Wisdom for the Weekend: Hippies -vs- History

The hippie generation taught us to laugh at the parents and grandparents who defeated America's enemies, bought us our first car and paid for our college. The hippies brought us social acceptance of drug use which spawned death and wrecked families; sexual freedom that imprisons human dignity; a sneering condescension for the squirrel that hoards his nuts against a hard winter.

The hippie generation has defied the wisdom of the ages by redefining family, gender, and marriage. They even tried killing off God! How stupid is all of mankind that came before them! We are now suffering the rotten fruits of their pot smoking, sex crazed self-indulgence.

G.K. Chesterton was a great thinker of the 19th and early 20th century. He spoke of the thought that kills all thoughts; and that's what these aging hippies, ensconced in their Hollywood studios, ivory towers of academe, and marbled halls of governance are trying to do: Kill our old fashioned thoughts. Kill our thoughts of loving and serving God, self-reliance, patriotism, morality. His words still apply today:

The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought.

It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"

The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all."

There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.

Don't let them stop your thoughts.