From a viewer of WYP:
Jonah,
It’s always interesting to me (an aging boomer) to observe
discussions of what the 60′s were all about, and what it was like
during that period, when, of course, what the 60′s were like depends
entirely on ones own experience of the 60′s.
I grew up in a poor section of Los Angeles in a working/lower class
family in the 50′s, was married, raising a family, and working
throughout the 60′s. When I finally went to college in the late
70′s/early 80′s and was required to read textbooks describing America
in that woeful decade, I found them hilarious. They seemed to be
written, mostly, by grown up East coast “rich kids” who described an
America that could have been on Mars for all I found
recognizable. Never-the-less, they had not a doubt that what they
described was all of America as it truly was.
People I knew were mostly other working class young marrieds who
laughed together at what a bunch of feckless morons the
average “demonstrator” (whatever the cause) was. Of course, that
was early on in the cycle when they were still amusing. As the
decade wore on (seemingly forever) they became less an amusement and
more of a constant irritant and inconvenience. Many of my friends
who went to college during that time grew weary of having classes
disrupted and cancelled, and of having to try to avoid tear gas
clouds when going from one class to the next. Talk amongst us began
to occasionally turn to how gratifying it would be to beat sensless
some of the more obnoxious examples of the beloved “counter culture”;
but, of course, and alas, no one I knew ever did. Now that I am
getting to almost relive some of the vexations of those times caused
by a lot of the same people regurgitating the same simple minded
cliches I became so tired of, I often wish I had availed myself of
the opportunity.
It is so laughable to hear folks laud my generation for its
“selflessness” and “open-mindedness”. I knew and lived amongst those
people. The thing that marks them most in my memory was their almost
total self-absorption and intolerance of anyone who did not agree
with everything that they believed. And they HATED mightily. And
literally. They hated the middle class, they hated the police, they
hated LBJ and then Nixon, they hated the military, they hated
American culture. Those were the folks that put bumper stickers on
their VW busses that said “I love mankind, it’s people I hate”. And
they were so stupid that they didn’t know what they were saying about
themselves.
The saddest thing may be that many of them (who now make up most of
the leadership of the Democrat party) haven’t seemed to have learned
a thing after seeing the actual fruits of their ideology come to
pass. No, I take that back…I actually believe they have seen and
learned from viewing the consequences of their ideology. They just
won’t admit it, and they don’t care about the consequences.
I enjoy and appreciate your work greatly. I began subscribing to
NRODT in its early years, and now NRO is my main and irreplaceable
daily read. I just wish you and Ann Coulter could play nice together.
Thanks for all your hard work,