Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Now liberals can agree: It all started in the '60s

Now liberals and conservatives can finally agree on something that's been dividing them for half a century.

Things really did start going wrong in the '60s. At least from one crucial point of view.

How so? Because if the cultural phenomenon that generally goes by the shorthand "The '60s" hadn't happened, we wouldn't be locked in endless wars today. The logic is simple.

(1) Americans accept wars as the first and quickest solution to any international problem because they don't know their history. History offers a guide to smarter problem-solving and most importantly, lessons about what not to do.

(2) American's don't know their history because (arguably) of the 1960s. As John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, has written: "Many conservatives believe that American public education is in poor shape today because of cultural and social trends, most beginning in the 1960s, which destroyed classroom discipline, the moral basis for education, and a national consensus on what students should learn."*

It's crucial to add that the "Israel-Firsters" who've hijacked America exploit public ignorance of history as their No. 1 tool. "Israel-Firsters" teach a gullible public that America has always been a natural supporter of Israel (or the Zionist project that created it). In fact, this has been American policy for only a few decades, and the policy was either quite the opposite or at least neutral previously. The shift happened precisely because of the machinations of the Israel-Firsters. And since they're usually the ones pushing us into the wars, it's not hard to connect the dots.

Did the generation that protested Vietnam inadvertently, perversely, help foster the conditions that created the pretend War on Terrorism that plagues us today?

Well, before we go that far, let's agree on one more thing. It doesn't matter whether it all started in the 1960s. What matters is that we fix it.

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* Hood goes on to add that he accepts this proposition only in part. I haven't been able to find any figures to prove or disprove it (they may not exist), but it has a ring of plausibility to me. Why? Take a look at some mass-circulation periodicals from before the 1960s. It looks clear to me that they're written for people with a higher level of educational attainment than the average Joe today. The statement quoted from Hood comes from his article "The Failure of American Public Education," in The Freeman, Feb. 1993.

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