Seqgewehr said:
Therumancer said:
On a lot of levels the problem is your dad's day (so to speak) rather than your grandfather's day. His toys were pretty much made by his grand-dad's generation. Consider that "Dad's" generation were the "make love, not war" generation, who had no sense of national duty, dodged the draft (as opposed to seeing it as a responsibility), and even if the wars at the time were a mess took things to an absolutly ridiculous level in opposition because none of them wanted to get shot at. "Dad's Generation" pretty much defined itself by tearing down society in favor of what it wanted at the moment, and while some good did come of it, a lot more problems occured. There are a lot of sociologists who believe we pretty much face the task of needing to rebuild our society after the US Baby Boomers, and it remains to be seen if the current, indoctrinated generations (given how long they lived, there is more than one, Gen X and Gen Y) can throw off a lot of the propaganda and get things back on track.
My father was a hippie in the 60s and I have had this argument with him more than once. I called him and his generation out for being anti Vietnam war and free love just so they could avoid the commitments that those things would entail. He told me it was to stop the "killing of innocents" in Vietnam and for the Feminists in the US respectively.
Well, nobody will say they are wrong on something like this, like anything, very few people decide to do something because they think it is wrong.
The problem with the Hippies, and most of the generation of the 1960s was pretty much an attitude of entitlement. Things were working smoothly at the time, their fathers were going to step down due to age, and be replaced by their children, unlike Gen X which was "skipped" due to the increasing lifespan that in part has defined the baby boomers (ie still remaining capable of working and holding jobs, expecially important ones, at the time their children came of the right age where they should be replacing them). The Baby Boomers pretty much figured there was no real reason to work for the sake of working. They pretty much just wanted to live off the success of their parent's generation and wallow in decadence. Sex, Drugs, and of course a general belief that the laws were useless and nobody should have to follow them were all defining attitudes at the time.
It's also noteworthy that Mcarthyism in the 1950s did have some legitimate points about the influance of Communist propaganda in the USA. Those general ideas of communal living, wound up becoming a big part of 1960s youth culture. Even today you'll see a lot of people from that generation talking about how Communism isn't a bad system, even if less naive than they were in their youth. The attitude at the time was very similar to the one held by a lot of Russians during their revolution, that somehow after the revolt everyone could relax, live their own way, and somehow magically be taken care of with it always being someone else who did the hard work to keep everything running. In this case the idea was maintained by their father's generation maintaining a pretty signifigant infrastructure.
There is some legitimacy to the bit about killing "innocent people" but only in so far that innocent people always die in wars (that is why they suck). A guy raised in a foreign country under it's idealogy really has no chance to wind up believing anything else. The majority of people who die in a real world are people who have done nothing wrong except embrace the idealogy they were raised to, though when things go far enough for a war the idea is to kill those ideas and thus the people who hold them are themselves the target.
To some extent the generation before the Baby Boomers did their job too well with propaganda about "World War II" and selling it as a "good" war after the fact. People tend to overlook that the Nazis were a hugely popular international movement, not a tiny minority group of germans who somehow managed to be omni-present. We bombed factories, schools, hospitals, and other things as well as killing entire towns to break the nazis in the end. Groups like "The Volkssturm" and "Hitler Youth" didn't evaporate, we killed them all off. It's just we don't bother to put the pictures of the corpse piles we made and talk about what bastards we were in order to win in our historical records.
The bottom line of the wars during the time of the boomers was that there was little propaganda being used. The wars were also being fought under the pretensions of protecting democracy... or basically democratic countries asking the USA for help since we promised we'd grant it. The Baby Boomers, already leaning towards the far left really saw little wrong with communism (or at least as they understood it, I'm not going to rant about the systems since this is long enough), and also didn't want to give up their decadence to go get shot at in a jungle. The biggest issue of course being that nobody wants to fight, and the boomers used every trick they could muster and any half arsed justification they could form to try and derail the war effort and avoid having to go. They *DID* shirk their responsibilities, even if they understandably don't want to view it that way. "Sorry dood, I'd rather sit here and get stoned than go fight in a jungle"... well duh, who wouldn't.
To be fair however, Veitnam in paticular shows the failing of the USA's "world police" mentality since we really didn't research who we were going to defend. While it's a great simplification, the bottom line is the guys we were protecting had no desire of being a progressive, democratic society (and never were one to begin with), and really the only way we were going to achieve the stated goal (A Democratic Veitnam) we would basically have had to blow the entire nation back to the stone age, and then rebuild the remnants from the ground up. There was literally nothing that should be achieved in the region. Wiping out the Veit Cong wouldn't have accomplished much of anything since 'Nam would still be an oppressive hellhole, it's just there would be a lot more bodies. Also to be entirely fair it's a war that we dragged out far longer than it should have been, despite knowing we couldn't "win", largely because of the money that was being made due to being on a wartime footing.
Veitnam being a messed up war does not justify the Boomers dodging the draft, and doing all the things they did. If you want to get technical Hitler was hugely popular in the US (an international man of the year) and there was strong isolationist sentiment in the US besides. Simply put people didn't want to fight World War II either, both because they didn't want to get shot in other countries, and also because a lot of people just didn't see anything wrong with Hitler's philsophy. The way wartime propaganda transformed the US is a big part of what made World War II what it was (and since that war, people seem to have forgotten the lesson). Simply put Pearl Harbour was the big incident that drove the USA into the war, largely by convincing the goverment that it had to be done, it then instituted war powers and used them to propell the nation into the war whether the people wanted to go or not. We wrote the history to make it look like people were volunteering by the droves right of the bat, but that's hardly the case. That kind of thing DID happen but mostly once the propaganda got in full swing.
At any rate, this is long and rambling, the point here is that I have little respect for the Baby Boomers, especially seeing as a lot of them sold out in a big way despite all the principles they claim... which were pretty much just there to justify whatever they wanted to do at the time. That means having a negative opinion of a lot of things my own parents were involved in... but that's simply how things are.
The only real positive legacy that came from the boomers was some of the civil liberties victories that were going on at the time. Although some sociologists have looked at things pragmatically and wondered if the Boomers actually helped, or were something the movements (which was already going) succeeded at despite their existance/involvement.
The reason being is that when you look at some of the stunts the left wing has pulled in elections, like the whole "Elephants against Republicans" thing or the "Naked Truth about Bush" protest (nude/body paint protest) fairly recently (Bush's last election that he won), and consider that this was mild compared to some of the thing Boomers pulled in the name of combatting racism and/or sexism back then, it's a miracle anything positive happened. See, despite being "cool" to some, the bottom line is that the majority of people look at carnival garbage like that on serious issues, and tend to want to instinctively oppose anything that those people support or stand for on principle. A point some analysts made after Obama's election was that part of his 7% lead was probably because you actually saw a lot less of this garbage (though it still happened) since the Demorats were enforcing a lot more disapline and closing ranks to end party dissent.
Civil Liberties victories are a nice legacy, but the point is I question it since it was still their parents generation in power and making most of the desicians. Above and beyond what you might think now, at the time a bunch of hippies running all over the place being rowdy and bizzare might not have actually helped.
