We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:
First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood.
We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that preserved our sexual and other innocence, in schools that generally taught us well, and we were allowed childhood play from boy-girl play to rough and tumble boy-boy play to monkey bars and ringalievio. Our generation has deprived you of all these things. And while we were aware of the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, few of us believed that we were threatened with death anywhere near the amount we have scared you about death from secondhand smoke, global warming and heterosexual AIDS, to mention just a few of the exaggerated death scares we have inflicted on you.
Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended up robbing you of childhood.
One was, "Never trust anyone over 30." Our infantile attitude toward adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the greatest needs in your life — adults. That in turn deprived you of something as important as love — parental and other adult authority. With little parental authority, you were left with little personal security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority figures, from teachers to police.
The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed to you was, "Make love, not war." Our parents had liberated the world from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan — solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics as "Give peace a chance," as if that deals in any way with the world’s most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not war. And we succeeded.
We made you anti-war and almost completely sexualized your lives. We told you that having sex was terrific or at least to be expected, even in early teens, and that your only concerns should be avoiding sexually transmitted diseases and getting pregnant. And if you did get pregnant, we made sure that you could extinguish the life you were carrying as effortlessly and guiltlessly as possible.
We started teaching you about sexuality and homosexuality in early grade school and we taught you how to put condoms on bananas. It is true that we did not grow up learning about these things at such young ages — certainly our schools never taught us about these things — but we chalked that up to the preposterous, if not reactionary, values of the 1950s and early 1960s. We had contempt for our parents believing that "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" and "Superman" — with the show’s motto of "truth, justice, and the American way" — were good things for young people to be exposed to. So we replaced these shows with MTV’s mind-numbing parade of three-second images and sex-drenched shows for teenagers. Sorry….
Dennis talks to Shelby Steele, Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.
Washington Post says don’t draw wrong lesson on Iran nukes. They see real danger. If we think that Iran is now a nuclear pussycat, we’re going to make a very big mistake.
Light one less candle for Hanukkah. Wacky. But what do you expect from the Greens?
Prager will be in San Francisco Sunday. Dennis will be a panelist for the Jewish Policy Center‘s policy forum on American Foreign Policy in the Middle East which will take place in San Francisco at Congregation Emanu-El on December 9 at 7:00 pm. To RSVP, please e-mail or call (800) 748-3992.
Anne Applebaum points out a few of the absurdities in the Western reaction. Read what the Archibishop of Canterbury had to say about it.
There’s a new section on Prager’s site called "Prager Meet Ups." Why not just call it "Prager Hook-Ups"? This is no time for moral niceties. The survival of the Jewish people is at stake.
When I went to a Dennis Prager singles event in 2002, I met a lovely Costa Rican shiksa. Thank you, Dennis!
When I got home that night, I called her up and invited her to dinner. She said she was staying with her mother a long way away and as she worked in Century City, could she stay the night?
I gulped.
Hearing my hesitancy, she apologized for being forward.
Collecting my breath, I said there was no need to apologize. That I had a small place but she was welcome to share it.
So she comes over and she’s dressed to kill. There’s a major V in her top.
I say the shma and take her to a nice kosher dinner.
As we walk home, we hold hands.
Back in the hovel, I offer her a back massage.
Her response? "Should I take off my clothes?"
Holy cow.
She offered her honor. I honored her offer. And all night I was on her and off her.
The next morning I made her one of my hideous soy milk fruit smoothies and sent her to work.
We were scheduled to meet for lunch. I show up in mismatched and ratty black shorts and black t-shirt. Until this point, she’d only seen me dressed to the nines.
She gets upset. She had wanted to show me off to her co-workers.
We have an awkward lunch. She asks me if Lukeford.com is mine. I say no, because it wasn’t. I don’t explain that I sold the domain a year before.
She borrows a book from me — DISH by Jeanette Walls.
I never hear from her again. She never returns the book.
Oh well, I never returned her honor.
