It was the last decade of organic discovery--stumbling upon the cool shop or out-of-the-way restaurant. There are huge benefits to having all the worlds knowledge in the palm of your hand, but the sense that there are discoveries to made around every corner seems to be gone.
"The last decade of organic discovery" is honest to goodness one of the most accurate and precise ways of describing it. I am definitely stealing that line!!
Correspondingly, our "educated" young suffer greatly due to a lack of authenticity, a lack of any contact with authenticity, or tradition, or the old world. It has really harmed them.
Never has our system of education been weaker. It's what the Right has been saying for years, .....but now it's all actually coming true: Colleges are becoming indoctrination centers, not places of higher learning. I can't believe the intolerant little monsters universities are producing.
Yes indeed. One of the first things that raised my concerns about the direction of the liberal-left was the issue of education. My mother taught city college and public high school in NYC and it was so, so, dire. This was starting in the mid 1990's. My parents could be ultra-liberal in some respects, but when it came to education they always maintained good old-fashioned common sense. They loved the classics, they passed on that healthy attitude to me. Thank god.
It does indeed look grim out there. I am glad that I am not a child today and I am glad that I am not parenting children in this screwed up culture. We are not imagining that things are different these days. The speed of decay of Western Civilization is obvious to all but the dense. It is not surprising that, when we turn our backs on God, we get something very different.
I know what you mean about the cultural output of those not opting in to the into the "successor ideology" and it is pretty cringe. OTOH, most of the cultural output from the left is also cringe these days.
It most certainly is. Even the decent shows like White Lotus are hard to watch because everyone in them is such a miserable arsehole. All joy is gone out of culture.
I can appreciate shows like White Lotus and Succession for the writing, acting, and general production values. They are extremely well done shows, but yeah, it's not like you "like" or even relate to any of the characters. If you want some well done feel-good TV, I recommend Ted Lasso on Apple. It's an INSANELY positive show that manages to make an emotional impact even on a cynical old curmudgeon like me. I got a free six month trial of Apple and the first thing I did was binge this whole show. It's only three seasons. Just outstanding.
For example, the two main female characters are ALLOWED TO BE FRIENDS! They are not jealous of each other! They are not stabbing each other in the back! They are not even in the same GENERATION (one's in her 30s, one's in her 50s) and yet they are depicted as fantastic friends. It's so heartwarming to see a show where women actually have each other's backs! The men are (rather fantastically, but hey, let's go with it) portrayed as capable of learning and growing and becoming better people. Check it out!
I've been on the Left for the last 45 years. Back when we had an actual ability to see something more vital than our own identities. I abhor the anti-intellectual attack dogs that pass for America's Left nowadays.
I once described my '90's look as "I dressed like I had fished my clothes out of the lost and found bin in my local leisure centre." I was quite proud of it too!!
This younger generation better wake up. They are crazy and maniacal.
I do agree with Jenny that "As a group, kids like us mostly rejected the low-brow and the commercial." I am so shocked how today's generations are group think in the extreme, like red guards...but what oh what did we all do to create this? We better start thinking about it because we all share the blame...always!
As another genXer, so well put! I think our generation needs to step up and help guide the ship! Your essay describes it so well, which is why I reflect so fondly on being a teen in the late 80’s. I am sad for this current generation but there are so many great kids out there, us genXers just need to guide them 😊
Even my kids who were born in 1986 and 1988 (they're 35 and 36 now) had a much more normal childhood than the kids nowadays. We didn't have the internet until they were eight and ten. They didn't have their own cell phones until high school. NOBODY was "transing." Now I have two granddaughters ages two and four. Their mother, my daughter-in-law, is a practicing Catholic. I've always been atheist, but honestly, if my DIL wants to put my granddaughters in Catholic school so they never hear that people can change sex, it would be FINE WITH ME.
In today's totally self indulgent, rabidly Left World of "Look at me! Look at me! I'm the new role model!" (of inanity/insanity) <> that we are forced to consume daily, your thoughts make me realize sane, insightful and kind people still exist.
Are they even left-wing, really? I mean don't get me wrong, I hate actual left-wing politics, but these freaks don't even meet that standard. They are immature narcissists with drug problems, babies in adult bodies, who think that aping past crusades gives them authenticity. It's more moral and cultural than political. IMHO.
