My generation’s campus revolution had the Vietnam War to energize it initially, and we rode that wave as far as it would take us. It was quite a ride while it lasted. But eventually the war ended and with it our movement.

I’ve seen this evolution before, having experienced it myself in the 1960s and 70s. It goes thus:

I actually was homeless in San Francisco in the summer of 1967(aka “The Summer of Love”). It was a beautiful experience, though a few years later I decided Maoism was a quicker vehicle for change than Peace and Love.

The Reagan Revolution was the result of my generation’s overreach. It was the arrogance of our youth receiving its comeuppance. We will never live down the shame. All we can do to atone is teach young people not to repeat our errors. I hope I have done my part.

America is not ready to move that far to the left. The great mistake of my generation was impatience. We wanted radical change immediately, but that’s not how change happens. It seems every new generation of young Americans has to relearn that lesson.

Bernie and Liz are campus radicals who refuse to grow up.

I don’t know anyone here. You’re all so young. I can’t imagine anyone else here being old enough to have been arrested at a Vietnam war protest.

What have you young people ever done to earn the credibility of my generation on matters of war and peace? We were in the front lines in the 60s, in the streets breathing tear gas and getting hit over the head by cops. I still carry scars from those days. It was the watershed moment of our political lives, so of…

This is not Vietnam. I marched against that particular war, so I can hardly be accused of being an imperialist. But my generation was in our youth perhaps too rigidly opposed to any and all military action. As we matured we hearkened back to our parents’ warnings about the pitfalls of appeasement, which they witnessed…

I bet you’d like that, but you’re stuck with us a while longer.

My generation built the modern American Left, so I need no lectures on what the Left is.

You have to understand, our generation’s parents fought WWII, and we grew up hearing tales from them of the catastrophic failure of the appeasement of Munich in 1938. We took their words to heart. So when Iraq blew up into a crisis in 2002, we knew immediately that appeasement was not an option with Saddam Hussein. …

Punk.

Iraq was not Vietnam. My generation knows the difference, and Joe is from my generation. Young folks should listen to us more.

Listen, we get that the actual left doesn’t like Biden

Punk.

Every senior citizen knows the dog whistles that Castro was tooting. We hear them every day, and we hear the snickers behind our backs. We’re not stupid.