Posted on 04/20/2008 9:37:10 PM PDT by jazusamo
Even though I’m embarrassed to have been a Democrat for so many years, I’m proud that even in my 20’s, I thought the 60’s was the worst decade in America’s history.
Because I was born in 1940, I was at UCLA for some of those years and had a bird’s eye view of my fellow college students. It was not a pretty sight.
What makes that time the source of so much nostalgia for so many people of my age -- the incessant folk songs, the tie-dyed shirts and blouses, the granny glasses, the bongs, the infantile anti-establishment content that permeated so much popular culture -- made me yawn even then.
The young folks in those days were on the right side of the civil rights movement, but that was the extent of their good works. The anti-war campaign was a charade, having far less to do with pacifism than with lack of courage and discipline. The draft was still going strong and it was fear, not moral principles, which led young men to flee to Canada or to burn their draft cards.
The baby-boomers born in the years after World War II were members of the most coddled generation America had ever seen. From birth, they had been treated like royalty, privileged and spoiled not for any special qualities or accomplishments, but simply because they existed and were their parents’ little darlings.
Nobody should have been too surprised that as they came of age, they were a religion onto themselves. Their not so holy trinity consisted of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I never really got a handle on how that made them so special. But gods do not have to explain themselves.
Their favorite line, the one about not trusting anybody over the age of 30, wasn’t just an inane catchphrase. It became the order of the day, not just for those under 30, but those well past it. It wasn’t just wars they got to judge, either, but movies, music, TV shows, books and politicians. It fell on children to bestow the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
The fact that they weren’t particularly knowledgeable or even open-minded, except, of course, when it came to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, only added to their mystique. Unlike adults, the thinking went, they hadn’t sold out. What made their bullshit so totally odious was the fact that their elders, for the most part, bought into it. In addition, because they were so lacking in humor, their solemnity was taken for sincerity.
Even back then, I found it disturbing that for the first time in human history, youngsters didn’t want to be adults. Worse yet, neither did adults. As a result, one could almost have sympathized with the contempt the kids felt for grown-ups if it hadn’t inevitably led to contempt for America. It also led to a soft spot in their hearts for any and all of our nation’s enemies, which, at the time, included such arch villains as the Viet Cong, Mao, Che Guevara, Chou En-lai and Fidel Castro.
The prevailing lies were so self-evident that I couldn’t imagine how it was that so many people could be so self-deluded. For instance, there was a great deal of self-serving blather about individualism. But most of those doing the blathering wore identical clothes, listened to the same music, went to all the same movies and mouthed the very same clichés. There was more individualism to be found in a flock of sheep.
Perhaps the biggest lie fomented back then was something called the Free Speech Movement. It was like something taken straight out of George Orwell’s “1984.” The title, alone, would have made Big Brother smirk. The movement, which stretched across America’s college campuses from UC Berkeley to Columbia, consisted of student radicals commandeering offices and classrooms, doing their level best to silence professors and administrators who didn’t buy into their fascistic dogma. Funny how little some things have changed over the years.
Today, the children and the grandchildren of those flower children are also in favor of free speech, but only so long as those speaking share their politics and their prejudices.
Because those radical idiots lacked both reading skills and any semblance of self-awareness, they didn’t realize that they were very much like the totalitarians that Orwell had in mind. When in “Animal Farm,” Orwell’s villainous pig dictator, Napoleon, standing in for Stalin, altered the original battle cry of the barnyard revolution from “all animals are equal,” to “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” he had the Soviet oligarchy in mind, but, unfortunately, it very neatly summed up the thoughts and actions of America’s own youthful swine of the sixties.
classics, all. :-)) Love sci-fi, started with Ray Bradbury as a child.
And you just described the left-wing liberals (with LOTS of money to do damage)!
I guess the 30s must pale by comparison.
What do you mean?
As just an observer who was too young to “take a trip”, I can tell you, it was wild man, it was wild.