DOB 1976. My siblings were 1986 & 88. I was much more free range than they were. I resonate with the idea that we didn’t grow up with a cause to fight for. More apathy than outrage. (Don’t think I’d encourage kids to be apathetic, but outrage is so tiring to listen to). What I wonder is how the pendulum will sing for the next generation. Will it be more Gen X-ish? Or something new?
Yeah, I think about that a lot as I was born in 1975 and my son in 2009. I think they *might* be a bit more sensible than my lot were, as we were out underage drinking and getting up to shenanigans from the age of 15 and for some of us, much younger. That was part of the apathy you mentioned. I would be quite happy if my son and all his friends turned out to be huge squares with very earnest values, as opposed to my amoral youth!! 🤣🤣
Jenny, Jenny, Jenny, as someone who was middle-aged in the 90s, the only thing I see about that time when my children were becoming adults was that those coming of age during that time hadn't gone through any of the turmoil of early generations. You talk about the antiwar movement of the sixties but fail to acknowledge that more than half of us were NOT antiwar. Richard Nixon wasn't reelected with the widest margin in the electoral college in history by the antiwar crowd. If the crowd at Woodstock was as large as represented today, the whole world would have been flower children. It wasn't.
Yes, kids today have the Internet to drive them nuts but children of the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties had the rock music industry who were spewing out their venom on the airwaves. LGBT was just LG but they were working hard to make the world believe they were normal. There was plenty of dope around and young women were pulling Jimmy Buffet's all over the place, knowing they could go down to their local abortion clinic and make it go away.
The left didn't change? Seriously? Judged by current leftist standards, JFK was a bit to the right of DJT. Even Bill Clinton, as president in the '90s, wouldn't pass muster with today's left. The left bears little resemblance to what it was fifty, forty, or thirty years ago (hell, fifteen years ago!). I still feel the same way about things I did when I used to vote Democrat. Trying to fit into that party today would require relinquishing all reason, which I cannot do.
Agreed. You could attribute this to any number of factors. Is it because the hard, totalitarian left has always been just waiting in the wings? Is it because liberal democracy (often conflated with the left, incorrectly) has produced such a decadent and corrupt society that we are all radicalised, in different ways? Is it a globalist takeover of our lizard overlords? Is all of the above? 🤷🏻♀️
I don't know. It seems there have always been wild-eyed, radical leftists that rational people--both Democrats and Republicans--laughed at, dismissed as crazy, but kept an eye on just in case. Somehow they emerged from where they were lurking in the wings and took over. Now it's their world and we're just trying to survive in it.
The hard totalitarian nincompoops of the Left have always been waiting, I think the insane rhetoric of Trump finally opened the flood gates. I can hardly bear to go online anymore and witness their totally self righteous, self indulgent behavior, masquerading as activism.
JFK died in 1963. At that time, the Democratic Party was still largely conservative with a left-wing element. The party was taken over by Leftists in the 60s. You might want to go back and look at what some of those Leftist radicals did, such as rioting, killing cops, attempting to derail trains, encouraging soldiers to go to Vietnam and kill their commanding officers. Nope, the Left hasn't changed. They're just as revolutionary and radical as they've always been.
Both of you are right on different levels. Clearly, the Left has in recent years undergone a shift from being pro-freedom and anti-Establishment to being the opposite. But the disease of the Left we see so flagrantly and massively now was being incubated & grown in the 60s (with roots even further back).
"The Left", which is a euphemism now for Marxism, goes back to before the 1848 (failed) revolutions in Europe. The first communists in the United States were German immigrants who formed the first league of communists in New York City and Philadelphia in 1847. (See my latest post.) "The Left" is today associated with the Democratic Party but it hasn't always been so. In fact, the Republican Party was started by socialists, some who were Marxists. Marx wrote for the New York Tribune for more than a decade. The Democratic Party was largely conservative before FDR then it went flat-out Marxist after conservatives left the party in the Sixties and Seventies. The Left has ALWAYS been violent. I suspect those who voted for Democrats because they were "for the little people" had no clue what they were really voting for. By the way, the only "freedom" the Left has ever been for is their own. Their goal since Forty-Eighters came here after the 1848 revolutions in Europe failed was to unite Northern factory workers and free slaves in the South in a great revolution. Factory workers saw the light but the Left's biggest support today comes from the descendants of freed slaves who swallowed their rhetoric and pressed for their own revised version of history.
