1968 Today

Very thoughtful essay over at PJ Media on the 5-year-old cultural revolution.  One graf that stands out more than most of them (and ALL of them are worth your time....)

...Like Falstaff’s dishonesty, the adolescent quality of these developments was “gross as a mountain, open, palpable.” If America’s cultural revolution was anything, it was an attack on maturity: more, it was a glorification of youth, of immaturity. As the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin put it: “We’re permanent adolescents.” The real victory of the “youth culture” of the Sixties lay not in the fact that its demands were met but in the fact that its values and attitudes were adopted by the culture at large. Rubin again: “Satisfy our demands, and we’ve got twelve more. The more demands you satisfy, the more we got.” Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth -- that is to say, of immaturity -- over experience....

...The idealization of youth has resulted not only in the spread of adolescent values and passions: it has also led to the eclipse of adult virtues like circumspection, responsibility, and restraint....

Granted that I am near-superannuated, but it's striking how often I've remarked on the fatuous flabberwocky that 'the yout's' have produced--and many of those yout's pretend to be "conservative", too.  They are friggin' ignorant.  But worse:  there's no interest in Fact or Thought.  It's all "FEEEEEEEEL."

And Rubin's 'the more [demands] we've got' is certainly the case with the Professionally Oppressed/Repressed/Dis-Privileged, eh?

The conclusion is dead-on:

...It is both ironical and dispiriting to realize that the counterculture may have won its most insidious victories not among its natural sympathizers on the Left but, on the contrary, among those putatively conservative opponents who can no longer distinguish between material affluence and the moral good. In other words, it may be that what the Sixties have wrought above all is widespread spiritual anesthesia. To a degree frightening to contemplate, we have lost that sixth sense that allows us to discriminate firmly between civilization and its discontents. That this loss goes largely unlamented and even unnoticed is a measure of how successful the long march of the cultural revolution has been.

True dat.  Sad to say, by and large, today's "conservatives" are far more concerned with material wealth than Virtue.  And that, friends, is an indictment.