For the truth is, we hate, despise and loathe each other and always have. From the crowded classrooms of the 1950s through the scrambling competition for colleges in the 1960s to our entry into the job markets in the 1970s, we have jostled, bumped and collided with our coevals at every step. The Vietnam War split us along socio-economic lines, with college students largely exempt from the draft as a matter of national policy.
Is it really true that the split of the 1960s has persisted with undiminished enmity for 50 years and that current divisions are all about the Boomers?
I don't think so. It's more that people today in red states and blue states had very different values in recent decades, not about college-bound and Nam-bound Boomers still hating each other.
Over the years, boomers on both sides of the political divide might have gone to church or worked or done drugs together. Today, liberals and conservatives don't interact together as much or as easily as they once did.
What I'm getting at is that the generation gap of the 60s between old and young was more bitter than the conflict between people within a generation, and the current conflict between left and right also dwarfs animosities that former classmates may have had all those years ago.
Generalize much? Any thought that enmities in this nation are devided by state boundaries is foolishness. Should the US embark on a CWII, it will more resemble the chaos of places like Sarajevo.