The Age of Aquarius

Just when I was old enough to start doubting my parents' wisdom, it was 1966 and everthing was exploding my way. Free Speech in Berkeley, Black Panthers in Oakland, Timothy Leary in Wonderland, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and the Grateful Dead in the Park.

Button-down attitudes were breaking down. Or, rather, the young, the hedonistic and the horny were battering them down. Freedom was in the air. Sex was good clean fun. Dope was harmless. Suits were for suckers. Rules were made to be broken.

It was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

We took the Civil Rights Movement seriously. And tried to extend its credibility to every libertine notion in our hormone-drenched brains. And we did a fair to middling job of bullying the rest of the country into agreeing with us.

The Radicals shouted about freedom. We assumed they meant the kind we had in mind: You didn't have to actually attend classes, but your parents still had to pay your tuition; that a Buddhist chant you didn't understand was a better spiritual guide than the Lord's Prayer which you did; that sex, whether in an alley doorway or a VW bus, even if you were a little too wasted to actually consent, was a "Celebration of Life"; that "Do Your Own Thing" was a literal translation of the Bill of Rights; that modesty, courtesy, tradition and good manners were tools of the oppressor to keep people down.

Freedom was our battle-cry. And when we ran out of money, we called home.

As I grew up and began to accept adult responsibilities, I still heard the siren song of those young Radicals...and remembered the joy of youth and freedom.

Then a strange thing happened. When I reached the age of most of the politicians, laws began to multiply to the point that things I had taken for granted all my life were suddenly illegal. I found I was subject to intrusive laws that would have been intolerable to my parents' generation. It started with seatbelt laws, helmet laws and anti-smoking laws. Now, we free-spirits of the 60's who chanted "Power to the People" find ourselves with less personal freedom than the generation we mocked, outraged and rebelled against.

When I looked for the culprit, I expected to find the evil Conservative Republicans to blame—those heartless blackguards the Radicals had warned us against in our formative years. But it was the "Liberals", the socially acceptable face of the Radical-Left that were responsible. The Nanny-State was born, not of the evil Conservatives who, we had been told, lusted to control our lives from birth to bedroom to heaven, but by the very Radicals who had preached freedom, and whom we had so badly misunderstood.

For years after this troubling discovery I thought they had broken trust. I thought they had sold-out. I thought they had become staid and hide-bound and too powerful to remember the magic, transforming words of freedom they had preached as young idealists.

It took 9/11 to finally pry my eyes open to see that they hadn't changed at all. This was always their agenda. They had preached freedom...but only from the BAD tyrants...not from themselves. They were banana-republic revolutionaries. They didn't want liberty for the people, they wanted power for themselves. And that power is raw and ugly in their hands. They've created more laws, more crimes and more criminals than Herbert Hoover ever dreamed of. They've stolen more money, confiscated more property and taxed more heavily than any rogue English King ever dared.

And on 9/11, they blamed America. And the scales fell from my eyes.

(Unfortunately you can't just shoot the bastards.)