Following bread crumbs is not always easy. Am I making certain assumptions? Yes, I am. Am I, perhaps, painting with a broader brush than usual? Of course. If I were to include every last detail, chapter and verse, to support my point in this article, it would end up being the size of "War and Peace" instead of a web article. Brevity and succinctness doesn't change the aim of the piece, nor does it invalidate the veracity of the theme. Our children and grandchildren are suffering at the hands of people who put their political agenda first, and kids LAST.
In the previous piece of this article, we followed the Baby Boomer generation though their adolescence in the 1960s. They were, as Malcolm Shabazz put it, "Lead astray and run amuck". Their every fault, every frailty, every weakness was preyed upon so that they would become the vessels for America's political Left. It's my hope that some of you have taken the time to use your favorite search engine to look up some of the things I brought to bear previously. Boomers were embers that the Left fanned in order to start the fire you see burning this nation today.
But as all children do, they grew up. They had children of their own. They turned (OMG!) 30. What you have to remember is that the link between these new parents and their past had been severed. The ideals, the morals, the tenets of truth that their predecessors relied upon to negotiate their own lives and raise their own children were rejected by the Boomers. Which leads us to what is called Generation X (my generation). Starting in about 1965, the Boomers started producing the next generation but, as I will try to make clear, they lacked the moral authority and underpinning to do the one thing that parenting requires...TEACHING.
The Boomer generation was awash in gender politics via the Women's Movement. They were blinded by the false platitudes about race from the changeling that ebbed from the Civil Rights movement. They had been inculcated by the reverse logic of Marxist economic and geopolitical theories. In short, they were lost souls who relied totally on situational ethics. They had allowed themselves to be convinced that America was the enemy of the world. They imbibed the Kool-Aid that the US was an imperialist nation whose intent was to have the rest of the world bow to it. Radical college professors of the day planted the seeds of disgust and mistrust in them, and they took it all in. But the Left knew there was still more chaff than wheat in the crop thus far.
See, as the Boomers aged, life started teaching them the hard way that at least some of what their parents tried to impart on them was true and, as such, some of them started to backslide toward more conventional views. The Left wasn't deterred though. They had seen the model for the changes they wanted to make. They just had to go after the young, and in this case, younger Americans. So the college graduates of the 60s became the next generation of high school teachers, journalists, lawyers, and influencers for Gen X.
The backwards and misleading nuggets that filled the minds of Baby Boomers in COLLEGE were just recycled and imparted at the HIGH SCHOOL level. I remember quite clearly getting into heated discussions with teachers in school when they would bring these things up. I got sent to the principal's office one day for asking my Social Studies teacher why he thought that western civilization wasn't more capable of making the world better than other cultures of the world. He actually shouted at me "If you think America is so great, then you're probably going to fail this class! Go to the office!". Imagine the irony of that situation. In the not so distant past, this same teacher was a college student, marching in protest that he had the right to be heard. The same man was now yelling at me that I didn't. Free speech was a good thing for them, but not us. Sound familiar? It should. You see it every single day on the TV, regardless of what channel you are getting your news from.
Boomers inhabited classrooms, newsrooms, and courtrooms all across the country and spent a lot of time using these vehicles to propel the Left's agenda forward. Gen Xers were caught in the crossfire. While Boomers, as adults, grew more hedonistic, the 1970s became known as the time of the "Me" generation. The "free sex, love, and rock and roll" of the 60s morphed into the gratuitous sex and cocaine abuse of the 70s. With the end of the Vietnam war and the impeachment of Richard Nixon, the Booming Left had their hands firmly on the steering wheel and were directing the country well off of the beaten path. Gen Xers could only watch, as children do, and try to reconcile the difference between what they were seeing and what they were being told.
And where does a confused child go for guidance? Obviously, their parents. That presented a problem, because their parents were the same Baby Boomers that were trying to fill their heads with false dogma. Parents of that time couldn't just tell their children that the Left was wrong, because to do so would mean that they, themselves, had been wrong. That's difficult for anyone to admit, but even moreso for a generation that had been told, since birth, that they were "special" and that their every whim, wish, and notion was gospel. Just think about. What happens if a decades-long alcoholic, in a bar, sees a newly minted 21 year old over indulging in Jack Daniels. The alcoholic knows from experience that what the younger person is doing is bad and leads to consequences, but just can't bring himself to speak up or look like a charlatan.