Anyone who graduated from a public high school after 1965 was mercilessly interrogated, drug-tested, stripped, high-pressure-washed, cavity searched, hair-cutted, beaten with ax-handles, and then permitted to interview after being given, and passing various SATs, New York State Regents Exams in every subject, and proving they could do 25 chin-ups and run 5 miles in 30 minutes. As I recall, I suggested being even tougher on the females.
Before being permitted to speak with any employee already on the payroll, they were also made to memorize the immortal Sherwin Cody text, "Do You Make These Embarrassing Mistakes in English?"
Saved us a bloody fortune.
In many ways, 1960 marked a true turning point. The crooked election that put JFK (objectively a President who made Warren G. Harding look good)in office marked the ascendancy, nay the triumph, of incandescent bullshiite over any semblance of reality or common sense. Downhill all the way after that.
What do you mean? I guess the 30s must have been a piece of cake. Oh, that's right, they didn't have cake.
I just fail to see what the Depression had to do with the 60’s and don’t believe this column mentioned a word on it or tried to compare it.
I guess you didn’t read all of my two line post in which the first line is a quote from the original post.
Sounds to me like you did the right thing. I’ll bet you got some good people but you probably turned a heck of a lot more away.
I got you, it’s getting late and I’m not thinking straight. I think I better head for the barn. :-)
A Conservative Baby Boomer.
So what has changed? Really? The '60s, and even more so, the '70s were a rip-off. Largely through the efforts of the media, virtually everything good and decent about America was denigrated and presented in its worst light, if at all. The rest of that crap is still built on today.
Growing up in a rural area meant I did not have the incessant peer pressure those in more urbane situations suffered, and thankfully I had the time to consider what was being said. It helped to have parents who said "You are welcome to have any opinion you want, but be prepared to back that opinion up with facts.". My first attempt to debate them was such an education in having irrational arguments shredded in short order by facts and logic, I learned to pick through the considerable dross being spewed in the day and never found cause for disagreement again.
I thank God my parents were smart enough to see through the BS,
obviously, as more babies were born into families, the middle and younger kids got little of this coddling....
this is precisely why my two oldest siblings are flaming libs.....they grew up thinking they deserved better than anyone else and they KNEW better...
we middlings and the youngest are much more hard-nosed towards life.....much more conservative and practical...
I was born in 1940 and grew up in a stable, traditional family. My politics were Republican, staunchly supportive of Nixon and anti Kennedy.
My activities in the late 50's and early 60's were strongly based on moral and humanitarian principles. I marched with the Freedom Riders at the local Greyhound bus station in SE Ky and was threatened with lynching by an Appalachian with a shotgun. I was a founder of the SDS at Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Drugs, sex and rock and roll played no part in any of this.
By the mid 60's it had all changed. Boston in the mid 60's was awash in antiwar sentiment stirred up by Marxists. The SDS had been engulfed by communists.
I was in Seminary at Tufts and immune to the draft but soaked my draft card in blood as an act of moral defiance. Later interviewed by the FBI in the Dean's office, I stood my ground and was, no doubt, dismissed as naive and idealistic. I was, by then, vigorously anticommunist.
By the late 60's in Boston drugs, sex and rock and roll were all that was left of a once powerful movement. It required another 15 yrs to get past the demise and get grounded in evangelical Christianity and Reagan politics.
I think Asian and Latino women are nice, sweet people.....I see a good number of women marrying across the ethnic and racial lines so the door does swing both ways.....
I never even liked Reagan at first...didn't vote for him....
now I consider him to be one of the greatest presidents we'er ever had....
Good Gawd!!
I’ve been a consistent Conservative since the age of twelve. Reading what you said makes others seem somehow ... pathetic.
Funny how if you weren't blind stoned or stone blind, if you weren't stone nuts or curled into a wad...you didn't seem to exist.
Funny how those that were married/in school/asthmatic/gay/psychotic/had friends;
have decided, twenty plus years late, that they really wanted to come along...but were not allowed.
Funny how nobody in my HS graduating class understands why I don't want to receive their newsletter.
That was Logan’s Run. Excellent movie- not so much for the production or acting, but for the concept.
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