A meme that I continue to come back to here at “Okie” is how much the generation that came of age in the ’60s and ’70s has hurt our society — with their narcissism, their abdication of responsibility to the defense of their country, their buying wholesale into a derisive attitude toward traditional religious faiths combined with an almost total embrace of multiculturalism over that of their own American culture.

The Congressional elections of last week have at long last given control over to the Democrats, except that this time it’s the Democrats of Nancy Pelosi, she being the representative of the Haight Ashbury “progressives” that form the foundation of the “nutroots” faction of the Democratic base. Given, our side lost this one amid unforgivable scandals, failure to clean house and outrageous in-your-face pork — ie Republicans acting far too much like Democrats. But that still doesn’t mean that we as a society won’t be threatened by the Woodstock Kids being in kontrol.

The Anchoress is often on the same page with this issue, and today is no exception.

A few days ago I wrote that Democrats never seem to know what time it is. They seem a little like Fitzgerald’s Gatsbians who “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Here we are in the 21st century – presumably time has moved forward, and yet with the ascendancy of the Democrats, we are immediately treated to the presence of George McGovern and the withdrawal mentality of Haight-Ashbury people who never wanted to commit to anything beyond keeping up with a trend and finding that elusive “self-fulfillment.”

Don’t miss her riffs on the Left’s undying love for killing the unborn, euthanasia as the newest form of community service and “The Holiness of Be-ing.” And then she links to this heavy-duty post by Elizabeth Powers. Here is an excerpt:

Though the liberalism that emerged from the sixties is usually interpreted as a triumph of idealism over the moral slumber of the 1950s, there is another way to regard that idealism. In truth, the 1950s was a very good time, of which all of us living today are the fortunate beneficiaries. But we who first went to school in that decade have been particularly favored, unduly so. While our parents had experienced World War II and the Depression, we grew up with path-breaking dermatological and dental care. When the “sixties” arrived (which for most of us was the 1970s), many of us were unwilling to make the same sacrifices our parents had made, either by going to war or becoming mothers. Sacrifice meant wasting all our good dermatological care, our college education, and indeed the good life for which they had raised us. We justified our unwillingness to follow in their footsteps by portraying the decade in which we had been raised as the breeding ground of repression, authoritarianism, xenophobia, moral and sexual hypocrisy, and untold (and therefore in need of telling and exposing) varieties of injustice. The fact is, we simply had it too good and wanted to keep things that way.

There is a noisy contingent still trapped in those times and whose opposition to the war in Iraq comes straight from the sixties playbook, but such overtly anti-American attitudes haven’t, in the current conflict, gained much traction. After all, the Boomers have grown up, chronologically at least, and the liberals among them don’t relish camping in tents in Crawford, Texas, or even marching in the streets. They have also benefited most from America, Inc. By now, they have made it through the institutions, the media, the law, and the universities. They have paid off their mortgages. They enjoy the advantages of the best health care system in the world. They are about to receive not only Social Security but also the fruits of their considerable investment in retirement plans. The terms of their opposition to war and to authority have changed—the president is an incompetent—but, as in their youth, they remain averse to sacrifice. Their priorities are now those of people who have had a good life and don’t want to jeopardize it.

Having grown up as the child of depression and WWII era parents, I know that Powers has this one nailed. I can’t really imagine what my father’s childhood actually was like, even though I have heard the stories, and at the age where I was self-absorbed in the making of really shitty art, my dad was sailing across the world’s oceans on the Mighty A, transporting healthy Marines to the Pacific theater and taking the wounded ones back home. Somehow his 20s were a damn site more consequential than mine.

But, he raised me, and for some reason he insisted that I be as pacifistic as possible. Maybe he had just seen far too much carnage of war, and didn’t want to see his son ever have to experience that. Maybe he thought that he and mom were raising kids that were going to build a better world. He fell into the dementia of Alzheimers before he could see the transformation that his son would make toward a conservative mindset and full support for the military. It took a long time to throw off the mental baggage of our culture’s love of the ’60s/’70s rebels and malcontents, but it was worth the effort.

We are living in a time of increasing danger, much like that of our parents in the 1930s. There are the appeasers, the cowards, the self-absorbed — and then there are those that are out there, risking all that they are and all that they might ever be, trying to help keep us safe. Somehow we must survive the next two years and work with increased zeal to put the adults back in control of Congress, even if they are a few decades younger than those youths-of-yesteryear that will sit in the catbird seats of power this Jan. (db)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 8:51 pm and is filed under '60s / '70s Redeaux, Culture of Death, Decision '06, Fever Swamp Madness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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