George Rebane
[This is the transcript from my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 28 April 2016.]
Conservatives, and even some libertarians for good measure, are accused of wanting to bring back the America of the early post-war years – the period from, say, 1945 to 1960. When any of the progressive media find someone prominent longing for those bygone days, they are immediately pounced upon and ridiculed as a knuckle dragger who wants the country to return to Jim Crow racism, to abandon the technical advances such as the personal computer, the internet, modern medicines, and most certainly to go back to a time when we ignored our environment.
And there is nothing nuanced about how liberals perceive someone who points out another silly aspect of today’s political correctness. These are stigmatized and accused of longing for what today is labeled as the ‘bad old days’, an epoch we abandoned as we became aware of social injustices to which formerly we were blind, and we realized that equal opportunity and equal outcomes were the measure of each other, and came to understand that all forms of diversity are now the new normal no longer subject to our individual value judgments. But most of all, that western culture and civilization has been and continues to be the source of evil in this world.
That aspects of the Americana of those bygone days might be worth another look never crosses the minds of our progressive neighbors. And most certainly, even if yesterday did have any good parts, these would be so ineradicably bound up with the really bad parts, that separating them out would be futile. How could we ever return to a time when kids played unsupervised on neighborhood streets, took part in unplanned pick-up baseball or basketball games, carried a BB-gun, earned money doing chores for neighbors, built forts and played war, and learned to resolve differences all by themselves? How could we again conceive of forsaken liberties that did not need to be reined in by growing stacks of laws, ordinances, and regulations to keep us on the straight and narrow?
Today we are taught that all conflict resolution must involve the state, that defense of your person or property makes you at least as guilty as your assailant, that your parenting skills are problematic at best, that your children are really wards of the state and only tentatively in your custody, that your property is yours only to the degree that it pleases the state, that owning and operating a business is prima facie evidence of greed and corruption, and that we should strive to build a society in which we can take from each according to their excesses, and redistribute to each according to their need. All that within a framework in which a famous 20th century social engineer observed that to make a delicious omelet, one first had to crack a few eggs.
Today it does not take a genius to see that we are already in the egg cracking phase on our way to a brave new global society. And how could we miss that certain candidates running for office this year have already promised and pointed out the next eggs that will need to be cracked when they get elected. Most certainly those of us longing for the ‘bad old days’ are prime candidates to be whipped into a homogeneous and undifferentiated amalgam that will become the fundamentally transformed omelet of our collective future.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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