Regressive Progressives want us to return to the 1950s
With a stop along the way in the 1970s (See the end of the post.)
A popular 1960s college “teach-in” in which students were propagandized by Leftist ideologues.
It feels like I’ve been transported back to the 1950s when I hear what “progressives” describe what they consider to be today’s horribles.
You’d think we’re all living back then when we hear their analysis of “systemic racism” and “white privilege.”
I lived through the 1950s, entering it as an eight-year-old and leaving it as an adult (eligible for the military draft, but that’s another story), and I witnessed what real racism was.
Racial segregation and laws against interracial marriage were not just on the books then, but were horribles that were embedded in American culture and were practiced regularly.
Lynchings continued until 1955 when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teen, was strung up for allegedly offending a white woman. That’s when causing “offense” had very real life and death consequences, until today when causing “offense” will get you banned from social media. Oh dear.
Racist punks, backed by fathead sheriffs, their police dogs and water cannons were deployed against peaceful civil rights demonstrators. Children died in the bombing of a black church. Northern activists were murdered when they traveled to the South to protest segregation.
Up North, real estate contracts prohibited the sales of homes to “negroes.” Housing discrimination was practiced legally. Schools were segregated by law and custom. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was hit by a rock while leading a march in Chicago for open housing.
My wife, Florida born and raised, remembers whites-only water fountains and blacks required to sit in the back of the bus.
I could go on, but today’s weeping and whaling by Regressive Progressives about the evils they’re imagining are peanuts compared with the oppressive 1950s.
No, I’m not asserting that racism today isn’t a problem, but America has come a long, long way. Those who see things as no better or even worse than what we were a half century or more ago are ignorant simpletons. Their exaggerations are an insult to the many, many Americans who sacrificed greatly and courageously to rid America from those horrors.
How did today’s greatly exaggerated evils happen? After World War II when America’s democratic values were truly under life-or-death assault (as compared to the nonsense raised by Regressive Progressives these days), a period of creativity and prosperity began.
Taking exception were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others of the “beat generation” who decided that America was a gawd awful place. They correctly identified the racial and other ills that afflicted America, but they preached that the “root cause” was the democratic system itself rather than the people who occupied and ran it.
Baby Boomers, despite their great advantages, adopted the criticism wholesale and turned the country on its head in the late 1960s. It’s not remembered well today, but they were violent and deadly. Mob action, bank robberies, killing and more.
They weren’t good for much else, so they migrated into college teaching, where they spread their doctrinaire BS. Colleges hired convicted terrorists. Students were herded into “Teach-ins” in which the “beat” view propagated by radical professors were hand-fed to them.
These rigid ideologies who have twisted history to suit their hard left views had the opportunity to plant this disease for generations, turning out “students” who were corrupted into thinking that no other possible views are permissible. From them today, we have harvested the kind of autocracy that once was so feared.
How ironic that they don’t know about how closely they have parroted the post-War red scare in which far-right commie hunters like Sen. Joe McCarthy thought a Marxist was hiding behind every tree. And how people were driven out of their jobs because they were thought to be unpatriotic and disloyal. They are today’s creators of blacklists.
I my loathing for them today is as great as it was for McCarthy and his “ilk.”
So, now we are confronted with Americans who have been propagandized into an anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic view that has no basis in actuality. It’s as if they must have something to be angry about, so they have concocted a fantasy world based entirely on theories that have long been demonstrated to be useless. That would be okay if they kept it to themselves instead of trying to impose it on us and destroy historic American values.
In my 1940s and early ‘50s childhood, I imagined Russians invading Chicago and nuclear warfare wiping out civilization. But in my 81 years, I have never been as afraid for our way of live, our proven cultural standards and our prosperity than I am today.
I don’t see a way that we can recover from this horrific place in which Regressive Progressives have led us. God help us.
Speaking of returning to the past, it seems that LSD may be making a comeback. Lysergic acid diethylamide, more commonly called acid, was the high of choice among some of the strung-out in the 1970s. It was especially dangerous because it was so mind-altering that it was causing an epidemic of self-harm. There reports of someone jumping to his death out of a window because of what he was imagining.
So now I see “experts” showing up how are recommending certain hallucinogens as beneficial treatments for depression and anxiety. Nature’s mushrooms are as good delivery system we’re told. But the synthetic stuff is also making its way back. Witness a recent story in which someone committed a murder because he said he was high on LSD. What goes around comes around.
God help us.