We really had a big beef with my parents’ generation growing up. The Generation Gap was real. It was all their fault, too. They simply declared war on us in most cases. Sure, we were rebelling, but there were a lot of stupid social codes and rules that needed to be rebelled against.
We were rebels with a cause, not without one. Their generation tried to justify their social sadism by saying that all of our behavior was just “teenage rebellion” and “young people rebelling.”
But it wasn’t. If your parents are rational and sane and fun, there’s nothing to rebel against unless you like being perverse. We were actually doing all of those things because we wanted to do them and we liked doing those things. We did out of desire, not to give our parents the finger for no reason.
Now, at 60, I look around me. Something has occurred to me over the past decade that was hard for a lifelong rebel to swallow, and it is this:
In far more ways than we want to acknowledge, and no matter how painful and humbling it is to admit:
Our grandparents were right.
Not just our parents. I mean our grandparents! I think back on the truths that they told me after long and well-lived lives, and there’s not a whole lot I can disagree with.
The Cultural Left wants to take all our collective wisdom of the ages, built up over centuries or even millennia, all of the wisdom of our ought to be revered elders accumulated through time and trial and error, tested and refined over countless generations until the truth came out so bright it blinded you to look at it…
…and set it all on fire.
Our wisdom is our heritage, and it is stored in our elders like flesh and blood libraries from generation to generation, refined through time in what is essentially an empirical and scientific process involving how to run a society and culture.
And we are setting the damn thing on fire like Nazi bookburners just to justify a few sexual, gender and racial ultra-radicals who are trying to engage in a vast social engineering project with ideas that not only have rarely been used by humans, but with concepts and notions that have been rejected over centuries and generations by the common wisdom of our species.
I’d call it folly if it wasn’t so frightening, and even dangerous.