8When I was in my early teenage years, I remember the war protestors, the bell bottoms, the long hair, the muraled Chevy vans and Robert Plant screaming out Stairway to Heaven on AM radio. I also remember the quizzical looks that some of the older folks gave to hand-holding couples passing them on the sidewalk. Sometimes they couldn't tell the guys from the girls and they were probably thinking, "I survived 35 missions in the nose of a B-17 for this?"
I guess it is just the nature of things that previous generations sometimes regard the current generation with some consternation and a little bit of wariness. Your music sucks, your clothes suck and so do your popular new values. In spite of that, we have apparently survived culturally. Until now, maybe. From the time I was a little kid, probably up to my late forties or so, I think certain things were commonly shared in American culture. Things like fair play, honesty and integrity were values that most of us still believed were core. Decorum was important too. It was generally considered a social good to be polite and well-spoken. Even if you didn't believe in God, most people thought that you should treat other people the same way you wanted to be treated because there was something intrinsic to our nature that told us it was just right.
Today a lot of those things seem to have been flipped over on their heads. From the top. Congresspeople freely use the Seven Dirty Words that you could never say on television...on television. Men routinely clobber their female opponents in women's sports. Kids in grade school are taught that their homeland is an evil bastion of racists and oppressors. And people freely support actual murderers when the right kind of person gets murdered.
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved to die because he was the CEO of an insurance company. Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wasn't a terrorist-murderer because he had shaggy curls the ladies found cute. He was actually a freedom fighter. And Karmelo Anthony got $270,000 worth of love from GiveSendGo.com. The site has been taken down now, but an internet search implores one to support Karmelo Anthony's Fight for Justice......(Like, he admittedly stabbed another kid in the heart over nothing. What sort of Justice does Karmelo want?)
In Seinfeld-speak, we are living in Bizarro World. And how in the hell did we get here?
Like an airliner crash, there are probably a lot of contributing factors that culminate simultaneously to create a disaster. Affinity for socialism might be on the rise as the gulf widens between the haves and the have-nots, and on those coattails come Marxist tantrums by the impatient. Suddenly throwing a two-pound rock through the windshield of an electric car becomes virtuous. That fact that the guy tossing it injured a pregnant woman is sad, maybe, but it's just the cost of doing business. Some eggs must be broken to advance the cause, you know.
Or maybe the internet. With all of its goods come a lot of bads. People get to comment while writing behind avatars and surnames. They are anonymous. I joined a political discussion board after 9/11, and I freely admit that I could be a jerk when crossing swords with liberals and progressives. I would like to think I've mellowed out some in the last several years, but having been in a number of heated discussions I know that I said things that I might have thought twice about had I been face to face. While I think I've tamed my responses as I get older, I also believe there are quite a few who have gone hard in the other direction. If you do that enough, it's possible if not probable that your online persona will crawl out into the physical world. Either way, we're definitely getting a heavy dosage of Lizard Brains in the culture, and I suspect this has helped to form the upside-down world of today.
I think academia between my own college years and now has shifted well into the red (literally) when it comes to introspection. Introspection is good. Introspection forces you to question givens that you may not have questioned before. Introspection forces you to articulate your convictions and by doing so, fortify them. Or, if you are intellectually honest, change them if you can no longer defend them in the face of stronger arguments. It looks like, to me anyway, that Introspection has been supplanted by Indoctrination. Students are informed what they should think and not how to become critical analysts. The aspect of injustice and/or oppression is ladled into the mix by their teachers so that guilt is produced. Guilt then precludes honest questioning because to do so opens one up to accusations of racism, sexism, misogyny and today...Trumpism. *shudder*
Let me offer an example. A few years ago at Oregon State University, a statue called The Pioneer was taken down. It had been there for about 100 years. The figure in the statue was a frontiersman with a rifle and a whip, two tools that would be essential to anyone travelling through an unfamiliar and heavily forested land. The students found this offensive because the figure was white (well...bronze) and bearded.
" On the one hundredth anniversary of the statue’s installation, members of the UO’s Native American Student Union demanded that The Pioneer be removed due to its symbolism of violence perpetrated by settlers toward the Native American people of Oregon..."
There are other things about this, such as a determination of intent by the lead activist, who said it was based on a bloodlust of native Americans by whites. That led to the removal of The Pioneer. I'm never sure that when we judge historical figures by today's ethics, arguments of consistency work out very well, but anyway, that was part of the deal. So. Why is this a case of Indoctrination over Introspection? Because northern American indigenous tribes practiced the very same atrocities against their own indigenous neighbors that the Native American Student Union found so horrific about the statue. Chinooks, the predominant tribe in the area, practiced slavery and cannibalism. So did others like the Clayoquot, Lummi, and Sitka. And they did it for a long, long time. Whites conquered the territory through warfare and no doubt killed a lot of Indians. But they didn't eat their captives, enslave them, or offer them up for human sacrifice. So, the matter becomes one of logical inconsistency. Why do we demonize the pioneer, when arguably his infractions, while bad, were either on the same level or less than those of the indigenous? We don't demonize them, and in fact, we glorify them as noble and peace-loving. I think it's pretty obvious that academia wants to produce graduates who are half-educated on historical facts so that they can march out into society, virtue signal, and lecture everybody else with stylish tropes on how bad their own country is. Socialism isn't going to happen if the original foundations remain intact.
It didn't use to be that way. Most of us of a certain age were taught that, while this place wasn't perfect by any stretch, it was still better than most.
So, we live in an upside-down society. It might be that just a small percentage of the population sees things this way, but it's a very loud one. Trump did win, and I hope that means that most of the country is still normal, but judging by trends, I'm not so sure. The president is trying to clear out all of the DEI nonsense, and it's not going to happen overnight. It will be interesting to see how the midterms go.
Help us keep fighting the Democrats extremists! consider becoming part of the RedState team and joining our VIP membership today. Use promo code FIGHT to get a whopping 60% off.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member