A Decade of Defeat

My father was part of the Greatest Generation. You know who they were. They were the generation that beat the Depression and saved the world in World War II. This generation believed they were destined to do great things. They were convinced that they could change the world for the better, and they believed that they had a responsibility to fight the spread of communism throughout the world. They were determined to make life easier for their kids.

My older brother is a Baby Boomer. My brother is a Vietnam veteran. However, he isn’t the face of the Baby Boom generation. The face of the Vietnam generation is the protester. Don’t let them fool you. They weren’t protesting merely the Vietnam War. They were protesting against the United States. They opposed US corporate power. They opposed US military power. They opposed US political power. They opposed the US Establishment. There is one other thing you must not let them fool you about. They were for a communist society. They didn’t necessarily support Stalinism, although plenty of them did. They didn’t necessarily support Maoism, but if you searched their pockets, you would have found many carrying Little Red Books.

The protester generation supported a utopian Marxist notion proclaimed by radical professors and endorsed by singers such as John Lennon, whose “Imagine” states with extreme clarity what these people desired. No nations, no possessions, no religions. They convinced themselves that if this collectivist utopia could be reached, then all war would cease.

They deluded themselves in believing that if we stopped challenging communism, then those nations would stop feeling threatened and become more open and we could join them in a “brotherhood of man”. Jane Fonda said in 1970, that we should "hope" and "pray" to become communist.

There was no place for people like my brother in that generation. Not only was he a Vietnam veteran, he ended up making the military a career. That made him an impediment to the goals of these people. Returning Vietnam veterans were ostracized unless they damned the United States and became antiwar protesters themselves. The news media, always leaning to the left, became mesmerized by this movement. In the end, they destroyed the morale of a nation. We never lost Vietnam on the battlefield. We lost it at home. As a result of the protester generation, the United States questioned its national morality, its role in the world, and evenwhether it was worthy to survive.

This is where my generation comes in. I was born in 1962. I grew up in the 1970s. We had politicians telling us that Americans expected too much. We were told that we needed to accept the existence of the Soviet Union as a fact of life and that we should learn how to get along with them, even if we had to change our policies to do so. We were told that traditional morality was repressive and oppressive. We were made to question the concept of national pride. By the end of the decade of the 1970s, we were told that we deserved to have our embassy personnel taken hostage in Tehran.

It got so bad that in 1980, as a senior in high school, I was told by an Army recruiter to stay away from the Army and go to college. Why? Because I had scored too high on my aptitude test. That was an Army recruiter telling me that. Jimmy Carter was right about one thing during his presidency. We were suffering from a national malaise. The protester generation and its left wing comrades in the Democrat party were the cause of it. Thank God for Ronald Reagan and the election of 1980.

Now again we are at war, in the middle of a long struggle against an enemy just as evil as communism. Into this circumstance steps one of the poster children for the protester generation. John Kerry who after serving in the US Navy, became one of the best diplomats and propagandists the North Vietnamese government had, wants to be our President. The man who compared our military to Genghis Khan, wants to be commander in chief of that military.

John Kerry and those who thought like him were responsible for a decade of defeat once before. Do we want a repeat of that? I know I don’t.