Too Young To Know Better By: Mark W Adams

So lemme get this straight. The loss of 50,000 US soldiers, the specter of the looming draft threatening to force us to join fighting we didn't understand nor believe in, a bigger threat of nuclear war ever-present whether we went to war or not. That is the emotional background of us aging hippies whose formative years were scarred by Watergate and Vietnam -- disillusioning us about what our government is as opposed to what we were told it stood for.

Our smug opposition, movement conservatives now in their 30s or early 40s, don't look back at the Cold War struggles and wars in South East Asia as our definitive foreign policy challenges. They don't recall anything about how Johnson and Nixon deceived us and divided us.

No. They came of age remembering Carter and the Iranian hostages. They don't mind the war or understand our visceral opposition to Bush because they know nothing of wasting lives in senseless wars -- as long as America doesn't get embarrassed again. As long as nobody can get the idea that we're weak, they care less who dies for what -- as long as it's not them.

Maha has more along this line of thought:

Because they’re too young to remember When Things Were Different, they don’t recognize that the way mass media has handled politics for the past thirty or so years is abnormal. What passes for our national political discourse — as presented on radio, television, and much print media — is scripted in right-wing think tanks and media paid for by the likes of Joseph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and more recently by Sun Myung Moon. What looks like “debate” is just puppet theater, presented to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Right.