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[QUOTE="Tony Eeds, post: 1064853, member: 32023"] OK, I am posting the following as a response and I will add my comments following James .... Do not try and take this off on a political bent or I [b]WILL[/b] nuke the entire thread. My disappointment is about a generation (mine) that failed to pass on a "respect" for America and a humility for our "position" in the overall scheme of things. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Best of the Web Today - May 31, 2006 By JAMES TARANTO Iraq and the Liberal Baby Boomers In an essay on CBS News's Web site, the network's Dotty Lynch laments the lack of anti-Iraq sentiment among kids today: As the war in Iraq rages on I keep asking myself: Where are the young people this time around? Where are the campuses? Where are the new Tom Haydens and Sam Browns and where are the Noam Chomskys, William Sloane Coffins and Daniel Berrigans? For the past four months, I was at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, surrounded by idealistic young people and their liberal professors. There was virtually no support for the war (except for the offspring of a few famous neo-cons) but neither was there serious organized activity to try to stop it. Large groups of students traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild it and another group went to Washington to protest the genocide in Darfur. But why so quiet about Iraq? Lynch, who says that as a lass during the Vietnam era she "was passionately against the war," then considers various theories to explain why Iraq is not another Vietnam. It's pretty trite stuff, but what's interesting is the underlying premise: that Vietnam is the norm--that in the usual course of things, as we put it a while back, "a war is supposed to become a quagmire, which provokes opposition and leads to American withdrawal." America's defeat in Vietnam was a triumph for Americans of a certain ideological and generational profile. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, made this clear earlier this month in a commencement address at the State University of New York's New Paltz campus: This wonderfully encapsulates several elements of the liberal baby-boomer mindset. First, the self-congratulation: "My fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon." Even Sulzberger, however, is self-aware enough to present this with some irony: "OK, that's not quite true. . . . Maybe there were larger forces at play." Then, the perversity of reveling in tragedy. To most Americans, the retreat from Vietnam and the resignation of Nixon were at best necessary evils; but to the liberal baby boomer they were, and at least to Sulzberger they remain, points of pride. The baleful consequences of Vietnam and Watergate--boat people, the Khmer Rouge's massacres, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the impeachment of Bill Clinton--go unmentioned in Sulzberger's speech. But Sulzberger also makes clear that his generation's celebration of Vietnam and Watergate was not solely, perhaps not even primarily, malicious in nature. It was motivated by a kind of misguided adolescent idealism: "We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government," Sulzberger proclaims. "Our children, we vowed, would never know that." As a newly minted college grad back in the 1970s, Sulzberger imagined that Vietnam and Watergate spelled the end of war and corruption. He still hasn't outgrown his disappointment that this turned out not to be the case. He knows his intentions were pure and is still wrestling with whether the world let him down or he let the world down. In his new book, "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era" (available from the OpinionJournal bookstore), Shelby Steele reflects on the origins and endurance of this attitude: One purpose of youthful rebellion is to put one's self at odds with adult authority not so much to defeat it as to be defeated by it. . . . But if the young win their rebellion against the old, their rite of passage to maturity is cut short and they are falsely inflated rather than humbled. Uninitiated, they devalue history rather than find direction in it, and feel entitled to break sharply and even recklessly from the past. The sixties generation of youth is very likely the first generation in American history to have actually won its adolescent rebellion against its elders. One of the reasons for this, if not the primary reason, is that this generation came of age during the age of white guilt, which meant that its rebellion ran into an increasingly uncertain adult authority. . . . It doesn't matter, for example, that there was honor in America's acknowledgment of moral wrong in the area of race. An acknowledgment of wrong was an acknowledgment of wrong, and it brought a loss of moral authority--and thus, adult authority--despite the good it achieved. In fact, the baby boomers were too young to be implicated one way or another in the civil rights struggle: The oldest of them turned 18 in 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. All of the credit for the triumph of civil rights, as well as the blame for what it had to overcome, belongs to earlier generations. But the success of the civil rights movement might have fed the baby boomers' political delusions in another way. When Sulzberger was born in 1951, Jim Crow still prevailed. He was 2 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education and 12 when the Civil Rights Act became law. By the time he finished college at 22, American racism was history (though of course some of its aftereffects linger to this day). The triumph of civil rights was the culmination of a struggle that began before the Civil War, but to a boy growing up in the 1960s and coming of age in the early 1970s, it must have seemed to have happened very suddenly. If this is so, then there was a certain logic to Sulzberger's triumphalism circa 1974: If America could so quickly abolish racism, why shouldn't it be able to vanquish war and corruption with equal ease--or, indeed, with greater ease, given how enlightened Sulzberger and his cohorts imagined themselves to be? Baby-boomer liberalism, with its smug sense of moral superiority and its impatience with America's imperfections, is today the prevailing worldview among many of our elite institutions, not least the so-called mainstream media. This explains why Dotty Lynch is puzzled that Iraq hasn't become another Vietnam. The answer to her question is that Iraq isn't Vietnam because "Vietnam" was the product of a peculiar set of conditions at an unusual moment in history--a moment that has long since passed. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - My position .... My generation (I was born in 1951) is completely and totally full of ****, or ourselves, depending on which knife you use to spread “it” with. My children are confused. Why are they confused? I would submit it is because we "believed" we rewrote the rules ... yea right. We tossed all the rules aside and now my daughter doesn't know it is alright to knock my grandson into next month if he acts like an ASS. James says it far better than I. If you are a child of a child of the '60's, do you feel lost? [/QUOTE]
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