Flipping switches and losing values

"I believe that the 60's may have been the switch that flipped."

There have been lots of switches.  Looking  back, it is clear that Lincoln's turning the country and constitution upside down when he freed the slaves on paper and condemned the states to bondage signaled the end to the vision of our forefathers - and make no mistake, that war had nothing to do with slavery other than using it as a prop, it was all about state's rights.

Some other big switches:  Submitting to the international bankers and creating the privately owned Federal Reserve, the New Deal that did little other than expanding the size and scope of the Federal Government.  Lyndon Johnson's Great Society . . .

But yes, from the standpoint of the general population itself, the lost promises and fallout from the 60's was a huge flipping point, when much of an entire generation rose up to protest wasting tens of thousands of lives for the sake of supporting a corrupt puppet regime and serving the profits of the military industrialist elite.  Unfortunately too many good intentions without viable answers faded away in a haze of marijuana smoke, and the sixties were replaced with the Me generations just as surely as socially relevant songs that were considered anthems for a generation faded into glitz and disco about self-satisfaction.  "I can't get no satisfaction" became "I can't get enough satisfaction".

Dropping out of the evils we perceived too often became dropping out of work and responsibility.  Nowhere is the idea versus the reality more clearly demonstrated than all the failed communes here and in Canada whence the draft dodgers and war protesters fled.  Hard to reconcile laying around getting stoned and a good days labor.  And hard for those who were willing to do the work to support the stoners and slackers who wouldn't.

Of course, the flipping point of the 60's involved much more than just a bunch of hippies and ex-hippies becoming drags on society.  The loss of the nuclear family, the expansion of government welfare into safety nets that became prisons which trapped generations into lives of welfare in crime filled slums and ghettos, the explosion of consumerism and the promise that each generation would be able to have more, bigger and better even as the work ethic became less.

In great part, I blame those in my generation not for dropping out so much as for failing to provide the examples of our fathers and previous generations. Looking back, though times were not always easy, we were spoiled more than we ever realized. The generations which followed, such as mine, bought into the more, bigger and better vision for us and our children.  What too many of us left behind was the example of the work ethic and family values that ebodied the American dream and so did not impart the examples of hard work, moral behavior and discipline that subsequent generations have severly lacked.

DQ