Ted Nugent goes full-auto on hippies
The Nuge is about as subtle as a brick:
Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.
He's not wrong. But, even though I feel his pain at the loss of his colleagues, this isn't productive to his cause. Here's the problem: it takes a generation to see and evaluate cultural change. Children are raised by 20s and 30s who largely hold their youthful values. The children know no other, and pass those on to their children. The original parents become grandparents, and observe how the world they see is inferior to that of their youth. But they no longer have the energy to change it, and after 2 generations, the young, who do have the energy, can't understand or reconstruct the world of their grandparents. When I was young, the Victorian Age was depicted as some monstrous neurotic mess. Now we can see certain moral choices as a society's collective striving for prosperity, at a time when that had finally become possible for the masses, by avoiding personal behaviors that would make that impossible. (Hint: the same behavior choices have the same outcomes today.). Likewise, what I remember of the early 60s was its absolute normality. 1967 was the end of that, not so much for the Summer of Love, but for the riots in Detroit and elsewhere.
I don't know how we can get back there, or to a "there" like but different. Some think that the Roe Effect will bring us back. But I have 4 step-grandchildren, and none of them are legitimate. It's unlikely that anything will change as long as we pay the poor to make babies. If it does, it will be because of those who make their own decisions and are willing to examine basic values, for whom neither tradition nor change are a given. And there are never enough of those.
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