I was there, chin-deep in the whole thing.

I lived the facts.

I did the civil rights thing in 67 and 68. That was several years after the famous Freedom Summer and after anybody got killed doing it–which is nice to know now although we weren’t all that sure then.

The Civil Rights movement and its participants got enormous, unprecedented moral credibility, much of which they promoted themselves. Unlike the Greatest Generation, or the current soldiers, they/we never said, “Just doing my job.”

IMO, the civil rights community fit reasonably well into the antiwar movement, although there were actually very few genuine civil rights activists, other than those who taught themselves to chord “We Shall Overcome” on a cheap fourstring and thought themselves very fine folk.

The antiwar movement got all the civil rights movement’s credit, although they deserved very little, if at all.

Point is, there are very many people ranging from fifty, say, to maybe sixty-five whose formative years were taken up with the self-absorption of being one of the Anointed (see Vision of The Anointed).

It’s hard to overcome the Big Idea of your late adolescence, and being antiwar in the sense that the US is always wrong and leftist murderers always right was the Big Idea of the time.

Very many of those folks are not antiwar as a policy today. They are antiwar as a permanent part of their personality. Which, IMO, is why they are so irrational. And why they lie. Reality is not important, except as a serious inconvenience. They remain convinced in their heart of hearts that they remain the virtuous, embattled minority, and to think otherwise based on crap like facts is simply impossible for them to contemplate.
And to have a son who differs….

Pink emotions replace grey logic and the rhetoric descends into childish profanity, name calling and finger pointing. The paranoid personality blames everyone else for their own singular dysfunction.

The rants we’ve seen on this page aptly demonstrate the divide between posters with honest questions and discussions and those who’se sole contribution is to try and throw sand into the machinery in a childish display of anti-authoritarian bravado. Sound and fury, signifying nothing. Deserving nothing.

Life must be joyless and bitter for humorless folks such as these. No wonder their rants are filled with such bile. I bite my thumb. -cp

What “false positive” are you referring to? Im not seeing it.

Just curious.
harry | 11.06.06 – 1:38 pm | #

Oh gee, could it be both?

Are you 12? You claim this isn’t a strawman but you keep repeating the false positive? Grow up.

Now that is naive.

Except neo, of course. She gets a pass cos I said so.