The Way We Are, The Way They Were

Revere, guest posting at Majikthise, provides a thought-provoking framework in which to compare and contrast the resistance of the baby boomer generation during the sixties with the current ideological schism between right and left.

[T]he split is not generational as it was then. The draft had something to do with that, but not everything. There was a cultural discontinuity that occurred in the 1960s that excluded the older generation. Today our children are not so very different than we are. That's not where the split is now. The people who are different are the religious right. On November 3 half the country woke up to find the other half of the country not only strangers, in some deep and unsettling way, but also threatening. Threatening to cultural moorings.

He concludes with this worrisome observation:

[U]nlike the parents of the 60s generation, since our split is not generational, we won't just die out. The split will reproduce itself in our children and the other side's children. That is where the battleground will be. Focus on the Family, with its preoccupation with religious (i.e., ideological) education, values imparted in the home and public education signals where the struggle will take place. That's the meaning of the gay marriage debate, evolution, religion in the schools. It is a struggle about reproducing ideologies in the next generation.

The discussion doesn't get significantly more probing than these excerpts, but even so it comprises a series of really obvious, yet relatively unremarked (in my limited experience, anyway), observations. Read the whole thing.