On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 06:16 PM, J.A. Terranson wrote:
On Fri, 2 May 2003, jburnes wrote:
The one thing that really amazed me when I moved to Colorado is the number of middle aged hippie types that 30 years ago were blasting the establishment for controlling what they wanted to smoke have now *become* the establishment. A professor friend of mine was smoking some Drum and shooting the bull with me in Pearl Street Mall (in Boulder). Some new ager comes by and reprimands him for generating smoke. He wasn't even a middle-aged hippie. The middle-aged hippie types are now running the city council, living in $500,000 homes and laying down nazi laws for the rest.
That my generation, once noted for their significant progress towards human freedoms, has turned into the single largest source of repressive laws and McCarthyesque attitude, is something I have sorrowfully noted for many years. That it keeps getting worse and worse is the only thing that continually fucks with my mind :-/
How did we go from libertarians to fascists?
Your generation was never libertarian. Libertine, yes, but not libertarian. Antiwar during Vietnam, yes, but not libertarian. Or have you forgotten the support by the college crowd, circa 1966-80, for statist policies like "affirmative action" and "welfare"? I was in college during some of those years, 1970-74, and can assure you that most of the kids around me were very, very far from being libertarian. Yeah, they like free sex and cheap pot, and so on, but they favored "government that works!," and they flocked to lefties like Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, and even Hubert Humphrey. They saw high tax rates as punishment for capitalists. Angela Davis was their hero, Cuba their idea of a just society. "Eat the rich!" came out of that era. So, with a few exceptions, that generation was socialist and communist, not libertarian. Hence the better question is this: "How did we go from socialists to fascists?" And the answer is obvious: "You were always there." --Tim May "Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity." --Robert A. Heinlein