THE WORST GENERATION

AN INDICTMENT OF THE 1960'S

THE WORST GENERATION—AN INDICTMENT OF THE 1960’S

It was a commonplace cultural trope of the 1970’s and ‘80’s that if you could remember the 1960’s, you must not have been there. The inside joke was, of course (wink, wink—nudge, nudge), that everyone was so stoned that no one really knew where they were. And while that was certainly true, sadly, it turned out not to be a joke at all. It was my generation’s youthful stupidity and self-indulgence that planted the seeds of moral relativism and socialism that have pushed this Republic to the brink of collapse today. Boy, did we screw the pooch!

So why did American kids from good homes forsake the faith of their fathers in the 1960’s? Short answer: drugs and sex (the rock’n’roll was just background music). The availability of birth control pills in the pre-HIV world, coupled with a ready supply of marijuana and other street drugs, was too tempting a combination for many of us to resist. These drugs led young people into a world of sensation and promiscuity that would not have been possible—or tolerated!—a generation earlier. Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” with psychedelics like LSD lured us even further down the counterculture rabbit hole. The mantra of the day was “If it feels good, do it!”

And while it is a usual and necessary part of growing up for kids to question established societal norms, the ‘60’s generation pushed those considerations to a whole new level. We defied all voices of authority. We flouted the rules of our parents, our teachers, the church, and civil authorities. We called the police “pigs”, and the soldiers coming back from Vietnam “baby killers”. We flirted with Marxism and political activism. We were adamantly against the Draft and the war in Viet Nam. We became rabid civil rights and environmental activists. We admired Gloria Steinem, the Chicago Seven, and “Hanoi Jane” Fonda.

It was largely out of that cauldron of social upheaval during the 1960’s that the political polarization we have in America today was spawned: a distinct division between “Them” and “Us”. The “Them” was the uptight, square, conservative world of our parents with the obligations of religion, career, monogamous marriage, and the demands of the military-industrial complex. And the “Us” was, of course, the liberal political Left: the hip, the cool, the enlightened generation that would transform the world into a utopian paradise of peace and harmony. (Or so we thought as we shuffled home from a peace march to drink more cheap wine, smoke more dope, and dream of the Aquarian age that was dawning. . .)

By the middle of the 1970’s, however, most of the flower children of the ‘60’s had moved on. It had been a hell of a party, but there was also a really big hangover when the party ended. The Haight Ashbury from the Summer of Love declined into a scary ghetto of burnt-out speed freaks and angry Marxists. Many of us who participated in that West Coast carnival of hedonism had abandoned good educations, careers, marriages and families. We had indulged our senses instead of settling down into the necessary business of growing up. Many of us emerged from those years addicted to alcohol or drugs, and our substance abuse issues kept us in kind of a limbo of developmental retardation—a drug-induced adolescence that some of us would never grow out of.

For those of us who finally did come out of the fog, we found that we had completely lost our moral compasses. We had abandoned the precepts and ideals of our parents in favor of secular situation ethics. We had turned our backs on religion, morality, and the responsibilities that went with living in a civil society. The moral failings of my generation created a huge void in the evolution of American social and political life—and in that vacuum the seeds of atheism, socialism, and globalism sprouted and took root. By the final decades of the 20^th Century, progressivism had become the dominant popular political culture

In this brave new world, Leftists took over control of the unions, the media, and the education system. Public schools and colleges became indoctrination arms of Liberal ideology, complete with revisionist history and rigid standards of politically correct speech. Universities conferred useless degrees in made-up disciplines like “Trans-gender Studies”. Since there was no will to enforce our border laws, our national sovereignty was compromised and illegal aliens flooded into our country across our southern border. Liberal administrations at all levels of government conspired with the embedded professional bureaucrats to enforce their Leftist agendas.

It was the 1960’s generation that unleashed the apocalyptic seeds of America’s current unraveling. What kind of warped godless lunacy could lead intelligent people to seriously propound that the difference between men and women is not biological, but merely a social construct—and then to teach this poison to grade school children? What kind of misguided legislators could enact hate speech laws against their citizens for the “crime” of using an incorrect gender pronoun on a member of the current victim class du jour? What kind of arrogant power-mad myopia could blind Seattle’s Mayor to the true nature of the 2020 George Floyd riots by organized anarchists and nihilists, and call it “a summer of love”?

And what kind of moral wasteland has this country become in 2021 when a popularly-elected Governor, Ralph Northam of Virginia (a pediatrician by profession!), can say that it is OK to leave a viable baby which has survived a late-term abortion on the operating table while its mother in the next room decides whether to let it live or die? God help us all.

GDK 01/25/2021