In our times, 5 decades is too long. Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade. What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us? One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts. The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes. Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.
The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots. Great song, horrible philosophy. Here’s a good rendition:
The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise. He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth. He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter). The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country. Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.
The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump. Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America. What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.
Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state. This isn’t about “price controls”. It’s about economic euthanasia. Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state. No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.
I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love. It’s a form of engineered social amnesia. Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?
RogerG