Were the trans-generational argument less outrageous, it would be amusing. It sounds like a hundred tracts of the older generation blaming the next, just like the ones from Nixon's Agnew, Hitler, Rome, and Greece.
The creators of <<the high-point of the American Dream>> also created a generation of vipers whose nature was to bite the breast that succors them and the hand that feeds them. Maybe that greatest generation really did miss something that their offspring were continuing in tradition to correct.
<<the nation's apparent success and plenty ...had been built on the exploitation of our environment and people.>> Who was supporting the Establisment methods, the 60ers? The racial and environmental movements were peopled by these you denigrate.
<<they attacked the system that had given them the plenty they had enjoyed. >> The 60ers were dangerous with their symbolic protest, dangerous enough for an expansion of police and military unseen before in peace.
The 60s movement had immature strategies, but the substance was against exploitation of our people of color and our poor, against sexual customs that hadn't fit biology for 300 years, and against obsessive-compulsiveness that they'd seen ruin their parents lives. Accusing them for having little idea what to substitute is a meanness beyond my understanding. And to do it by force is unconscionable. The yippie to yuppie change disgusts me, but there is a limit to how often one will risk the choice of death in the jungle or living death in prison.
The previous American Generation with demographics similar to the Boomers [numbers, family size, prosperity, ...] was the Generation of the Civil War. America should count itself blessed with the generation it got. We brought modern protest to history, the last brought modern warfare.
To those facing Depression and War, the niceties of long-range and externalities are luxuries. Their children set off to correct these overlooked things in ourselves, our culture, our world. The balance was seen as a threat, and the old ways resurfaced: Force and single-mindedness, legitimatized by morality, crushed the nascent generation, and its purpose.
Look to that greatest generation for the legacy. A world with customs shattered, and the reformers scattered like rats against the farmer. Look to your own hubris, not to our disintegration that you caused. |
