Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, where do the children of the 1960s generation stand in the judgment of history? Oh, the judgment of God for that matter as well. We will be judged as generations as well as individuals.

Well, I submit to you that my generation, and I'm talking about my generation, as the who would say, from the 1960s, talking about my generation. Oh, the generation of the 60s, the baby boomers, has shaped and determined so much of American history that what we see happening before our eyes today has been determined in some part by it. If you look out upon the political landscape today, the cultural landscape today, for example, and maybe you scratch your head and you ask, how can this be? How can radical socialism overtake America like it has? How can our constitution be forgotten so easily in the last few decades?

Well, what many people do not realize is that this process began in earnest back in my day. That is, back in the 1960s. They were days of revolution and not without cause. We came very close to complete chaos and a complete meltdown in America. Marxist socialism was alive and well in America for generations before the 1960s.

And I just put forward men like Eugene V. Debs, who led the union movement and the socialist party ticket for years in the first quarter of the 20th century, but never made much headway with the American public. And in the 1950s, you may remember Alger Hiss was a communist found in the Eisenhower administration. And Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were communist traitors executed for betraying nuclear secrets to the communists in the Soviet Union. And throughout this period, Americans saw communism for what it was. That is an atheistic, fanatical ideology that opposed everything for which America stood.

But it was not until the onset of the 1960s and its radical politics that socialism began to take serious foothold in American life to the destruction of that way of life, I might add. And it was my generation that put it into warp drive on its way to driving America over cliff communism. What made us uniquely vulnerable? What is it, I ask you, that made us uniquely vulnerable to the siren song of socialism? Why have we, the 60s generation, the me generation, spent the better part of our lifetimes bringing about from within the system, what generations of violent outsiders could never accomplish?

Well, let me first review briefly the forces that shaped us, that shaped me, made the 60s generation, the me generation, so vulnerable. Number one, four things. Number one, peace and prosperity spoiled us. Yes, peace and prosperity spoiled us. We're spoiled brats.

No generation experienced the wealth and the sense of security for the future that my generation experienced. After World War II, America sat at the top of the heap of nations. We had emerged from World War II as undisputed victors with a great industrial machine that now shifted from producing war material to peacetime consumer products. Soap, cars, nylons, records, food, airplanes, barbecue grills, little boxy homes in the suburbs in the leisure time in which to enjoy it all began to flourish all over America.

There was a sense that self-gratification and self-fulfillment with all the amenities that accompany it were the natural state of man. And it would always be the condition of the American people. Well, that helped to shape us. Number two, guilt and self-loathing fueled us. Yes, this is a generation of guilt and self-loathing as so many liberals are.

With my generation, kids with privilege and wealth were wracked with feelings of guilt over their place and their position to which they were born and did not earn. Instead of improving and growing what they had that all might benefit, Americans of my generation felt they had to redistribute what they had to those less fortunate. You know this theme, don't you? The redistribution of wealth. It's a socialist principle.

A direct result of this attitude was the great society programs of Lyndon Johnson, for example, and all of the welfare culture that flowed from it for generations. Number three, the third force that helped to shape me, helped to shape my generation, the me generation, baby boomers. Number three, apocalyptic fear of doom paralyzed us. We were the first generation to live under the shadow of a mushroom cloud, the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb. For the first time in recorded history, mankind had the capacity to destroy itself and all remaining life several times over with nuclear weapons.

The United States of America had begun this potential by dropping atomic bombs upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. Well, that was part of the guilt and self-loathing as well. And at the time, it seemed perfectly possible that utter obliteration of mankind could happen at any moment. Russia and America were engaged in a nuclear arms race to see who could out destroy the other. Oh, uh, the fourth thing that helped to shape in general, me and my generation, the baby boomer generation, pride and self-centeredness consumed us.

Yes. We thought we were the apex of humanity, the absolute culmination of human evolution and progress. No one was smarter than us. No one was wealthier and more privileged than us. And no one was better equipped to change the world for the better than us.

Oh, what pride, what hubris. Therefore, the world was all about us. This is precisely why we were called the me generation. All for me, all for us. I'm talking about my generation.