So what did the Boomers do? As they say in poker, they doubled down. While their partying days of their teens, twenties, and thirties might have been a real hoot for them, a goodly number of them started to see their lives slipping by. As they entered their late 30s and early forties, many decided that (contrary to their socialistic pronunciations of their youth) that capitalism might be a little OK. At about this same time, they found themselves at that age where they started to be in charge of things. They were the foreman on the site, the vice president of the company, the coach of the team instead of just a player on it. If you'd like a really good example of this, do a little research on Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1980s. You'll IMMEDIATELY see what I mean.
In 1980, something happened that the Left didn't expect. The country elected a President who didn't parrot their nonsense. In fact, he had spent a lifetime fighting tooth and nail against it. He was appealing, articulate, knowledgeable, and likeable. His name was Ronald Reagan, and he was, at the time, the Left's worst nightmare. He was a barricade along the road they wanted the country to travel. Gen Xers noticed. They listened. He made sense to them, where their teachers, parents, and other so-called role models did not. The Boomers and their Leftist masters HATED Reagan. They pulled out ALMOST all the stops to try and discredit him after they noticed that Gen Xers were hearing his message of freedom, independence, smaller government, and lowering the federal burden on the individual. Gen Xers weren't following the script that the Left had laid out for their parents. See, a funny thing happens when you tell young people not to listen to their elders. The knife has 2 sides to the blade. Where it had worked on their Boomer parents, Xers way of rebellion was to lean more conservative.
That being said, the idea of Left-Moderate-Right on the political scale had shifted. What was once thought to be middle of the road politically had shifted Left. And, in that shift, the country moved with it. Grandparents could only look on sadly as their Xer grandchildren, although more Conservative than their Boomer parents, were still way more Left than they were.
Personally, rather than simply parroting the Conservative Right, I started to see the world in a much more Libertarian Conservative (LC) light. A big majority of Xers are that way. We believe in freedom. Whatever you want to do, so long as it doesn't infringe on the rights of others to do the very same thing is part of the LC doctrine. The AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s shifted political focus from a religion only standpoint of homosexuality (which is enumerated in Romans, Leviticus, et al) to a more eased position. While we were (and are) a nation steeped in Judeo-Christian heritage, we still believe in a separation of church and state. Gen Xers looked at the predicament of the ill and their partners through the lens of freedom and equal protection. While the idea that homosexuality was still morally wrong, a secondary notion that individual choice of lifestyle that didn't impede on anyone else's freedom started to change the conversation. Why could a gay man, on his deathbed, not be visited and cared for by the closest person in his life? Why could a person dying of AIDS not bequeath his worldly goods to his significant other just because they were both men? So Gen Xers pushed for what was referred to as "civil unions" so that gay men and women could be afforded the same rights as their straight counterparts. The American Left, seeing this, drooled like the proverbial Pavlovian dog. It was their chance to move the ball a little further down the field.
You have to look at the American Left with a certain lens. Reagan got sworn into his first term of office in 1980 just shy of his 69th birthday. The media, seeing his ability to sway the masses IMMEDIATELY took off the gloves when it came to his age. They chided and slandered him both subversively and openly about being "too old". They cast aspersions about his mental capacity for the job and implied that he was impaired. Perhaps it was just a relapse to their thinking of the 1960s that the generation before them was incapable and evil, but they nevertheless were relentless to the sitting President's ability to carry out the duties of his office. In the 1984 campaign for re-election against then Senator Walter Mondale, the accusations of infermity became manifest against Reagan. But as he always did, he handled it with wit, humor, and aplomb as can see in this clip from a presidential debate.
To understand, and I mean TRULY understand, how we got here and, particularly, how our children and grandchildren got to where we are in this nation today, it's instructive to see the disparity in the way they treated Ronald Reagan about age and the way they are protecting a much older President Biden today. The American Left is outcome driven. They are goal oriented. They have no problem whatsoever in being totally contradictory when it suits them. Lying when they can get away with it. And being duplicitous at every turn. The easiest way to understand them is to acknowledge that their true aim is the EXACT opposite of their stated intent.
Gen Xers (at least those that pay attention to such things) have watched this their entire lives. In the next piece of this article, I will go into a little more detail about what it was like raising Generation Y children in this very same environment. It's only when you track the path of the nation from Baby Boomers to Gen Xers, to Gen Yers, to Millenials that you can truly understand how we got to this point. You can only know where you are going if you know where you've been.
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