What caused all this to change? There were many factors of course but the single biggest one was the Viet Nam War where my generation (more young men died of my age born in 1948 than any other in this war.) So, people of my generation didn't ever see the point of the Viet Nam War ever (except maybe in the abstract). There was no logical reason for the U.S. to be in this war at all (except) in regard to the spread of Communism (which is something people believed was a real problem). However, today communism in some ways doesn't exist really anywhere and it has been replaced with Totalitarian Dictatorships instead. So, the threat now is more Fascism where minorities oppress the majorities on earth and enslave them.
However, the point of this article is that people didn't tend to think for themselves as much as now. How did this change begin? At first school including college was stuffing stuff down all our throats with students not having the right to question what they were taught at all.
However, at UC Berkeley the Free Speech Movement began which began students being allowed to be respected for the first time as having their own points of view. This might seem impossible from today's perspective but this actually was the way it was. You could not have your own opinion as a student. As a professor then you could have any opinion from being a socialist or communist to being a fascist or communist as a teacher but students didn't have any say about any of this until it began in Free Speech movement of the 1960s.
This moved like wildfire once it began across all public colleges and universities and students began to have the right to "Question Authority" more. This is where all this began to change with student protests and eventually student riots because of the Viet Nam War and their friends from high school dying every day in Viet Nam. There less studious friends being drafted and sent to Viet Nam and dying within a day or two or a week when most of these boys didn't know more than racing cars or surfing so they were sheep to the slaughter of this war and many didn't survive the first few weeks there. They were just too naive and from a country where they didn't have to fight every day to survive like they do in many other countries. So, killing people was very unnatural for our generation even though our father's and their relatives died a lot in World war II which messed everyone up too worldwide.
So, the Viet Nam War was the first time the public felt betrayed by our government and confidence in Government dropped from about 75% trust during this time to around 11% trust in the government ever since.
This is one of the many reasons why our governmental system is so fragile now because we were betrayed from the Assassination of Kennedy and his brother and Martin Luther King on. So, people just don't trust anyone in government ever since. This is why democracy is so fragile here in the U.S. right now.
The old system was not based upon enlightened thought but rather than unflinching loyalty which as we have seen causes all sorts of problems. When you have a more enlightened electorate different things happen. And we are in the middle of one of these dynamic changes now. And hopefully democracy can be maintained and not lost in the next year because of this.
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