Are the 1960s Here Again?
Emma Gonzalez reacts during her speech
It seems that American society may be experiencing a reprise of the 1960s: a cultural revolution driven by young people who have became fed up with their elders’ cold-hearted indifference, and took matters into their own hands. Lots of kids today seem to be saying, “Hey, old morons tragically born without consciences. You may think that it’s OK to have us slaughtered in schools so you people can elect corrupt senators who make it possible to buy weapons of war at the local liquor store. We’re putting a spear through this stupidity. Right. Effing. Now. You think we’re too young to make this change? Watch. And pay close attention.”
This is not altogether different from the young people who are suing the federal government to bring about climate change mitigation; note the similarity between the two conversations. This one goes: “Your generation loves fossil fuels because they’ve been very good for your 401(k)s, and you really don’t seem to have a problem ruining the planet so you can retire by a golf course. Screw you, your 401(k), and your golf course. You won’t lead, but you will get out of the way.”
Good people everywhere take such delight in seeing a generation that was most closely associated with beer pong and video games, now totally coming alive. It’s like we’re knock knock knockin’ on Bob Dylan’s door all over again, as he told us:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’
Maybe it’s just me, but I can feel it coming, and I’m damn happy and proud to see it. In many ways, we failed our kids’ generation, but at least they’ve come through all this with the horsepower to take the actions we refused to take on their behalf.
I can just hear my son telling me, “Think we can’t make this idiocy stop? Hold my beer.”
Craig,
Ah, how I wish that what you dream were so,…
But alas, I afraid the millennial generation seems to be less civic minded than the sixties and more selfish. Or are we really looking back with rose tinted glasses ?
I see the rise of a new priggishness or puritanism, based not on a desire for better public standards or morality, but a desire to see others persecuted for not being politically correct.
Intolerance seems to be increasing, demands for ‘equal rights’ or ‘justice’ always seems to be at the expense of someone else’s rights and ‘justice’ for one group must be gained from injustice being denied others.
“Freedom for all” seems to have been replaced by “hooray for my side”. ” Freedom of Speech ” replaced with ” Freedom of Speech, but only if you agree with me “.
Perhaps it was always thus so…., we just thought more of our generation because the sacrifice made during WW2 and Korea provided world peace and unprecedented prosperity, so the baby boom generation had the right demographics, advances in technology (especially TV) and the time to philosophize.
For the American underclass, the words of Bruce Springsteen seem more in keeping with the desperation of the times:
“Now I been lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find
Down here it’s just winners and losers and don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I’m tired of comin’ out on the losin’ end
So honey last night I met this guy and I’m gonna do a little favor for him
Well I guess everything dies baby that’s a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your makeup on fix your hair up pretty and meet me tonight in Atlantic City”
[Atlantic city]
The tech savvy, affluent, internet generation seem more interested in virtual reality than eco-activism
Or maybe I’ve just grown cynical….
I’m not alone, here’s an excerpt from centre right UK MP and London Times columnist Matt Ridley who rights:
“I am sure I am not alone in finding the cultural revolution that we are going through difficult to understand. Like a free-living Regency rationalist who has survived to see Victorian prudery, like a moderate critic of Charles I trying to make sense of the Cromwellian dogma, like a once revolutionary Chinese democrat hoping not to be denounced and sent for re-education under Chairman Mao (or John McDonnell), I am an easygoing Seventies libertarian baffled by the aggressive puritanism and intolerance that seems to be everywhere on the march.
I turned 60 last week and expected by now to find myself in periodic, grumpy disapproval of the younger generation’s scorn for tradition, love of change and tolerance of “anything goes”. Instead I find something approaching the opposite. Many people of my generation have mentioned the same experience recently: the terrifying censoriousness of the young, even sometimes their own children, and the eggshell-treading dread of saying the wrong thing in front of them. The young are a bit like our parents were, in fact.
What happened to the liberation of the Sixties and Seventies, when you could start to forget hierarchy and say just about anything to and about anybody? Pictures of young women in make-up, short skirts and high heels walking down the street in Kabul or Tehran in the Seventies are in shocking contrast with the battle that modern Iranian women, dressed mostly in all-concealing black, are bravely fighting to gain the right to remove a headscarf without being arrested.
Is it so different here or are we slipping down the same slope? Pre-Raphaelite paintings that show the top halves of female nudes are temporarily removed from an art gallery’s walls; young girls are forced to wear headscarves in school; darts players and racing drivers may not be accompanied by women in short skirts; women are treated differently from men at universities, as if they were the weaker sex, and saved from seeing upsetting paragraphs in novels; sex is negotiated in advance with the help of chaperones. We have been here before.”
The full article can be found at [http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-censorious-age/], the full article is worth reading, as is everything written by Matt!