A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Tomorrow
I am so old I can remember when we thought tomorrow would always be better than today. We were, for the most part, optimistic that the world could be great. We could talk through all our problems, we could find common ground and solve the tough problems.
We knew so much more than our parents, the ones who had lived through the great depression and fought a total world war, but then all the sudden the baby-boomer generation grew up and were in charge.
As we became the governing generation we filled the schools with people who would spend their lives indoctrinating the young into the acceptable socio-economic beliefs of Marx and Engle. We condemned war, at least until we had a chance to start them for ourselves. We celebrated the failures of the church and moved to ensure the smallest minorities in our society had the loudest voices in our collective culture.
While condemning the work of our elders - we created programs to teach our young that everyone who believed the right things were winners. As our generation’s voices grew ever louder we moved from a society of us, to a society of us and them. There could be no compromise, there could be only winners and losers.
Along the way, we realized Captain Kirk and most of the men in Star Fleet were chauvinists (except for the redshirt away team members who would die anyway) and anyone who didn’t accept the extreme positions of the social justice warriors was a homophobic racist.
Today, the utopia we were told was just around the corner in 1969 seems even further away than it did back in those heady days of telling our parents to just take a chill pill.
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