No Question about it. The “seeds of the revolution” were sown long ago. It’s fair to say a lot of vets returning from VietNam, even if they weren’t combat missions. (I had friends who suffered permanent injuries just in training.) Plenty of guys returning to the US were spat upon and cursed by privileged kids maybe even older than they were. It was not lost on these vets that a lot of people were getting free goodies from the government, not just taking without paying, but living in comfort and bounty that the peasants where these vets had served — war zone or no — would have risked their lives to possess.
And it gradually became screamingly obvious to them that the leaders of the culture they’d defended — for which many had lost irreplaceable limbs and organs and all had lost irreplaceable years — mostly didn’t give a crap about them. Their own politicians, professors, editors, grandfatherly news anchors, priests, and girlfriends had fraternized with the enemy, kissed their rings and kissed their asses, flown to Paris for meetings while the war raged, or to Hanoi to make propaganda films, or paraded before Congressional committees hungering for any damned lie they could make up to villify and demonize the military and anyone who loved it.
The Marxists in the 1960′s radicalized students, and planted provocateurs, and coaches well trained in strategies and tactics of disruption. These overwhelmed the timid administrators of colleges from the humblest community colleges to the loftiest towers. Columbia’s leaders soiled themselves like Obama facing teenage Somali pirates. They would not risk a police assault on “students” who brandished shotguns and pistols while occupying the administration building. Leftists bombs and fires ravaged campuses, banks, and shopping centers. Yale’s chaplain Wm. Sloan Coffin offered sanctuary to draft dodgers and deserters, and the government dared not respond to his taunt. Yale’s president in spring of 1970 said a black revolutionary could not get a fair trial anywhere in the US. Self-identified Marxists were given tenure at many universities, or when denied, championed by students threatening to trash the campus.
The Black Panthers postured, menaced, and strutted, running token free cafeterias and day care centers while making REAL money selling cocaine and prostitutes. In their spare time they busied themselves murdering each other when they weren’t having gun battles with police, or attending “radical chic” cocktail fundraisers with Leonard Bernstein and other decadent NYC gliterati. When Nixon struck VietCong sanctuaries in what was supposed to be neutral Cambodia, nationwide student protests (spontaneous, my ass) seemed to be bringing the country to the brink of armed rebellion. It was widely believed by the Clearasil crowd that Nixon intended to declare martial law and stay in office indefinitely without ever bothering with elections again.
Within a couple of years, most colleges and universities had utterly caved in to student unrest, loosening minority entrance and grading standards, and giving un-challenged accreditation to the intellectual bowel movements of race, gender, and “critical” studies. Didn’t much matter. The English departments were become so utterly dominated by Marxists that students are now as thoroughly steeped in the dialectic and revolutionary dogma there as they ever might have been in a grade school in Moscow.
Now parents of 8-year old girls are discovering that the public school will give them abortion counseling, condoms, and demonstrations of every possible sex act, but will adamantly refuse to share information with parents about these programs, or warning that they are going forward. All this deliberate dismantling of parents’ rights going on with funds extorted from them by local, state, and federal bureaucrats who sneer at them and call them racist, reactionary dunces who don’t know what’s good for their children.
The government tells them the carbon dioxide they breathe is a pollutant and will tax their asses of for producing it. The government tells the people who work and pay taxes, that they are racists for protesting any thing the government decides to do with their money, most especially using it to buy votes from people who have lived on the public trough for three or six generations. The Government tells taxpayers THEY don’t deserve and can’t get free university tuition, but that people who have violated US immigration laws DO and WILL. The Government tells people who earn a wage or make products to sell that they have to pay for their own and health care, emergency services, mortgages, rent, government administered instruction, driving manuals and driving tests in 25 languages besides English, AND in addition, they have to pay for the same services for all the people who DON’T work, AND for all the people who are living in this country ILLEGALLY.
The government tells them their homes can be condemned and bought up by the local council, to re-sell for a profit to any developer who dangles the bribe of a few extra dollars of revenue for the council to use to secure their retirement plans. Ditto for the private citizens’ own retirement plans — THOSE were being sized up for seizure by the Democrats in Clinton’s first Congress in ’93.
We now have a half-black mostly arab-descended President telling us we are more racist than ever. That same president just spent the summer working tirelessly to transform a relatively minor tragedy and oil spill into a major environmental disaster. The tap-dancing usurper couldn’t even accomplish THAT, by deliberately delaying and obstructing every effort attempted or proposed to mitigate the oil leak. This administration — uniquely in any disaster since WWII — imposed a ban on news helicopter flights over international waters where the spill occurred. Now that the beaches and marshes are revealed to be remarkably less damaged than all his shrieking minions have been telling us, they change their chant to “Well, BP used LOTS more dispersant than they should have!” (Yeah, 3 per cent more than authorized, for a chemical that is not in any way classified as dangerous.)
This president made his career as a disrupter and obstructor, has never done anything remotely definable as “productive” — only amassing confederates and co-conspirators for a vast looting of the National piggy bank. The two organizations most closely involved in his career — SEIU and ACORN — have been revealed to be populated by criminals, embezzlers, and thugs, who show up at citizen’s meetings with their Congressional reps and beat them up for protesting the President’s confiscatory policies. This week, while millions of people are despairing of finding a job, his supremely arrogant wife is pissing away something like $100k of taxpayer moneys EVERY DAY on a vacation at a resort that caters to international millionaires.
The absurdities listed here are just a few turds of the avalanche of stinking feces that’s been pouring out of the LEFTIST’s Anti-Cornucopia for four or five decades.
“Cognitive Dissonance” ceased to have any functional meaning by the time the phrase was coined.
The Left does not have a blind spot for its own insanity. Their vision is ALL blind spot.
As Wretchard pointed out, the revolution is not the battles waged with guns and bullets. Those occur long after the fact. It is the AWAKENING of a subject population that their own government already views them as slaves, and that they have only themselves alone to sunder the shackles.