An element of the left has always been violent -- yes. And you could say that that element is the truest representation of what the left really is. But that doesn't account for millions of people, post WW2 and post Iron Curtain, who were misinformed/lied to/hoodwinked...however you want to characterise it ...into thinking that the left IN GENERAL was good because the right IN GENERAL was the next door neighbour to Hitler. It doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion if this was accurate or not, it is just how I and all of my peers grew up understanding the world.
And I see the left's biggest and most powerful support as coming from the intelligentsia and corporations, not "descendants of freed slaves."
Jenny, just why do you think the Left's biggest and most powerful support is from the intelligentsia and corporations rather than "descendants of freed slaves"? Did it ever occur to you that academia is now filled with and to some extent controlled by black academics, many of whom have backgrounds in "African studies," a bogus field started at Berkeley by activists? Corporations now have black board members, many of them activists. Congress has a number of black members, nearly all of whom are/were activists. An example is Shelia Jackson Lee, who represents the district adjoining mine. She's not even a Texan or
Southerner - she's a New Yorker whose husband was offered a job at the University of Houston. Blacks currently make up some 13% of the American population but they are the most powerful voting bloc in the Democratic Party. Granted, not all blacks are leftist in every respect, but they'll vote for Leftists. Remember that Joe Biden was way behind in the Democratic Primaries until he won South Carolina, where the Democratic Party is mostly black (as is true in most states, particularly in the South.) The Left has been making inroads in the black American "community" since Reconstruction. Rosa Parks was not a card-carrying communist, but she and her husband had attended communist party meetings. W.E.B. Dubois was definitely a communist, he eventually joined the party. Eighty blacks, some of them at least communist, went to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade. A former black soldier and communist named Oliver Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Law - commanded it until he was killed in action. BLM was started and led by black Lefists - they even claimed to be Marxists - and black activists formed and led the protests after George Floyd's death.
Today's Left is absolutely enamored/enthralled with the idea of violence. Beware any who may wish to disagree with their absolute views. The Red Guard kids have become reincarnated, just as blind and ideologically obnoxious as before. Hitler Youth of the Left?
I agree about most of what you wrote, but I don't see the Left in the 60's and 70's as being as downright stupid, racist, and juvenile as they are now.
Oh, they were! I'm writing a Substack about it right now. What we have now are products of the "New Left" of the sixties and it goes back to 1905. The SDS changed the focus from labor to the college campus. They went around blowing up things and killing cops.
The reason I fail to acknowledge the half that wasn't antiwar is because I didn't know any of them! I write from my personal perspective of someone who grew up on the left, and this essay is really only about that. And while I understand that there were hard left elements in the counterculture, and I now recognise that as bad, that was not clear as I and many like me were living through it.
But though you can quibble with what "the left" really means, taken as a large whole -- it has most definitely changed. You could say that it is finally showing its true face, but that is still a change.
In spring of 1990, I took off for 3 weeks on a drive across the country and back, starting in Baltimore. I and boyfriend (both in our 20s)took my 1984 Cavalier, a Rand McNally road atlas, and a few rolls of quarters for the pay phone. We never knew what was coming around the next turn, and it was a wonderful adventure. Too bad Gen Z will never have that.
I have hopes for Gen Z. My son, his friends, my friend's kids, my family -- they seem pretty sane. I worry about them entering adulthood and having to deal with Millennials, as well as their more crazy peers.
"Those of us born in the late sixties and seventies and were the last free generation."
No, no, no. I and many others hitched across Europe, travelled Africa on public transport, saw The Stones, Bowie, Springsteen and many others, took drugs that put you up, never down, and was in the window between the sexual liberaltion of the late 60s and HIV. I helped medical students go to Soweto, and post 71 to Medecin sans Frontieres. We were free to shag, free to party, free to travel, free to help.
Sounds to me like you are not a Millennial? I'm saying that everyone who came after us Gen X'er's has not grown up in real freedom, and you are confirming that with tales of your wild youth! 🤣
Given the dates it should be obvious that I am a boomer. My point is that your generation wasn't the last free generation. Boomers think they were, Every generation 'thinks' they are.
BTW what is wild about going to a few concerts, helping people and travelling? The freedoms were functions of the times (no HIV, safer travel), not any deliberate eccentricity, whatever we felt at the time.
