PURELY POLITICAL
By James Buckley
Anyone who has a stock portfolio can be thankful that 2022 has been put to bed, or more likely, thrown out with the garbage.
It’s over. One of the least productive and most depressing years of the past 50 years is finished. Kaput.
So let’s be thankful.
Thankful that baby boomers, born just after World War II, who had it better than probably any generation, ever, are now on their way out.
Thank goodness.
The good times for them began with returning World War II GIs — young, mostly men, in their uniforms, stuffed with experiences most would never speak about again. Women too, the WACS and the WAVES, who served behind the lines had an inkling of the kind of freedom their daughters and granddaughters would one day experience.
Most of the returning soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen married their hometown, high-school or college sweethearts and got on with having babies and raising families.
Though it was often a bumpy ride, there was a lot of fun along the way.
A list of those “bumps,” and not particularly in chronological order, but maybe in order of their impact, would include: the fear of atomic and then nuclear annihilation that permeated the boomers’ early school days; many dads had to go back in uniform a few short years after coming home from Europe or the Pacific; they were sent to Korea to fight again. Communism was on the march and the Soviets had absorbed Eastern Europe. The Free World (née the United States of America and its allies) had to stop them, first in West Berlin with an airlift, then at the 38th parallel north in Korea, and then again in Vietnam.
If anyone is searching for what made boomers who they became, the answer is Vietnam.
That was them.
There were other bumps, including the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Kent State (National Guard troops firing on protesting students, killing four of them), and myriad lesser incidents such as riots in Detroit and Los Angeles in the mid ‘60s, mayhem in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, followed by the years-long Watergate unraveling and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
If Vietnam defines the boomer generation, the Woodstock Music Festival (held on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y. (I was there along with 400,000 or so other mostly teenagers and 20-somethings) completes the picture.
The years between the end of World War II in September 1945 and the festival in Woodstock in August 1969 brought us to where we are today.
First, there was Dr. Benjamin Spock, a noted pediatrician who advised parents not to punish children for being children in his best-selling “Baby and Child Care.” More than 500,000 copies of the hard-bound best seller were sold in the first six months of its printing in 1947. Little did most mothers and fathers of the day know that Dr. Spock (who today is described as a “left-wing political activist”) was a leader of the movement that has produced transgender and sexual grooming at the elementary school level by drag queens, “teachers” and other invited guests, along with a plethora of bizarre “learning” experiences that have nothing to do with reading, writing or arithmetic.
Another doctor who strongly influenced the baby boomer generation was Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whose “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (released in 1948) moved the left-wing agenda considerably along. This former entomologist became a sexologist whose “research” proved flimsy at best. Turns out, he was something of a pedophile.
But, enough about the medical profession, after all, we have Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The halcyon days of the baby boomers were the 1950s, before all that sex stuff became the center of their universe. Boomers had more toys than they could ever play with, and had part-time jobs at soda shops, drug stores, supermarkets and gas stations that translated into cash. That made this age group the most sought-after demographic for the recording industry (records and record players), the car industry (a 1957 Chevy convertible was every boy’s and girl’s dream), the clothing industry, and virtually every other business.
The draft and a trip to Vietnam put an end to what had been for most an idyllic childhood. But they have left a trail of destruction behind.
The good news is that within the next 10 years, boomers will no longer control anything. They’ll be gone. The ruin they’ve wrought (starting with the 31 trillion-dollar U.S. debt) will take another generation or two to clean up. The psychological damage done to proceeding generations, however, may never be put right.
But just as bull markets always burst up out of even the worst bear markets, all this gender-changing, pre-adolescent grooming, and Woke Equity! Diversity! Inclusion! garbage that came to a head in 2022 will one day be thrown out with the trash.
Wishing you a Healthy and Happy 2023!
James Buckley is a longtime Montecito resident. He welcomes questions or comments at jimb@substack.com. Readers are invited to visit jimb.substack.com, where Jim’s Journals are on file. He also invites people to subscribe to Jim’s Journal.
