There was more going on in the '70s than people seem to have noticed. Sure, the Boomers were encountering that "force of a million new ideas" Chicago sang about but a lot of their parents had already encountered that force. A lot of their parents were the children of New Dealers. Their parents had also been the beneficiaries of government subsidized higher education. Can you say, "GI Bill?"
I never liked Bernie Sanders. The guy couldn't sell sno-cones in Hell. He proposed free higher education and could never defend against those who claimed it was too expensive and couldn't be done.
It obviously isn't too expensive, it can be done, we have done it in the past and it produced a Golden Age. If he didn't know that or couldn't express that why did he bother to bring it up?
That's another question. Why do we allow the sixties and seventies to be stigmatized as an era of sex, drugs and rock n roll? Why do we allow a Golden Age of progress and creativity that underpins the world we now live in to be belittled? You could make the case ( But I won't) that 1955 thru 1980 was a new Quattrocento. Sure, I cut my hair. I always looked like an unmade bed but I damned sure didn't get dumber.
We did not expand or extend any rights to anyone who didn't have those rights to begin with. We did limit people's ability to deny those rights as a matter of course. We didn't deny people's rights to injure or discriminate because they never had the right to do those things to begin with. We just made them behave. A lot of them sure didn't seem to like that much but people had been asking politely for decades.
We took lowercase "a", affirmative action thru the government to bring minorities, women and the poor into the mainstream of society. Sure it was egalitarian and altruistic and all that but it was more importantly the right thing to do for all of our welfare, wealth and progress. It's good to be on the side of the Angels but it's not a bad idea to be on our own side. You just have to look at the economic resurgence of the southeast to realize the benefit of bringing 50% of the population into the economic mainstream. You can make the case the northeast could do a better job.
In nature, every action has an opposite but equal reaction. In human nature, particularly politics, every action seems to have a totally disproportionate reaction. Check out Shakespeare, Dickens or Tuchman. There was a wave of racism, misogyny and contempt for the the poor that was deliberately but subtly appealed to by Reagan. College kids, being college kids, overreacted to the political right and called for political correctness as though it weren't obvious racism, misogyny and classism were wrong and it needed pointed out. I repeat; college kids.
I looked up political correctness so I wouldn't seem too dumb in this essay. There's way too much reading that'll make you fidget out of boredom. It turns out there is no "PC" movement. Although, I guess if you need a term to use to cryptically appeal to racism, misogyny, classism and the like it's as good as any. There's no body of articles extolling the virtues of PC. There is a plethora of "scholarly" articles coming from the right employing amazingly twisted formulae to criticize resistance to bigotry, misogyny, classism. Apparently, if you want to defend those things as American Values you need a lot of verbiage and a simple, shorthand phrase. You need a handy enemy. Those scruffy college kids and those pointy head intellectuals in their "Ivory Towers" will do fine. Especially, if those "pointy head intellectuals" are holdovers from all that sex, drugs and rock n roll. They, they must be commies! And, and they're teaching our kids to be commies!
I'm tellin ya friend we got big trouble and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for P C!
Good Lord! All you really need is a funny definition of the word "correct". Not funny Ha Ha and this bunch of Harold Hills isn't going to have the truth revealed to them in the final reel. In politics, epiphanies are in short supply.
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