Every generation thinks they are special and the one that comes after them is terrible- but do you really not think there is a qualitative difference between Millennials & Gen Z and everyone that came before them?
Gen X were the last kids to grow up without the Internet & social media, which has been an unprecedented change factor that has categorically scrambled our minds. We were also the last generation before parents were pressured to routinely drug their children for normal behaviour.
We are all currently suffering through the consequences of these things.
And I was only joking by referring to your wild youth, hence the 🤣.
Alvin & Heidi Toffler had a broadly similar set of thoughts in 'Future Shock' I seem to remember, and whilst the toys and tools have changed I am not sure that is the change factor people think it is. (AI might, might, be more of a game changer). I think that the trend of medicalising social traits bears some responsibility, as well as a nurtured growth in expectations for those who can afford them, status virtues if you will.
Also, I don't know any parents on this side of the pond who drug their children. I'm sure there are some, obviously not the sort I know. Equally anecdotally virtually all the kids I meet, strangers or not, seem polite, interested and helpful.
On this anecdotal note, a sort of Godwin's law perhaps, I will leave in broad agreement and with thanks for your interesting writing.
We (Gen Z and older millenials) were the last generation generation not to have their youthful foibles immortalized online. That was a freedom we didn't know we had until we see our kids without it.
Me and the wife often say growing up in the 90’s was amazing. She reckons the world started changing when the LHC at CERN turned on and discovered the Higgs Bosun.
It was the last decade of organic discovery--stumbling upon the cool shop or out-of-the-way restaurant. There are huge benefits to having all the worlds knowledge in the palm of your hand, but the sense that there are discoveries to made around every corner seems to be gone.
"The last decade of organic discovery" is honest to goodness one of the most accurate and precise ways of describing it. I am definitely stealing that line!!
Correspondingly, our "educated" young suffer greatly due to a lack of authenticity, a lack of any contact with authenticity, or tradition, or the old world. It has really harmed them.
Never has our system of education been weaker. It's what the Right has been saying for years, .....but now it's all actually coming true: Colleges are becoming indoctrination centers, not places of higher learning. I can't believe the intolerant little monsters universities are producing.
Yes indeed. One of the first things that raised my concerns about the direction of the liberal-left was the issue of education. My mother taught city college and public high school in NYC and it was so, so, dire. This was starting in the mid 1990's. My parents could be ultra-liberal in some respects, but when it came to education they always maintained good old-fashioned common sense. They loved the classics, they passed on that healthy attitude to me. Thank god.
It does indeed look grim out there. I am glad that I am not a child today and I am glad that I am not parenting children in this screwed up culture. We are not imagining that things are different these days. The speed of decay of Western Civilization is obvious to all but the dense. It is not surprising that, when we turn our backs on God, we get something very different.
Happy Easter Susan!
Thank you. And Happy Easter to you. He is Risen!
He is risen in deed.
Im in my early 50’s. You just wrote an essay about my life. It’s downright eerie.
I'm glad to hear it's not just me!!
I know what you mean about the cultural output of those not opting in to the into the "successor ideology" and it is pretty cringe. OTOH, most of the cultural output from the left is also cringe these days.
It most certainly is. Even the decent shows like White Lotus are hard to watch because everyone in them is such a miserable arsehole. All joy is gone out of culture.
Thank you ! I sincerely don’t watch very much but I am always willing to try and was convinced by a friend to watch White Lotus. I couldn’t watch it!
I can appreciate shows like White Lotus and Succession for the writing, acting, and general production values. They are extremely well done shows, but yeah, it's not like you "like" or even relate to any of the characters. If you want some well done feel-good TV, I recommend Ted Lasso on Apple. It's an INSANELY positive show that manages to make an emotional impact even on a cynical old curmudgeon like me. I got a free six month trial of Apple and the first thing I did was binge this whole show. It's only three seasons. Just outstanding.
For example, the two main female characters are ALLOWED TO BE FRIENDS! They are not jealous of each other! They are not stabbing each other in the back! They are not even in the same GENERATION (one's in her 30s, one's in her 50s) and yet they are depicted as fantastic friends. It's so heartwarming to see a show where women actually have each other's backs! The men are (rather fantastically, but hey, let's go with it) portrayed as capable of learning and growing and becoming better people. Check it out!
I've been on the Left for the last 45 years. Back when we had an actual ability to see something more vital than our own identities. I abhor the anti-intellectual attack dogs that pass for America's Left nowadays.
