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Thursday, December 12, 2002
Tacitus gives a correct argument for what's wrong with Trent Lott, dragging in Bob Herbert. He says(link via Instapundit):One must feel sorrow for his predicament, and pity at his impasse. For if Trent Lott represents a dying past, so too does Bob Herbert. They grapple, two old men and their old ideologies, dragging one another down into history and secretly (or not so secretly) hating those who will not join in their struggle. And America, the country they both earnestly want to save from itself, increasingly ignores them and, in its younger generation, increasingly does what it should have done all along about race: shrug, miscegenate, and not care. I've been saying this all along: the majority of the social problems that we have today are reinforced by the generation gap. Even self-described non-racists of the older generation often tend to be -- I'm not claiming this isn't the case, but there's a serious difference between people who grew up passively acknowledging segregation and those who grew up after affirmative action had already been in place; the older generation is overwhelmingly consumed by the former, and the younger generation is entirely consumed by the latter. This makes rather dubious the contemporary demands that old racists apologize when they make racist statements or somesuch...anyone who grew up in a segregated world and didn't think it was wrong and try to do something about it is on majorly questionable ground in the first place. Every college kid who decided to stay on campus and sleep one weekend instead of taking a bus to join in protests or voter-registration drives has an internal responsibility to answer for their action/inaction, but they'll never be called on it. Everyone made such a big deal about how Joe Lieberman went to Mississippi(I think so -- he went somewhere, and that's the point), and rightly so, but the bigger story should be that there are a bunch of boomers who were the same age who did nothing and are considered progressives. And then there are those who sided with segregation -- actively or inactively -- who can still be considered moderates. Boomers, for this reason and others, are a major problem for our generation to deal with. I don't think it's fair or honest to judge them by their generational standards -- they shouldn't get a pass just because they were part of a larger generation that on the whole didn't do the right thing.
Steven I. Weiss 8:48:00 AM
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