If you had told me while I was in college in 1971 that a few decades later, a US Supreme Court justice was going to be questioned hard on
whether there was too much sex and alcohol at his high school, I would have been petrified that the conservatives had somehow achieved total power, possibly by violence, and were imposing some sort of Puritan standards of a type later fictionalised in
The Handmaid's Tale. I would have contemplated moving to some other country.
I used to hear so often that I couldn't go here or there because it was too risky for a girl, suggestions I always tried to resist. It's appalling to see women embrace this mindset and deliberately play the helpless-little-girl card. Seriously, do they want to be confined for their own safety? Do they think the whole world will be turned into a padded cell for their convenience? I guess that last question is a dumb one, considering the trend in consumer product safety and helicopter-parent syndrome. Yes, people often do very much prefer safety to liberty, just as we have always been warned, and they never fail to be gobsmacked by the tyranny that results.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great observation, it's pretty warped, isn't it? When I was sacking groceries in High School (outside of Boston) I remember the breaking news of the Nixon resignation, and it was something that a lot of my young co-workers were cheering, swept up in the rhetoric of the moment and spurred to excitement for his ouster. It was all the same kind of relentless press battering, except then it was tearing down The System and The Man. And yet, back then, were we to be confronted with something like the smears we are seeing now, we would indeed have concluded that the establishment was behind it, and that it posed an existential threat to all of us. How times change. The libertine 70's produced a lot of free-thinkers, and also a lot of third-rate hackers who thought of themselves that way as they worked their way into the system. But in reality a lot of them are just like their parents, who they despised. The new Puritans.
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