From 1969 to 1974, I was out of the country, serving first in Viet Nam then in Germany. From the time I returned in 1974, I have been trying to figure out and understand where did the country I left back in 1969 go. This article, more than anything I have ever seen or read before, offers the best explanation of what happened during my 5 year absence and why the country I left to fight for,, disappeared while I was gone.

Our Second Civil War
By Bruce Walker

January 06, 2010

The 1860s marked a period of great trial for our land. A bloody civil war resolved, at least nominally, some important issues. It was the period after Appomattox and after Reconstruction, however, which determined the true impact of our first civil war. The 1960s, which ended forty years ago, was the time of our second trial — our Second Civil War. It is a testament to its ferocity and its reach that the consequences of this internecine war for the soul of America remain undetermined.

Conservatives — those who wanted to conserve the values of America going into the 1960s — stood on one side of this battlefield. These Americans viewed our land as the best candle of hope in a stormy world. They strongly favored equal rights for blacks, despite an Orwellian rewriting of history painting them as racists. The Republican Party, the principle vehicle for conservatives, had a very long and clear record of opposing Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement and segregation of blacks.

—————

The 1960s saw a loosening of corsets (which was simply a question of moderating the equipment of decency) evolve into a long cultural striptease that ended with rabid feminists burning their bras. The abiding faith of Christians and of Jews, which had stabilized families and restrained notions of sin in a healthy check on the direction of culture, began to be portrayed almost always as bigoted ignorance. Defying foundational faith was championed as heroic. God and sin, the left snarled, were false, or worse. Two generations of Americans have grown up in this gulag of godlessness. Now, faith in anything beyond the top bureaucrat or trust in anything above the most decorated sociologists is heresy against militant secularism.

—————

The 1960s saw the prevailing sentiment of America — profound gratitude for the freedom and prosperity bestowed by brave and noble predecessors — transformed by the left into a rude ingratitude, a mocking deconstruction of everything good in America, and an embrace of each imperfection as proof of some capital crime. Conservatives saw America as the place where everyone wanted to be, the one great nation which never had an emigration problem, the refugee country of all oppressed peoples. When GIs fought in Korea or in Vietnam, conservatives saw that the policy mission may have been foolish and the strategies unwise, but the underlying purpose — to preserve freedom — was never in question. The left, by contrast, seemed in the 1960s to adopt the belief that the people of South Korea would actually have been better off if they had been incorporated into the vast concentration camp which is North Korea.

Read the rest at American Thinker