Posted on 03/08/2002 3:42:52 PM PST by KantianBurke
I know it's too much to hope for, but I would sure like to see the total, complete, absolute destruction of liberalism before I die.
The longest journey begins with but a single step.
We can only hope that the generation upcoming holds them in the same contempt that they held their own mentors in the 60s and 70s.
Payback would be a bitch.
The orchestration of multi-level attacks was designed to guide us away from the institutions that support Freedom and Liberty and give us a desire for "other" things.
If I learned anything from the '60s......
"We don't get fooled again!....Meet the new boss....Same as the old boss....God save the Queen....I knew I shouldn't have taken all that acid...."
Everyone forgets that the vital precondition of the Sixties counterculture was the incredible prosperity of the time. A high school educated blue collar worker could buy a home that today would require two college graduate white collar paychecks. It was a society so rich, so comfortable, so entitled, so certain of a future of limitless plenty that things like deferred gratification or effort seemed like rowing on a motor boat. If there is plenty for everyone, we can all smoke a joint together and be friends. After all, what was wrong with dropping out for a year to 'find yourself' if you were perfectly certain that a job just like Dad's would be waiting for you whenever you chose to drop back in ? It was a time when young girls thought nothing of hitchhiking alone and hippies could sleep safely on the streets.
Naturally the combination of recession and the glut of liberal arts BA's in the early '70s reducing the level of one to a high school diploma a generation earlier did in the counterculture. A popular bestseller in 1971 was something called The Greening of America by a Yale Law professor which breathlessly predicted that America was destined to become one big hippie commune of flower power and free love. Two years later the popular bestseller was Winning Through Intimidation (i.e., Wake up cupcake. Dad was right. It's a cold hard world out there that doesn't care about your feelings and you have to play tough.). Nothing like unemployment to help you understand that life is hard.
Have you noticed in popular culture, in movies, that academia is more often than not depicted with contempt ? In Cocktail Tom Cruise puts down a bullying professor (lesson: There is every bit as much cruelty in the ivy halls of academe as in the real world but by much smaller people). Remember how Rodney Dangerfield put down that pompous economics professor in Back to School ? In Malice Bill Pullman played a college president who was doubtless a much educated man. But who didn't know jack about who his wife really was or what she was really like. In fact it was his Southie blue collar police friend who clued him into the truth. Remember in Ghostbusters how when Bill Murray suggests they go from academia to business, the other ghostbuster says, "Business isn't like academia. They expect results." I am certain others could come up with more examples. But the point is that familiarity with academia has bred contempt among educated people. A universal perception that it is a sanctuary for people who could not cut it in the world of conflict and competition.
We've been given our marching orders. Now let's go out there and defeat the enemy.
We have two things going for us this time around. We have our own voices in print, every bit as combative as the enemy. We have our own methods of communication, the net and print publications. Most importantly, as we FReepers know, we haven't surrendered the streets. There may not be many turning out now but if push came to shove, I think that would change.
The election of 2000 proved that there are people who will turn out to challange evil.
Anti-Americanism? NO.
Anti-government, revolution? Yes.
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