I must salute those crazy-baggy jeans.
I once described my '90's look as "I dressed like I had fished my clothes out of the lost and found bin in my local leisure centre." I was quite proud of it too!!
This younger generation better wake up. They are crazy and maniacal.
I do agree with Jenny that "As a group, kids like us mostly rejected the low-brow and the commercial." I am so shocked how today's generations are group think in the extreme, like red guards...but what oh what did we all do to create this? We better start thinking about it because we all share the blame...always!
They are Red Guards meets Hitler Youth. Genuinely frightening.
We do share the blame, I agree.
As another genXer, so well put! I think our generation needs to step up and help guide the ship! Your essay describes it so well, which is why I reflect so fondly on being a teen in the late 80’s. I am sad for this current generation but there are so many great kids out there, us genXers just need to guide them 😊
Thank you!!
Even my kids who were born in 1986 and 1988 (they're 35 and 36 now) had a much more normal childhood than the kids nowadays. We didn't have the internet until they were eight and ten. They didn't have their own cell phones until high school. NOBODY was "transing." Now I have two granddaughters ages two and four. Their mother, my daughter-in-law, is a practicing Catholic. I've always been atheist, but honestly, if my DIL wants to put my granddaughters in Catholic school so they never hear that people can change sex, it would be FINE WITH ME.
Yes, I would feel the exact same way!
Ironically for todays youth to “rebel” they must embrace traditional values. 🤣 Bring on the cultural backlash already.
I know!! I just worry that the backlash will be Taliban level backlash.
Beautiful piece of writing as always Jenny.
In today's totally self indulgent, rabidly Left World of "Look at me! Look at me! I'm the new role model!" (of inanity/insanity) <> that we are forced to consume daily, your thoughts make me realize sane, insightful and kind people still exist.
Are they even left-wing, really? I mean don't get me wrong, I hate actual left-wing politics, but these freaks don't even meet that standard. They are immature narcissists with drug problems, babies in adult bodies, who think that aping past crusades gives them authenticity. It's more moral and cultural than political. IMHO.
"....who think aping past crusades gives them authenticity..." Precisely written Jenny :-)
DOB 1976. My siblings were 1986 & 88. I was much more free range than they were. I resonate with the idea that we didn’t grow up with a cause to fight for. More apathy than outrage. (Don’t think I’d encourage kids to be apathetic, but outrage is so tiring to listen to). What I wonder is how the pendulum will sing for the next generation. Will it be more Gen X-ish? Or something new?
Yeah, I think about that a lot as I was born in 1975 and my son in 2009. I think they *might* be a bit more sensible than my lot were, as we were out underage drinking and getting up to shenanigans from the age of 15 and for some of us, much younger. That was part of the apathy you mentioned. I would be quite happy if my son and all his friends turned out to be huge squares with very earnest values, as opposed to my amoral youth!! 🤣🤣
When you are too rapidly approaching your 80th year, Jenny, and are not laid to rest nor cremated, you may enjoy a wonderful sense of being at peace.
In other words you are not doomed (yet) to a nagging sense of ennui, or at least that is my experience.
I thoroughly enjoyed the essay you shared with us.
Thank you.
Thank you! That is a very valuable perspective!
Jenny, Jenny, Jenny, as someone who was middle-aged in the 90s, the only thing I see about that time when my children were becoming adults was that those coming of age during that time hadn't gone through any of the turmoil of early generations. You talk about the antiwar movement of the sixties but fail to acknowledge that more than half of us were NOT antiwar. Richard Nixon wasn't reelected with the widest margin in the electoral college in history by the antiwar crowd. If the crowd at Woodstock was as large as represented today, the whole world would have been flower children. It wasn't.
Yes, kids today have the Internet to drive them nuts but children of the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties had the rock music industry who were spewing out their venom on the airwaves. LGBT was just LG but they were working hard to make the world believe they were normal. There was plenty of dope around and young women were pulling Jimmy Buffet's all over the place, knowing they could go down to their local abortion clinic and make it go away.
As for the Left, they didn't change, you did.
The left didn't change? Seriously? Judged by current leftist standards, JFK was a bit to the right of DJT. Even Bill Clinton, as president in the '90s, wouldn't pass muster with today's left. The left bears little resemblance to what it was fifty, forty, or thirty years ago (hell, fifteen years ago!). I still feel the same way about things I did when I used to vote Democrat. Trying to fit into that party today would require relinquishing all reason, which I cannot do.
