I no longer have anything against them. But it could be a problem if they tried to defend or play down what they did in the past. They were all active participants even though many of whom walked away from it.
I don't understand why people attempt to conflate this with across-the-board condemnation of all boomer generation or what aging boomers are now.