Had

Here's another backgrounder related to the Graduate one. Again, this is not about 1968 per se, but then again, it is...

From Sara Robinson (an American-expat in Canada, essentially a Canadian) in "Born-Again Americans and That Old-Time (Civil) Religion" on http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/born-again-americans-and-old-time-civil-religion


[Bellah [sociologist Robert Bellah, probably in his book The Broken Covenant] writes: “Once in each of the last three centuries America has faced a time of trial, a time of testing so severe that...the existence of our nation has been called in question...the spiritual glue that had bound the nation together in previous years had simply collapsed."

For the current cycle, the glue started coming loose during the 1960s -- and the resulting collapse was the defining event of the decade. The Boomers, who had been raised deep in the cradle of postwar patriotism and inculcated early with the themes of American greatness and exceptionalism, were brought up short by some brutal realities almost as soon as they reached adulthood. Between the lies that fed the Vietnam War and the intractable injustice evident in the civil rights battles being fought at home, they confronted the sickening realization that the institutions they'd been taught to trust were deeply corrupt, and that the civil religion was being used to justify actions that ran completely contrary to the high ideals they'd been told their country stood for.

They'd been had -- by their parents, by their teachers, and by every single institution in society. Their response: "Don't trust anyone over 30." Don't trust any institutions run by them -- schools, churches, governments, professions, any of it. And especially: Don't trust the civil religion, which is nothing more than a pack of establishment lies.]