I'm watching Dennis Miller right now, and he has his all star panel on . The two liberal panel members (Lawrence O'Donnell & Leslie Marshall) just accused 18 to 29 year olds of being ignorant of the issues, of being ignorant as to why the baby boomers had to stop the Vietnam War, and of not being being able to point at Vietnam on a map. As a member of that age group, I'm a touch offended by that assertion, but I'm more amazed by their arrogance. I'm not sure if O'Donnell & Marshall are old enough to have voted during the Vietnam War, but what they are asserting is that the youth of their generation were intelligent and versed on the politics of the day, and they stood up to do a great thing (I disagree, I think they were spoiled quitters who actively helped lose that war), but the youth of today are stupid, obedient dogs who support this war and Bush because we are nothing but a bunch of followers. I respectfully disagree. I don't think this group of young people is very much less versed on the topics of the day than the Vietnam generation. I do think we are, by and large, much more questioning of the information we see and much more responsible in how we go about our activism. May the baby boom generation remember that right now we are basically where they were 35 years ago. We aren't getting drafted, but it is we who are volunteering for service. It is our friends, our brothers and sisters and cousins who are getting killed and maimed in this fight, just like them. It is our age group that is shedding the blood for this effort, just like there's. We are closest to the action, just as they were. After viewing what we are viewing, the majority of us support this president and this war, despite the human cost to us and our peers. And that isn't because of ignorance. The majority of the ignorance that I see from this age group actually comes from the anti-Bush side, chanting idiotic statements like no blood for oil. These people are preaching at us, but they forget that 35 years ago they launched a full out rebellion against an older generation that preached against them. Youth ruled, youth knew it all in 1969. In 2003, those same people preach that they know best, and the youth are nothing but lap dogs. More proof to me that some of the most self absorbed people this country has ever produced were born from 1946 to 1960. (No offense to all baby boomers, just those of you who can't let the hippy years go).
2 comments:
At twice your age, I do remember the events during Vietnam. Vividly and with the same anger of the age. But at the protesters. They were, as David Horowitz and Peter Collier describe them, the "Destructive Generation." That's the name of the book they wrote about the 60s. Horowitz and Collier were there, too, but at the protests, leading the rabble.
Stopping the war in Vietnam was a political coup staged by an agenda-driven media and Children of the Corn dropouts who embraced bell bottom jeans, drugs, free sex, and mass party politics. They were alienated from society by a combination of rage at the death of JFK, deliberate incitement of the idea of "unknown perpetrators" of it, a campaign of agitation of the facts, and a hopelessness felt by most people caught in a collapse of order.
Their conceit is that they thought they were smarter than anyone before them. They still do. It echoes in their smirking condemnation of everyone who opposes them. It's a belief not born of facts but of faith. They are True Believers, the hapless, directionless souls looking for a cause other than themselves in order to validate their worth. Horowitz has a great line he uses in a letter to his former friends to explain why he opposes them and regrets the damage that they have done to America and its institutions. "Totalitarianism," he wrote, "is the crushing of ordinary, intractable human reality by a political Idea." That's what motivates the mass political murderers of every age, the belief that the cause is more important than humanity.
What youth of today have more than any 60s Boomer dropout is a sense of place and time. Reality. Couple that with a very human yearning to learn and grow and you have a maturity of thought and decency the 60s Lefties haven't achieved even today. They're still Children of the Corn, aliens in our culture.
I'll have to add that book to my reading list. In fact, my "want to read" list is so large that I'm thinking of posting it and asking for opinions in order to help me decide where to start reading. Atlas Shrugged is near the top, but it has been for two years now, and I still haven't gotten to it.
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