I've been thinking about this for a while now, and it isn't really crystallizing too well. So I thought I'd type out some thoughts (I type fast, sometimes it's easier than trying to reason something out in my head) on the subject.

I'm a child of the 70's. I was born in 1960, and while I remember some things from that decade (I even have a vague memory of President Kennedy being shot, better memories of his brother's murder, ML King's assassination, and the moon landing), the things I know about that time come from hindsight reading about the time, from films, from news stories, from talking to people who did grow up in that period.

In my area, people are very conservative. They're sort of knee jerk conservatives, in fact. Much of the time, I believe that they don't have a great grasp of the issues, having gotten them from whatever conservative source they listen to, and they go with it. That said, a lot of them grew up in those tumultuous times. But they don't seem to have the same "feel" to them that you get when you watch a movie set in the 1960's. Maybe it's because a lot of them didn't have the opportunity to go to college; they went into the service instead.

I suppose that service in Viet Nam affects different people differently. I wouldn't know. But maybe it explains their attitudes today being different from what I'd expect of a child of the 60's.

Then I look at today. There are some parallels, especially an unpopular war that can't really be "won" in the classical sense. And I don't know what the economy was doing in the 1960's, but now we have the additional stresses of a down economy. I also don't know what was going on with the middle class in the 1960's, but now the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing.

So why aren't people more ticked? Why are they willing to let things go as they have been? I suppose that there is a lot of anger out there, but it's being misdirected. Having just finished reading DEN OF THIEVES by James B. Stewart, and learning something about the junk bond scandals of the 1980's, I realized that it's quite similar to what happened with the mortgage backed securities mess of the last year or so. The goal of all this stuff seems to me to be to separate more people from their money, and put more of it into the pockets of the already fabulously wealthy. I read something where George Bush, after cutting taxes on the wealthy, was going to extend those cuts further down the line to middle class Americans, but was dissuaded by his vice president. I don't know if there is documentation of this allegation, but I do know that it wouldn't surprise me.

Then I looked at the whole home-school trend. A lot of people feel the need, often based in their religion, to pull their kids out of the public school system and are home-schooling them. The unspoken, and maybe unrealized, reason could be that they (and I don't always mean the parents here) don't want the kids exposed to any type of controversial idea. Sure, they can add and multiply. Sure they know their history, such as it is. Sure, they can use parts of speech correctly in an essay. But are they learning to think? Or just to accept what they're told?

And is this trend aimed at all at quelling the sort of rebellion that our country experienced in the 1960's? A rebellion, I might add, that ended up making us a better place and a stronger country, no matter what the powers that be want us to believe.

It's sort of a scary thought, that "Big Brother" might be influencing such a shift, and even more scary that "Big Brother" doesn't appear to be the government this time.