June 15, 2024
The Revolution Will Not Be What You Expect
By
P.F. Kelly, Jr.
Blind hatred of America is so yesterday. It’s shadowboxing an opponent who has exited the ring. Activists on college campuses today, whether agitating for Hamas, BLM, or Occupy Wall Street, are fighting a caricature of America from the 1950s and ’60s, an America that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s the America of Bill Ayers and Richard Nixon — the radicals versus the squares and the capitalist pigs. They are obsessed with a phantom that faded away years ago.
A movie called
The Music Never Stopped tells the story of a young man named Gabriel, who left home just before high school graduation in 1968 after a fight with his father over his views on America and the Vietnam War. Set in 1986, his parents haven’t seen him in 18 years, until they learn he is undergoing brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. The tumor is large, and its removal affects his memory processing, making it difficult for him to form new memories and trapping him in the familiar environment of the ’60s.
As Gabriel recovers, he asks about his friend, Mark, whom he had last seen when Mark got his draft card. His father tells him Mark died in Vietnam, and he cries out, “That bastard Nixon!” Gabriel is still fighting the bogeyman of yesterday in 1986. Today’s leftist protesters have a similar tumor on the brain, planted there by their university faculty. Like the character in the movie, they are all fighting yesterday’s enemy.
America today is far removed from the unreconstructed America that student radicals in the ’60s hated. From the boardroom to the stock room, America is now almost entirely woke, groveling in abject and continual apology. Diversity and inclusion are enshrined in our national life, despite the constant lectures on race. Movies and television are full of “people of color.” Our national sports heroes are almost all black. Mixed-race couples dominate our national advertising. (Fortunately, we have an army of grievance professionals available to interpret the “systemic” racism in our every word and gesture, which they will do for large sums of money.)
In addition, marriage redefined is the law of the land. Gay pride is celebrated for the entire month of June. Homosexuality is mainstream. On transgenderism, parents in some states are still trying to establish their right to stop their minor children from being sexually mutilated without their consent. We’re woke, okay? The jury has spoken.
Nonetheless, leftist radicals take today’s events and jam them into the Procrustean bed of a 1960s worldview. College students with their Hamas sit-ins follow a playbook right out of the ’60s. Fight the power! Hillary Clinton, the student radical who insulted Republican senator Edward Brooke to his face while she addressed her graduating class at Wellesley, and Barack Obama, acolyte of radical organizer Saul Alinsky and Weatherman Bill Ayers in Chicago, would approve.
But the war is over. The left fought for and won on civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom. It’s time to accept victory.
Young people are beginning to sense that white supremacists, uptight Christians, and big business aren’t really the problem anymore. The problem today isn’t the “establishment” making life miserable for people who want to live the way they want to; today, the establishment is the government. It’s the government’s power over their lives that young people should be fighting. The outdated ideology forced on today’s young people is pointing them at the wrong targets. An executive order forcing radical transgender policies on high schools and universities or a border policy allowing criminals and terrorists to flood into the country is much more likely to make an impact on their lives.
The radicals from the ’60s who wrote the playbook on campus activism went into the propaganda business at American colleges. But the young radicals they trained who are coming out of college today aren’t true believers. Their commitment is half-hearted, as demonstrated in their lack of understanding of the issues they protest, most recently the Hamas/Israel war.