Agreed. You could attribute this to any number of factors. Is it because the hard, totalitarian left has always been just waiting in the wings? Is it because liberal democracy (often conflated with the left, incorrectly) has produced such a decadent and corrupt society that we are all radicalised, in different ways? Is it a globalist takeover of our lizard overlords? Is all of the above? 🤷🏻♀️
I don't know. It seems there have always been wild-eyed, radical leftists that rational people--both Democrats and Republicans--laughed at, dismissed as crazy, but kept an eye on just in case. Somehow they emerged from where they were lurking in the wings and took over. Now it's their world and we're just trying to survive in it.
The hard totalitarian nincompoops of the Left have always been waiting, I think the insane rhetoric of Trump finally opened the flood gates. I can hardly bear to go online anymore and witness their totally self righteous, self indulgent behavior, masquerading as activism.
JFK died in 1963. At that time, the Democratic Party was still largely conservative with a left-wing element. The party was taken over by Leftists in the 60s. You might want to go back and look at what some of those Leftist radicals did, such as rioting, killing cops, attempting to derail trains, encouraging soldiers to go to Vietnam and kill their commanding officers. Nope, the Left hasn't changed. They're just as revolutionary and radical as they've always been.
Both of you are right on different levels. Clearly, the Left has in recent years undergone a shift from being pro-freedom and anti-Establishment to being the opposite. But the disease of the Left we see so flagrantly and massively now was being incubated & grown in the 60s (with roots even further back).
"The Left", which is a euphemism now for Marxism, goes back to before the 1848 (failed) revolutions in Europe. The first communists in the United States were German immigrants who formed the first league of communists in New York City and Philadelphia in 1847. (See my latest post.) "The Left" is today associated with the Democratic Party but it hasn't always been so. In fact, the Republican Party was started by socialists, some who were Marxists. Marx wrote for the New York Tribune for more than a decade. The Democratic Party was largely conservative before FDR then it went flat-out Marxist after conservatives left the party in the Sixties and Seventies. The Left has ALWAYS been violent. I suspect those who voted for Democrats because they were "for the little people" had no clue what they were really voting for. By the way, the only "freedom" the Left has ever been for is their own. Their goal since Forty-Eighters came here after the 1848 revolutions in Europe failed was to unite Northern factory workers and free slaves in the South in a great revolution. Factory workers saw the light but the Left's biggest support today comes from the descendants of freed slaves who swallowed their rhetoric and pressed for their own revised version of history.
An element of the left has always been violent -- yes. And you could say that that element is the truest representation of what the left really is. But that doesn't account for millions of people, post WW2 and post Iron Curtain, who were misinformed/lied to/hoodwinked...however you want to characterise it ...into thinking that the left IN GENERAL was good because the right IN GENERAL was the next door neighbour to Hitler. It doesn't really matter for the purposes of this discussion if this was accurate or not, it is just how I and all of my peers grew up understanding the world.
And I see the left's biggest and most powerful support as coming from the intelligentsia and corporations, not "descendants of freed slaves."
Jenny, just why do you think the Left's biggest and most powerful support is from the intelligentsia and corporations rather than "descendants of freed slaves"? Did it ever occur to you that academia is now filled with and to some extent controlled by black academics, many of whom have backgrounds in "African studies," a bogus field started at Berkeley by activists? Corporations now have black board members, many of them activists. Congress has a number of black members, nearly all of whom are/were activists. An example is Shelia Jackson Lee, who represents the district adjoining mine. She's not even a Texan or
Southerner - she's a New Yorker whose husband was offered a job at the University of Houston. Blacks currently make up some 13% of the American population but they are the most powerful voting bloc in the Democratic Party. Granted, not all blacks are leftist in every respect, but they'll vote for Leftists. Remember that Joe Biden was way behind in the Democratic Primaries until he won South Carolina, where the Democratic Party is mostly black (as is true in most states, particularly in the South.) The Left has been making inroads in the black American "community" since Reconstruction. Rosa Parks was not a card-carrying communist, but she and her husband had attended communist party meetings. W.E.B. Dubois was definitely a communist, he eventually joined the party. Eighty blacks, some of them at least communist, went to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade. A former black soldier and communist named Oliver Law - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Law - commanded it until he was killed in action. BLM was started and led by black Lefists - they even claimed to be Marxists - and black activists formed and led the protests after George Floyd's death.
