Wednesday, October 22, 2008

My thoughts exactly

Yesterday I was browsing a number of college-campus, liberal websites. What handsome, adorable young people. And so bright, talented, and apparently, well-heeled. Far more so than my generation. Just like that houseful of students that invaded Columbus to steal our election during voter golden week. Much more fashionably dressed and better teeth than even the college students I used to hire in the 80s. Their parents have worked hard for them--private schools, braces and dermatologists--the best our capitalist system could buy. They are truly the spiritual children of the 1960s radicals, like Diana Oughton of Illinois whose headless body with both hands missing was found in the rubble of that Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970 with Terry Robbins' torso, the guy from Kent State. They had enough explosives to blow up the city block, but only killed three of their own Weather People, a group founded by Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn. The unrepentant Ayers who say they didn't do enough to bring down the USA so they went into education.

Browsing the CampusProgressive.org site I noticed a review of the latest book about President Nixon, a man I never liked and never voted for, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. However, he did significantly change our relationship with Communist China and the USSR, so I'm not sure why he isn't an icon of the left. Oh well, who can fathom them? In the review I noticed this conclusion--arrived at from a different angle than my own--but everything the left wanted in the 60s they got. The right can only plug the dike from time to time but the steady stream of their views washes over us constantly.
    While his electoral strategy remains popular, the success of Nixon’s ideology remains an open question. The burning issues of the 1960’s—civil rights, women’s rights, and the political agency of young people—have resulted perhaps not in complete triumph for the left, but the left’s vision has prevailed.
The whole anti-war thing, then as now, was just an excuse to get drunk, do drugs and burn a few flags before getting down to business. The problem we face in the 21st century is not the specter of a growing right wing (i.e. popularity of talk radio of Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh, according to these easily offended youngsters), but that today's students have to stretch and bend the edges and the constitution that much more than their baby boomer parents and college faculty did at the same age. They all want to out-do Dad and Mom in being big, bad liberals.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

"so they went into education"

and recruited Obama.

Anonymous said...

Because, you know, us kids are so shallow that our "liberal status" HAS to be the motivating factor. Economic, moral, political, or religious beliefs? Forget it. We're just shallow college students. These things are beyond us.

Then again, this is Ohio State.

Norma said...

Should be "we kids." And why wouldn't you reflect liberal values? To what else have you been exposed? Although, if you are on a college campus, that isn't liberalism in the sense of open and free thought.

Anonymous said...

Or, perhaps it's this. In my day we had to be liberals to cut the apron strings of our stodgy conservative parents. Now they have to be that much more shocking to split from their liberal parents.

Anonymous said...

What's the basis for your assumption that a person with leftist or liberal attitudes must never have been exposed to any other values?

Norma said...

Good call Jordan. I should have said on the campus, in their classes.

Anonymous said...

You sure you don't work at Bob Jones University, Norma?

I happen to be a born again Christian who was raised in a conservative home and fundamentalist church.
I am now a staunch liberal because liberals care about social justice and equality. We have open minds and hearts. I am convinced if Jesus were alive today the conservatives would crucify him all over again.

Norma said...

And your faculty? I've taken the opposite route. A humanist and Democrat most of my adult life and got sick of how they continue to hold the poor down with government hand outs and suck up to every ethnic (that isn't white) in the name of diversity while relegating them to the "human resources" positions on the board. Better if she's a female, then it's a 2-fer. Look around. You'll see the truth in a few years if you don't now. It's not an unusual route.

No familiarity with Bob Jones. My profession, library science, is 223:1 liberal to conservative. We beat out Hollywood! In Matt. 25 Jesus didn't tell us to do it through the government.

Anonymous said...

Let them be. If Obama gets in, they'll get 10 years or so of FDR programs, then they can tell all their children and grandchildren the "new Great Depression" stories and learn from experience that gov't is no savior. They're kids. They'll learn. We did.