[This piece ran as a radio commentary in late August, 2005, on KUNM, the NPR radio station that covers most of New Mexico.]

Lead in: It’s a fine thing for idealistic youth to want to improve the world. But commentator Andrew Bard Schmookler, reflecting on his own youth, says it’s important first to recognize what’s the baby and what’s the bathwater.

I’ve been thinking lately about a serious misjudgment I made years ago when I was part of the counterculture. I still think in our critique of America’s mainstream culture there was a lot we were right about. But it was a major mistake to take so much for granted about the society we were born into.

That society was certainly badly flawed. But it was also an achievement. It had taken centuries —millennia—for people to create the structures that gave us as much of freedom, of abundance, of simple decency as was present in the America as we found it.

But back in the sixties, I took much of that for granted. When I thought of the possibilities for change in America, my eye was always on change for the better. It scarcely occurred to me that change in America might be for the worse, that we might someday look back at the America of that time with a sense that precious things had been lost.

After all, had not our Establishment, in its arrogance, given us the nightmare of Vietnam?

Yes, but the whiz kid Bob McNamara has since had the decency to shed tears—in that film The Fog of War—over his errors. Can you imagine our present Secretary of Defense ever weeping over all the lives destroyed by his arrogance?

There was a basic decency in the American establishment of that post-World-War II era that is simply not visible in the power-wielders of today.

People like me chafed to see LBJ in the White House—LBJ with the sleazy ways, who mistreated poor Lady Bird, who twisted arms to make backroom deals.

All true, but it was also because of LBJ –bringing the full force of his political talents to bear—that vital civil rights legislation got enacted, finally accomplishing what the Civil War was supposed to have done a century before. And he signed it gladly– despite knowing, as he then said, that it would cost his party the South for a generation.

Can you even imagine the current occupant of the White House signing a law —knowing it would impose a huge political cost on his forces—just because it was the right thing to do, because the soul of America required it?

I suspect that in the more morally grounded America of two generations ago, our current rulers’ lie of false righteousness would not have been so readily believed.

Nor have the downward possibilities of change been confined to the realm of power. Many of us who grew up in the stultifying bondage of Pleasantville” just assumed that liberation would lead to the promised land of human blossoming.

But it turns out that let it all hang out” leads not just to healthy honesty but also to The Jerry Springer Show, and that if it feels good, do it” can engender millions of kids growing up without a stable family to anchor their lives.

It turns out that frustration may not be the most important fruit of those bourgeois” values so many in the counterculture thought should be overthrown.

A lot of blessings we enjoyed, it turns out, were not just the natural state of things, but the benefits of a cultural edifice it took generations of hard work to construct. And while buildings often need renovation, they also need to be maintained well or they will fall apart.

Maybe it’s witnessing how things can fall apart that makes age more conservative than youth. It’s like in the movies: whenever a character says, Things can’t get any worse,” it turns out they can.

I’m Andrew Bard Schmookler.