That will hugely depend on who writes the history of these times.
I recall personal histories of Hitler' Germany -- e.g., Albert Speer' "Inside The Third Reich". The writers were invariably incapable of explaining why what happened happened.
There is a similar feeling about these days. How did we come to be such a self-destructive society, so dismissive of our past? It is as if, during the sixties, we were infected with a malign virus...and many have now become crazed with its fever.
These are difficult times -- but, as a country, we've been through them before. God bless the USA.
The insiders may have been unable to explain their own attraction to the Third Reich, but history as a whole has condemned them all.
You are right about the feeling at the moment. Somber reflection is not a mark of our era. Perhaps no one can see clearly while in the midst of events that will not be history until a later time.
I think one of the problems with the 60s was that, at the time, most people dismissed the Youth Movement or compared it to the period prior to WWI with the Wandervogel, as just a symptom of youth. For adults of that time, things seemed to be going along as normal. Throughout the decades since, it was common to just laugh at hippies and dismiss all the culture that came afterward. Those who were alarmed were just seen as cranky geezers.
While not a Boomer, I was there for the Sixties/Seventies and, as an artist, was in the midst of a lot of it. Most of it, IMO, was, by itself, harmless in a societal sense. But, it was co-opted by the political left and the worst aspects (drugs, promiscuity, deconstructionism, postmodernism)actually became hallmarks of the politics of the New Left leaders who went on to influence higher education, which, in turn, eventually changed all educational theory and practice. From there, the worst aspects were enshrined into national policies.
These philosophers and educators were all much older than their students, so, IMO, the blame goes back a lot further. Your epidemic analogy, however, could be valid, in that the virus found a vulnerable host, mutated, became contagious and spread everywhere, like a retrovirus, lurking in the cells until the right conditions allowed it to begin to do damage.
My personal recollections would pinpoint the Vietnam War and the youth reaction to the draft as a starting point. Again, it was seized upon by those with ulterior motives and used to fan embers of discontent into flames of anarchy.
Have we ever experienced such a dangerous situation in recent history as we are living today? Difficult is one thing, but this is closer to societal suicide. It just seems to continue on and on until people begin to accept outrageous conditions as normal. We spend a lot of time today just reacting to the actions of the elite until we are exhausted.
One of the most common comments I hear daily is:”Things are just crazy!”. Crazy has never been amenable to logic or rationality. No one seems to know how to react to what appears to be so bizarre. Those who do connect the dots are dismissed as *conspiracy theorists*. So, there is an isolating quality to today’s milieu which makes it all that much worse.