If you are receiving Imprimus from Hillsdale College each month, you may have already read the speech author and editor Christopher Caldwell delivered at Hillsdale just last January. Profiling his new book, and schooling everyone on what the impact of the sixties has made on the American psyche in the last 55-plus years, Caldwell lays it out for anyone to see and understand the truth. For someone like myself who lived through those years, it was both illuminating and surprising, as few have managed to elucidate the massive harm wrought upon our nation from these very turbulent times.
I am a child of the sixties, and so for me, Caldwell’s excellent analysis just can’t be ignored, or for that matter, disputed. I was there. I saw it. I lived it. What astonishes me is this: it was only in reading Caldwell’s, Imprimus feature, that I finally examined the truth of what has tormented me for many years now: “How in the world did get to the point we find ourselves in today?” I should have suspected of course. The sixties were a very pivotal time in modern history, and very few of those years were free of the cloud of the Vietnam War, campus riots, drug abuse, and a lot more.
Because of the sixties, I believe, we are as divided now as we have never been before that I can think of. In fact, Caldwell actually gives us the time frame: not since the time of the Civil War! His speech is well worth reading, and the book should be a must-have in anybody’s library. If what he writes could be taught to the school-age generation now, it would turn the course of history on its ear. But it won’t of course. Instead, I believe home schools and private Christian schools ought to add it to their curriculum. So please do!
The speech text can be viewed here, and the book can be purchased online here.