Ever since I was eight years old (I am 56 as I type this), I have known that my generation would let down America. I looked around at the people my age and I knew we didn't have, would never have, what it would take to keep America going as our grandparents had built it.
I knew that we were missing something the older generation had---a fundamental psychological understanding of the mechanisms required to sustain a functioning Constitutional Republic over the course of our lifetimes.
We were deprived in exposure to the philosophical education that would have given us this understanding. Civics was a throwaway subject for most of us. But that deprivation alone was not sufficient to achieve this. I knew before we even had a chance to get any form of education that we would fail the Republic.
I knew we were different from our grandparents. Our elders didn't realize how different we were from them, as they could not understand the kind of people we were. Likewise most of us, of our cohort, could not understand them and thus we were happy to accept the new normal that was in fact very different from the America of our grandparents. It was already in our minds and outlooks, from the time we were very young. Whatever we are living through now is a consequence of that time, which has now become manifest in the world at large, instead of confined to the collective consciousness of schoolchildren of the 1970s.
I could see the gulf between us and our elders. But how to describe exactly? How did this come about?
It was a rupture in the flow of civilization. Civilization in the form it had existed until we were born had suddenly ceased and changed into something radically new. People seemed to be aware of it at the time, and talked about it at the time as being a fundamental break in this way, but few except the true visionaries could understand the breadth of this rupture with the past. We had a complete revolution yet all we could do in the years that followed was go on pretending that life was a normal continuation of the past, when in fact everything was in upheaval. Not surprisingly, from my generation forward, widespread mental illness is almost the norm.
Our media taught us how to live through this upheaval. Our media taught us to evaluate what was happening, and how to adjust to it by striving to live a normal life, something most people now suspect they have failed at. This is what was different between us and our grandparents, and even our parents. They learned how to live, and how to evaluate the world, primarily from their own life experiences with people they personally knew. For my generation, our personal experiences were drowned out by the immense glory of the media, which usurped the power of the transmission of value away from the personal and thrust it into the realm of the mass experience.
My parents were among the last people to experience consciousness in America before the adoption of television. I was one of the last to experience the world before color television took over.
Most of my cohort was completely immersed in a world ruled by color television from the beginning. The world was instantly remade by it. Even seeing broadcast color television once is like an acid trip for a child. Even a single exposure to broadcast color television is enough to convince him or her that the real world is the one on television. It is far bigger and more interesting than anything in your personal world around you. It immediately takes precedent in its reality.
This is the civilization of 1965 onward. The year 1966 was the last year in which Hollywood made black-and-white movies as a standard product.
As a consequence, my generation saw the world in much more malleable terms than our grandparents every could. We knew from the beginning that many concepts and definitions people relied on in the past would no longer apply in the world we were born into.
We understood from the beginning that situations which we would consider fantastical can be achieved in reality by the power of the imagination. It was so intoxicating to be a young child in that era.
We knew the world was just beginning to come into an era in which so many social issues which had been a problem in the past would be wiped away by the power of imagination to transform the world. We knew we were the good people of history We would harness our imaginations to make the world so much better.
All those things about the Constitutional Republic was interesting as history to us, but we didn't take them seriously because we understood they were a product of era before people harnessed the power of their imaginations, as we would.
Along the way we learned to discard anything that didn't suit the furtherance of the Social Transformative Power of Imagination through Goodness. We discarded God the Father. We discarded fathers in general. We discarded marriage. We discarded mothers. We discarded babies. We discarded men and women. We discarded logic. We discarded reason. We discarded meaning.
We did all this because we promised ourselves that as Good people, we would use this transformative power only for Good things. We would destroy people who opposed us because in opposing our Goodness, they revealed their Badness, and thus they were worthy of destruction.
How little surprise that we are now discarding the Republic. We---my generation---discarded the need for it in our minds a long time ago. We accepted freedom as something that easy and relaxed. Freedom transformed the satisfaction of our needs and wants. Freedom became the unfettered ability to project our imagination onto the real world.
In a word, the old Republic, and the virtues necessary to sustain it, could be described by the most devastating words possible to my generation. They were not cool enough to be worthy of our attention over time. It was ok to talk about them, but it was a bit uncool to give too much importance to them. You weren't supposed to take them that seriously. Doing so was an easy way to label yourself as a uncool extremist.
And that is how the Republic was lost. Now my cohort in their mid Fifties, which is the historical age of apogee of influence over society. While it is true that our seniors, the Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation, are holding onto the power a little longer than is historically normal, I think the psychological cycle is still true, and is pointed right squarely at my cohort as being the pivotal swing vote that has cast us into this apparent interregnum, where we are not sure we are going to continue as a Constitutional Republic or fall into some other form of Postmodern version without the overt Rule of Law being recognized as the basis for Constitutional government, and without acknowledgment of the existence of fundamental universe rights such as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religious Belief and Worship, Freedom of Self Defense, etc.
In fact it is likely we would all have to go re-education programs of some form to make us admit that that those rights were toxic and oppressive, as was the idea of the 1787 Constitution itself. College students, high school students, government workers, teachers, and many other groups already learn this and bully other into accepting it.
Thankfully there are members of my generation, and even my cohort, who didn't fall for this. They are the true heirs to my grandparents, and the old Republic. I certainly failed it for the longest time, and came out of the trance of the Transformative Imagination Cult within the last decade and half. This is because I watched lots of television and loved the television news. I absorbed what anchormen told me with the greatest enthusiasm. I watched every episode of M*A*S*H. I watched every episode of Star Trek. I was schooled in the arts of love and romance through the Top 40 countdown on AM Radio. I learned about human relationships form mTV. I learned about heroism from televised sports. I accepted what they told me about the world and about current events that I lived through.
When I consider that perhaps the situation has only gotten worse since my cohort, by orders of magnitude, it can easily make me tremble with expectation of the darkness that lies ahead for us, as we lose all historical connection to the old Republic, and we become a nation of people who have never known anything but the new Cult.
I don't have much intellectual respect for any American of my cohort who is still in the Cult. I pity them. Many are mentally ill. There is no point in talking to most of them about anything in the world.
Ultimately I know this task of restoration is far too big for us to handle. I believe God alone possesses the power to restore us. I beg Him daily to do that, in a way that is magnificent and speaks to His Glory. Maybe we can get the Republic back and resolve to preserve it by some miracle of God's Grace. For those of us who know what the old Way was truly like, before our civilization was destroyed, we know that God could achieve this if He chooses. How much a test of our resolve and courage must endure for this to happen? For how long?
Maybe through the Grace of God the wisdom and resolve necessary to sustain the Republic will be kindled in the younger generation, and those that follow, as it was for people long ago. It will a new form of it, to be sure, appropriate for the times ahead. Perhaps there will be enough of these new kind of people. Perhaps they will have developed psychological antibodies against the toxic corrupting ideas that destroyed my generation and kept us from fulfilling our responsibilities to preserve what had been gifted to us by our forefathers and foremothers.
My generation is probably a lost cause. I think what we are about to find out, and what is about to be revealed to us, will a crippling blow to their psyches from which many will never recover. I could say I have to warn them, but in this too I failed. I was too afraid most of my life to look uncool to care about the things that were actually the things one should care about it. Forgive my brothers, and sisters, for failing you this way. If anyone should have been doing more of that, it was me. I spent so much time chasing the frivolous, and the Nothing. I didn't realize what I was neglecting, which was our true treasure, which we threw away thinking it was deadweight ballast holding us back from climbing to the stars.
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