The Bridge To The 21st Century - Softcover

It was during the 1960s that a large number of American's entered into an unwritten agreement to experiment with the social and cultural structure of the nation. The root causes of this need to experiment included the residual effects of World War II and the resulting changing demographics, technology, and the other underpinnings of society. In the 15 or 20 year period from 1960 to say, 1979 a huge disconnect from America's heritage occurred . The Baby Boomers were reassessing the past. But they were doing so from a perspective very different from previous generations. The burgeoning youth of America who became known as the baby boomers had begun to dismantle the old sails and compasses that had guided and propelled the ship of state. Their resulting energy became a gale force of political and cultural winds that blew that same ship into uncharted waters. All this occurred during the various stages of the black civil rights movement as well as our ill-defined and apparently unreachable goals in the Vietnam War.

Suddenly change became a priority. A coalition of different ages, political ideologies and ethnicities formed a New America. As New America began to take root, this new force wanted to be rid of much of our heritage, both good and bad: abstention and restraint as well as intolerance and hypocrisy; moral austerity as well as harsh judgementalism. But, ironically enough, much of New America adopted the very worst of that heritage. Like the Puritans of old, New America developed a process more akin to a witch hunt to uncover our sins, both real and imagined. Part of Old America's sin was the concept of personal responsibility. One tool was to purge us of the outdated idea of sin as set forth in our Judeo/Christian heritage. In the beginning, this gave a moral high ground for their version of rewriting the script of the American Century. Hand in hand and overlapping in time frames was their intolerance with being conscripted into the military to fight a war in which they did not believe we belonged. Old America, broken by a sense of guilt, quietly acquiesced to the new paradigm.

For the next forty years, America has been at war with itself. One group stayed, for the most part, loyal to the standards, ideals, morals, and principles of Old America. New America began to reinterpret the Bill of Rights; for instance the unwritten alteration to the First Amendment goes something like this.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. The government will work to replace the concept of "Freedom Of Religion" with the concept, "Freedom From Religion," and will, in fact, discourage religious practices especially in school-aged people. There will be no abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of television, radio, Internet, motion pictures, or any other media outlet. There will be no limitations on the use of graphic sex and gratuitous violence in humor, print, movies, TV, art, and any other medium as long as such activity makes money or particularly if it can be targeted to young people so that they may begin, early, to understand that baseness in humanity does exist, and if they feel so inclined to exhibit such, they will not feel much guilt because they know that society understands and apparently is sympathetic to these feelings. You have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, real or imagined. The important thing is to work the system with money and political threats and, if that does not work, resort to violence and riots.

This background provides the political and social environment which helped elect Bill Clinton twice to the presidency and led America into the strange presidential election of 2000. The truth is that a large segment of the American people have allowed themselves to be manipulated to the point of distraction and disorientation. We have become numb as well as dumb. Whether it is the politicians and media on the East Coast or Hollywood on the West Coast, the manipulation is constant to the point that we increasingly find it difficult to remember what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false, what is noble and what is ignoble.

As we stood on the brink of the 20th Century an insightful lady poet named Ella Wheeler Wilcox cautioned us - this is what she wrote:
One ship sails east and another sails west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the sea
As we voyage along through life,
‘Tis the set of the soul
that decides it's goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

We must remember that America acted as a firewall for the rest of the world during the 20th Century. It was America that carried the brunt of the burden to deflect totalitarian ideologies such as communism and fascism from dominating the globe; and what they did destroy we were instrumental in rebuilding.

Times are going to be very trying during these next 100 years. For America to weather the storm we are going to have to repair our soul sails. We have an important job here as citizens in this land called America. Whatever, the source of the strife in the future, unless we have set our national soul on proper course, our next voyage through life may be determined by the gales of strife and we may not like it.