The boomers, the MSM and 1968

From David Ignatius in The Washington Post. This is the perfect conventional wisdom and exactly to which I was speaking a few day ago.
One day in the late 1970s, the writer James Baldwin was explaining to an Arab friend that he wanted to go back to America after many years as an expatriate in France. "America has found a formula to deal with the demon of race," Baldwin told Syrian businessman Raja Sidawi, who had a house near him in St. Paul de Vence. In France and the rest of Europe, people pretended that the race problem didn't exist, Baldwin said, but "someday it will explode."

..."The Fire Next Time" was the title Baldwin gave to his prophetic 1963 book about race. Sure enough, the fire came. Americans of my generation remember the riots in Watts and Newark, and the explosion of rage in Washington after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It was a trial by fire, and it changed America. [bold mine] Racist politicians such as George Wallace tried to sow more hatred, but a consensus emerged that America needed to provide real opportunities for the enraged young blacks who were throwing the molotov cocktails. The country began a period of court-ordered affirmative action that was acutely painful for blacks and whites but changed how America looks and feels.

They see everything through the lens of 1968 and it distorts everything they see. It is almost as if the beginning and end of time belongs to their generation and their generation alone.

I once heard a boomer saying that her generation's greatist accomplishment was ending the Vietnam War. I was appalled. They didn't end the Vietnam War, they simply force the government to withdraw from it and allowed the North Vietnamese to conquer South Vietman. Then, genicide began. As Richard Brookhiser is fond of saying, "lose a war, gain a restaurant".