“Ah, But We Were So Much Older Then”: The Betrayal of a Generation
By someone who remembers
I was born in the 1950s, grew up in the 60s and 70s, and now, as I watch my generation stumble blindly into its twilight, I’m left asking myself: what the hell happened?
We were the ones who marched. Who flipped off the draft board and kissed our lovers under tear gas skies. We read Ginsberg, howled with Kerouac, tuned into Dylan like he was Moses with a harmonica. We said no to Vietnam, no to segregation, no to the lies our parents swallowed with their Jell-O molds and Cold War paranoia. We were, at least in our minds, the last moral insurgency this country ever produced. And now? Now we’re the ones wagging fingers, shouting on cable news, red-hatting ourselves into oblivion, terrified of drag queens and vaccine mandates, mouthing Fox-fed clichés about “traditional values” as if we were raised in Eisenhower’s golf bag instead of Haight-Ashbury.
It’s appalling. It’s shameful. And, worst of all, it’s cowardly.
If this blog moved you, spread the word, leave a comment, and wear it to make a statement.
Let’s not pretend this happened by accident. No, it was a steady erosion. The long march—not through the institutions, but into them. The hippie became the hedge fund manager. The protestor became the PTA president. The dropout turned into the CEO who now tells young people to “suck it up” and buy a house with wages that haven’t moved in 40 years.
This was not a cultural evolution. It was moral embezzlement.
Psychologically, it makes sense, of course. Age breeds caution, and caution calcifies into fear. When you’ve built a comfortable life, you begin to see threats where you once saw causes. You start defending the systems you once sought to dismantle because—surprise, surprise—you’re now the one benefiting from them. You start believing your own mythology, mistaking comfort for virtue, mistaking memory for legacy. You become the very bourgeois you once swore you’d never become.
But still—must the betrayal be so complete?
The irony would be comical if it weren’t so grotesque. These same people who once got high and read Siddhartha are now clutching their pearls about immigrants “changing our culture.” These same people who burned draft cards are now foaming at the mouth about NFL players kneeling during the anthem. These same people who screamed “make love not war” are now cheering on drone strikes, surveillance states, and strongmen who wouldn’t know compassion if it kicked them in the teeth.
And they do it all while still playing Dylan in the background, as if the soundtrack alone excuses the rot in their convictions.
If this blog moved you, spread the word, leave a comment, and wear it to make a statement.
Let’s look again at My Back Pages, one of Dylan’s most underestimated masterpieces—because it is not a tribute to idealism but a eulogy for its collapse. Each verse is a self-indictment: youthful certainties replaced by disillusionment, moral posturing exposed as naivete. Dylan, at his most honest, admitted the contradiction: “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.” He recognized that certainty is often the domain of the foolish, and wisdom begins only when we admit we don’t know as much as we thought.
But here’s the difference: Dylan grew in that realization. My generation regressed. We haven’t matured into humility—we’ve hardened into hypocrisy.
So what now? Must we all sink into our La-Z-Boys of senile authoritarianism, shouting at clouds and clinging to a past we ourselves abandoned?
No. That would be the final failure.
We still have breath. We still have voices. And we still owe something—not to nostalgia, but to history. We owe it to those who died in Southeast Asian jungles and on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We owe it to the artists who opened our minds, the lovers who opened our hearts, the teachers who taught us that freedom means something more than tax breaks and Facebook rants.
If there’s any youth left in us, let it not be in Botox or Spotify playlists but in a return to the courage we once had—the courage to be compassionate, to admit error, to stand up once again and say no.
No to cruelty disguised as strength.
No to ignorance disguised as patriotism.
No to fear disguised as “traditional values.”
Our generation loved to say, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” Well, take a hard look around, my friend. Which part are you now?
The truth is this: You’re never too old to remember who you are. But you’re damn near too old to keep pretending you didn’t sell it off for a stock portfolio and an HOA.
So, to those who still remember: It’s time to stop reminiscing—and start resisting again.
If this blog moved you, spread the word, leave a comment, and wear it to make a statement.
Further Reading: From Protest to Compliance
- The Gaslighting of the Millennial Generation, Caitlin Fisher — A witty and insightful take on how an entire generation was raised to believe in the American Dream—only to be blamed when it didn’t materialize. https://civilheresy.com/gaslighting millennials
- A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, Bruce Cannon Gibney– A searing indictment of the policy and cultural shifts that abandoned the common good. https://civilheresy.com/generation of sociopaths