Today's Left is absolutely enamored/enthralled with the idea of violence. Beware any who may wish to disagree with their absolute views. The Red Guard kids have become reincarnated, just as blind and ideologically obnoxious as before. Hitler Youth of the Left?
I agree about most of what you wrote, but I don't see the Left in the 60's and 70's as being as downright stupid, racist, and juvenile as they are now.
Oh, they were! I'm writing a Substack about it right now. What we have now are products of the "New Left" of the sixties and it goes back to 1905. The SDS changed the focus from labor to the college campus. They went around blowing up things and killing cops.
Being old enough, or well educated enough, to know about the turmoil and lawlessness our nation suffered during those years.
I suspect the "being old enough" to remember allows us to cringe at the memories created during the final four decades of the prior century.
Very well said Cary. Thanks.
The reason I fail to acknowledge the half that wasn't antiwar is because I didn't know any of them! I write from my personal perspective of someone who grew up on the left, and this essay is really only about that. And while I understand that there were hard left elements in the counterculture, and I now recognise that as bad, that was not clear as I and many like me were living through it.
But though you can quibble with what "the left" really means, taken as a large whole -- it has most definitely changed. You could say that it is finally showing its true face, but that is still a change.
In spring of 1990, I took off for 3 weeks on a drive across the country and back, starting in Baltimore. I and boyfriend (both in our 20s)took my 1984 Cavalier, a Rand McNally road atlas, and a few rolls of quarters for the pay phone. We never knew what was coming around the next turn, and it was a wonderful adventure. Too bad Gen Z will never have that.
I have hopes for Gen Z. My son, his friends, my friend's kids, my family -- they seem pretty sane. I worry about them entering adulthood and having to deal with Millennials, as well as their more crazy peers.
"Those of us born in the late sixties and seventies and were the last free generation."
No, no, no. I and many others hitched across Europe, travelled Africa on public transport, saw The Stones, Bowie, Springsteen and many others, took drugs that put you up, never down, and was in the window between the sexual liberaltion of the late 60s and HIV. I helped medical students go to Soweto, and post 71 to Medecin sans Frontieres. We were free to shag, free to party, free to travel, free to help.
I ache (and look) like sh*t now. Heh.
Sounds to me like you are not a Millennial? I'm saying that everyone who came after us Gen X'er's has not grown up in real freedom, and you are confirming that with tales of your wild youth! 🤣
Given the dates it should be obvious that I am a boomer. My point is that your generation wasn't the last free generation. Boomers think they were, Every generation 'thinks' they are.
BTW what is wild about going to a few concerts, helping people and travelling? The freedoms were functions of the times (no HIV, safer travel), not any deliberate eccentricity, whatever we felt at the time.
Thank you for clarifying!
Every generation thinks they are special and the one that comes after them is terrible- but do you really not think there is a qualitative difference between Millennials & Gen Z and everyone that came before them?
Gen X were the last kids to grow up without the Internet & social media, which has been an unprecedented change factor that has categorically scrambled our minds. We were also the last generation before parents were pressured to routinely drug their children for normal behaviour.
We are all currently suffering through the consequences of these things.
And I was only joking by referring to your wild youth, hence the 🤣.
I see your points but wonder...
Alvin & Heidi Toffler had a broadly similar set of thoughts in 'Future Shock' I seem to remember, and whilst the toys and tools have changed I am not sure that is the change factor people think it is. (AI might, might, be more of a game changer). I think that the trend of medicalising social traits bears some responsibility, as well as a nurtured growth in expectations for those who can afford them, status virtues if you will.
Also, I don't know any parents on this side of the pond who drug their children. I'm sure there are some, obviously not the sort I know. Equally anecdotally virtually all the kids I meet, strangers or not, seem polite, interested and helpful.
On this anecdotal note, a sort of Godwin's law perhaps, I will leave in broad agreement and with thanks for your interesting writing.
Thank you for your comments!!
We (Gen Z and older millenials) were the last generation generation not to have their youthful foibles immortalized online. That was a freedom we didn't know we had until we see our kids without it.
Me and the wife often say growing up in the 90’s was amazing. She reckons the world started changing when the LHC at CERN turned on and discovered the Higgs Bosun.