We were so proud of who we were and what we could achieve. Was there racial discrimination? We will end it. Was there poverty in the world? We will redistribute the wealth from the greedy rich to the needy poor.

Was there war upon the earth? We will end it and bring universal peace. Was government for the privileged few and the rapacious corporations? Well, we will bring revolution and democracy and make government the people's government. Well, I submit to you, it's time to call my generation, the me generation, the baby boomers to account.

Have we done this? Have we done what we said we would do? Oh boy. Peace, peace. During the Vietnam War, we said, but there was no peace.

In fact, it can be argued that the world still stands upon a precipice of greater war and genocide than ever, precisely because instead of standing firmly in strength, as our founders insisted, we are laying down our arms, making ourselves vulnerable to the predators of the world. Well, if you're old enough to remember these turbulent days of the 1960s, you may remember vaguely or maybe clearly the petulant, childish rants of my generation as they looked out upon their world and judged it for being far less than the perfection with which they had been born. And we swore that we would make it better.

On the one hand, we must know how hopelessly idealistic we were in thinking we could perfect the world on our command. On the other hand, we must also know how ungrateful we were as well towards our heritage and towards our constitution that had given us what we had. Like Obama, we thought it was obsolete, the constitution. Those of you too young to remember those days, having been born perhaps to another generation, you may wonder how we arrived at such a past. Why there's so much of a disconnect between what our founding fathers intended and what has happened to us in these last 40 to 50 years.

Well, it's been that long. It's hard to think, but it has been that long. But know this, every generation does something with a baton of heritage that is handed to it. Those of the X generation and subsequent generations know this. Every generation does something with a baton of heritage handed to it.

That generation either advances it further and faster towards the finish line or else slows and sabotages the race to victory. Which do you think characterizes the baby boom generation, my generation, the me generation? When compared to the principles of our founding fathers, we must judge the children of the 1960s as failures. We not only slowed and sabotaged the race to victory, but it can be argued that we conspired to throw the race all together. It is my contention that no generation of American children so blatantly and self-consciously plan to destroy the America founded by men like Washington and Jefferson than us.

In philosophy, our founding fathers studied men like John Locke and Montesquieu. My generation read the philosophers of despair like Nietzsche and Sartre. Our founding fathers relied upon the foundation of biblical Christianity to provide a moral and spiritual framework for the Constitution. My generation, the me generation, the 60s rejected Christianity in favor of Eastern mysticism. Remember the Maharishi yogi that the Beatles followed for so long and made a fortune here in America too?

And they also followed existentialism, New Age spirituality, anything and everything but Christianity unless we forfeited any claim to morality. Our founding fathers cherished life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while my generation repeated the mantra of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Our founding fathers studied and brought to conscious application the free market capitalist economics of Adam Smith, which emphasized self-reliance and independence of the worker, while my generation tried to overthrow all of this with the Marxist-Socialist-Communist economics of Karl Marx, which of course emphasized the dependence of the worker upon the state for his economic well-being. This insidious smuggling of Marxist-Socialism goes on, yet even today with the Democrats, with our present administration, with the so-called progressives.

This insidious smuggling of Marxist-Socialism into our way of life has been one of the most destructive trends of recent history. When Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union in 1956, said, we will bury you. Americans rallied as a nation to reject this threat, and Khrushchev meant that the Soviet communist system would eventually replace capitalism. And we rightly perceived that communism attacked everything that had made America great. It was an external threat by a nation that was most apparently a tyranny as a direct fruit of its own philosophy, Marxist-Socialism.

They hated us, and they held over our head the threat of total nuclear war. And for decades, we were locked in a desperate struggle to see whose system, a free, capitalist republic, or a tyrannical communist totalitarianism would prevail upon the world stage. Every American should thank God that America and liberty was victorious in the 1980s, especially under Ronald Reagan. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, along with the Berlin Wall and other symbols of totalitarianism, was due in no small part to my father's generation and their dedication to the defeat of communist socialism.

