Thursday, July 23, 2020

Why This Revolution Isn't Like the '60s

Why This Revolution Isn't Like the '60s
Excerpt: Thus, America is far less resilient, and a far more divided, indebted and vulnerable target than it was in 1965. Today, radicals are not protesting against 1950s conservatism but rather against the radicals of the 1960s, who as old liberals now hold power. Now, many of the current enforcers — blue-state governors, mayors and police chiefs — are from the left. Unlike Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in the '60s, today’s progressive civic leaders often sympathize with the protesters. The '60s protests were for racial assimilation and integration to reify Martin Luther King Jr.’s agenda of making race incidental, not essential, to the American mindset. Not so with today’s cultural revolution. It seeks to ensure that racial difference is the foundation of American life, dividing the country between supposed non-white victims and purported white victimizers, past and present. In the '60s, radicals rebelled against their teachers and professors, who were often highly competent and the products of fact-based and inductive education. Not so in 2020. Today’s radicals were taught not by traditionalists but by less-educated older radicals. (...) Yet the scariest trait of the current revolution is that many of its sympathizers haven’t changed much since the 1960s. They may be rich, powerful, influential and older, but they are just as reckless and see the current chaos as the final victory in their own long march from the '60s. [We Americans STILL haven’t resolved the issues of the 1960s, and we aren’t likely to do so any time soon, short of an actual shooting civil war. The only end I foresee is when our generation has died off, there might finally be “peace.” But, it won’t be the peace envisioned by either the 60s radicals or the 60s conservatives. It’ll be something hybrid that ignores our past completely. And, if one of us lives long enough to see it, we’ll be appalled.  I have a vision of a decapitated Lincoln’s statue sitting in his Memorial with a small, hand-lettered sign identifying the stone corpse as “Ozymandias.” Ron P.]

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