There was no better representative of that greatest generation than President Ronald Reagan, whose strategy of peace through strength helped to bring down the Soviet Union. That direct frontal assault from the outside met with defeat and collapse, didn't it? That's history now, a matter of history. But what has happened since? What has that brave nation that fought so valiantly done with her victory, what has she done with it?

Well, I'm afraid that she has let her guard down, and she has lost the battle from within. Dupes. And what Lenin called useful idiots have begun to foist that very system upon us under a softer cover and a different name. Oh, Vladimir Lenin said he perceived very accurately that within the very capitalist system, within democracy, within republics, there would be those useful idiots that they would be able to employ to help destroy those nations from within, and look what has happened.

It is as if Peter, in the old fable Peter and the Wolf, has slain the wolf from the woods that threatened him in his farm only to be eaten by another who has come in sheep's clothing with soft human words and the appearance of another less threatening creature. Oh, if we were to trace the history of Marxist communism in the United States of America, we would observe that it has always had a presence here. It has. Until the appearance of the Soviet Union in 1917, communism was quite fashionable in many circles, but quickly showed itself for the destructive totalitarianism that it is.

When actually applied in the laboratory of human behavior, as it was manifest under Lenin and later Joseph Stalin, the majority of Americans soundly rejected communism in those days in favor of traditional capitalism. Although we were quickly moving from a republic to a democracy, even in those days, well, with the onset of the Cold War following World War II, it became closely bound up with the regimes of not only the Soviet Union, but China under Mao and all of the satellite states that came under the sway.

And then when in 1959, Fidel Castro led an apparently democratic revolution on the tiny island nation of Cuba, only 90 miles from the shore of Florida, well, then lovers of liberty in America initially rejoiced until they realized that Castro was no friend of liberty when he threw off his sheep's clothing, talk about a wolf in sheep's clothing, and he imposed the wolfish empire of Marxist socialism on Cuba. And I'm afraid that JFK's weak and foolish attempt to overthrow that regime in the Bay of Pigs invasion in the 1960s merely emboldened Marxist sympathizers in this country.

Castro and his minions like the revolutionary Che Guevara, who exported Cuban-style revolution to South and Central America, they became heroes. They became heroes to who? Whom do you think? To whom did revolutionaries like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro become heroes, huh? Oh, I'm embarrassed to say to my fellow American baby boomers, they became heroes.

Todd Gitlin, who was an initial co-founder of SDS, the Students for Democratic Society, a radical socialist group. Todd Gitlin, in his book, The Sixties, speaks of he and his fellow revolutionaries protesting JFK's blockade of Cuba. You remember the blockade of Cuba to keep out Soviet missiles? Revolutionary Cuba touched my heart, Todd Gitlin exudes in his book. And what Che Guevara attempted to bring to Bolivia from Cuba, my generation, led by Marxists like Tom Hayden, attempted to bring to the streets of the United States, and that is communist revolution, to the streets of America in riots back in the 60s.

One of Castro's favorite sayings was, the job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution. Viva la revolution. Castro's favorite saying, the job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution. And ever since that period, my generation has been about that perfidious task. Mao in his little red book was fond of saying that political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, i.e.

via violence. And that truth was borne out in Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and Vietnam in 1975, as communism swept over the globe. While this was thrilling to my socialist classmates, the American people soundly rejected the violence espoused by groups like the Weathermen. You remember these characters led by the notorious revolutionaries like Bernadette Dorn and Bill Ayers who planted bombs. Remember Bill Ayers?

Those were his days. Those were his glory days. And if this was revolution, if this was socialism, then that generation, the greatest generation, did not want it. Americans were in no mood for the kinds of petulant, childish tantrums being thrown by my spoiled counterparts, by my baby boomer generation, the me generation. And then when the war in Vietnam finally came to a pathetic gasping end in 1975, remember that last helicopter leaving the roof, how iconic that was?

The last helicopter escaping from the roof of the American embassy with people hanging onto it, even as the Viet Cong were in the streets below, taking the city of Saigon. Well, much of the fuel after this, much of the fuel and the motive for the movement died. Most Americans went back to their jobs and families to rebuild what had been lost and destroyed. But what about the hardcore Marxists who had wistfully hoped for revolution in the streets of America like they saw around the rest of the world? What happened to them?

Well, dear listener, I remember clearly the strategy called for by men like John Sinclair of the White Panther Party in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived at the time, and Tom Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society. Work within the system became the mantra. Work within the system. Instead of trying to destroy it from without, work within the system. This became the mantra of the new left, even as the white hot fires of violent revolution began to cool in America, at least.

If violent revolution would not accomplish the socialist revolution, then socialist evolution would. This is ensconced in the song Revolution by the Beatles. John Lennon expressed it openly in the Beatles song Revolution. And I quote one of the verses for you. You say you want a revolution.

Well, you know what? We all want to change the world. You tell me that it's evolution. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?

Now, you'll be glad I didn't sing that to you. You can go check that song out again if you want. But Darwinist evolution had long ago reached the social sciences. And Karl Marx had written about the inevitability of progress and the eventual triumph of communism. This is the sense of evolution in the mind of progressives today.

These radicals would put down their protest signs. My generation would put it in their mind, indeed, to put down their protest signs, their homemade bombs. And instead, they would take up their teacher's certificates and their union cards and go back to work from within the system to bring about revolution. How dedicated they are. If we were just half as dedicated as Christians, we would be able to bring the gospel around the world, even as these people are bringing the gospel of Marxist socialism around the world and trying to bring it to America stealthily themselves, right?

And so instead of calling themselves Marxist and communists openly, Bill Ayers is such a good example. They would use euphemistic language like liberal and progressive. Bill Ayers went and got his teaching certificate, didn't he? And he's teaching at the university level now in Illinois, no longer calling himself a socialist or a Marxist and throwing bombs. Instead, he's throwing erasers and he's calling himself a progressive or a liberal instead of calling for raw socialism without the mask.

Well, it would become rebranded as democracy. Be careful how these people use the word democracy. That is, students for a democratic society is a good example. Instead of using the term redistribution of wealth, as Karl Marx had done in Das Kapital to describe seizing the wealth of capitalist society and giving it to the proletariat, you bourgeois, we're going to take your money and we're going to give it to the proles, to the proletariat. Well, instead of openly expressing things like this, progressives would develop the euphemism economic justice.

Familiar with that term? President Obama, a Marxist socialist to the core, talks about economic justice these days. And it means the very same thing, though. Instead of mandating from the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Karl Marx puts it in Das Kapital, he talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat, that the children be raised by the state and families be irrelevant to the economic interests of society. This was a theme of Marxist socialism.

Instead, progressives would destroy the biblical family slowly from within the system by substituting other models of the family as equal models. This is a Marxist socialist principle, dear listener. You wonder why this is going on. It's a Marxist socialist principle. And we would have single parent families, for example, or gay families, models that would destroy the biblical family.

And instead of strengthening the individual states of the union and severely restrict the size and scope of the massive federal government as the constitution does, progressives would work within the system to bloat and burgeon the federal government in order that it might become the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's what we see unfolding before our eyes, as Karl Marx had envisioned, this kind of top-down command structure of communism. Well, all of this we see in our own world today. Dear listener, open your eyes.

Although most Americans are oblivious to these facts, merely going along with what they're told, as if all of these euphemisms and false labels are the real thing. But they are not. They are all products of my fellow baby boomers and their efforts to take over the cultural institutions of America and transform her from within. Do you remember Timothy Leary? Oh, some of my generation do.

Timothy Leary, his cultural advice to us all. Fellow baby boomer, tune in, turn on, and drop out. Oh, remember those phrases? Tune in, turn on, and drop out. That meant that all young people of the baby boom generation should listen to and take their cue for action from the radicals in their midst.

That's the tune in. And then begin experimenting with mind-altering drugs that would expand one's consciousness ostensibly. That's what turn on meant. And then finally, to turn one's back on society as it was then constituted and begin making a new one, a counterculture. That's the idea of drop out.

Tune in, turn on, and drop out. Timothy Leary himself was a Harvard psychologist who experimented with psychedelic drugs in his own work. When he began using these substances himself, like LSD, lysergic acid diethylmide, he began to advocate openly for their use for mind-expanding drugs. Leary said of himself and others like him, his fellow psychologist Richard Alpert, you may remember from history, later changed his name to the Hindi Ram Dass. Well, Leary and Alpert used to say, we saw ourselves as anthropologists from the 21st century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s.

On this space colony, we are attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art." Unquote. From Timothy Leary. It sounds as if he had taken one too many trips on LSD. Well, Harvard at the time did not share Leary's vision, and they created his own mode of dropping out by firing him from his post as lecturer in psychology.

Although Leary went on to become a cultural guru in the counterculture, not everyone followed his advice to tune in, turn on, and drop out. His life became one of crime. Leary was charged 10 times for drugs. Betrayal, he turned in as very radicals who hit him in the weather underground, and tragedy too. Leary's daughter, his own daughter, committed suicide tragically after years of his weirdness and her own drug addiction.

Now, what the progressives decided to do instead of tuning in, turning on, dropping out, is what Todd Gitlin of the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, describes as lower your expectations, dress up, and get down to business. Wow, what a drastic difference, or so it seemed at least. And what the radicals of the 1960s did was merely put on a mask, adorn as wolves, very clever sheep's clothing. Instead of the long hair locks of a radical wolf, they cut their hair in very stylistic forms as yuppies in the 80s.

Instead of bell-bottom jeans and tie-dyed shirts, they donned three-piece suits and went to work getting down to business, as Gitlin puts it. Their radical politics did not change. Our radical politics did not change, however, only the methods and modes. In order to take over the institutions of learning, to shape the hearts and minds of the next generation, they became teachers and professors. Do you wonder at the thoroughgoing, systematic socialism of the educational establishment of America today?

Why they do not give a wit about whether little Johnny can read, but passionate and exacting about whether he obeys and thinks right about the progressive agenda? Do you wonder why little Johnny cannot tune a carburetor or turn a lathe, but he can put a condom on a cucumber? Oh, and why little Janie cannot keep a home or balance a checkbook, but knows where and how to get food stamps and an abortion?

Do you wonder why little Johnny and Janie can repeat the mantras of the left about how evil America is because of slavery and capitalism and Christianity, but they know nothing of our constitution or its founders or even the basics of economic motive and principles of capitalism and the true production of wealth? Oh, this is because, dear listener, this is indeed because ever since the children of the 60s began to graduate from college, after trashing those campi with riots and protests, they began to return to them and teach the rot they tried at first to foist on America by violent revolution.

They have worked within the system such that they are now the system. Oh, they have worked within the system such that they are now the system. Gone are the cries for disobedience and the open challenge to authority. No, now they are the system. Strangely, they call for obedience now and marching in lockstep to the Marxist socialist agenda.

Gone are the cries for justice and the protests against violence and the abuse of power. Now they are the system. And now that they are the system, strangely, we hear from the Obama administration, things like this little ditty. If we cannot use the power of persuasion, we shall use the persuasion of power. Oh, do you hear the threat of implicit tyranny here?

This is right in line with communist strategy. Use the very capitalist system against itself to destroy it. Oh, dear listener, this is what we are in for. When the revolution comes, we will hang the capitalists with the very rope they have made. We are finding indeed that that is happening to us now in our generation.

This is the product. This is the results of the underground movements of my generation, the me generation. Oh, dear listener, leftists and progressives weep crocodile tears and they wring their hands over America's imperialistic wars. They shout peace, peace when there is no peace. Dear listener, I submit to you that we are reaping now the fruits of my generation.

It's time to turn this around, dear brothers and sisters. Time for the next generations to turn this around. My generation has spoiled what has been handed to them and we see them ruining and destroying America now from within. It is time to turn this around. This has been Pastor David Bass challenging.

Pray, dear listener, pray, dear listener, that we can yet redeem what has been left to us. Redeem, pull from the fire, salvage yet a heritage from our history. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We meet for holy worship at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard, 523-0196.