1965: Year Zero

Being a teacher and student of history, dates are important to me. Although memorizing dates has fallen out of favor in many history classrooms, many of us are still able to instantly name the important events that happened in such years as 476, 1066, 1492, 1620, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1945, 2001, and so on.

I have another year for you to remember: 1965. Over the years, I have come to designate this particular year as the one in which we, perhaps irretrievably, lost our country. So many society-changing events and acts of legislation were passed in 1965, I cannot think of another year in our nation's history - not even during the Civil War or the Great Depression - that so permanently altered the fabric of our society and, consequently, our nation as a whole. I expect that many people will disagree with my analysis, and could give their own reasons why another year should be considered instead of 1965, but let us consider the following:

The Great Society - What better catastrophe to start off our list than Lyndon Johnson's grotesque dream-cum-nightmare that has sapped our nation's coffers and its motivation ever since its inception. This series of government programs, announced by Johnson during his State of the Union speech on January 4th, 1965, began to remove the stigma of welfare and set our nation down the road to a dependence on government that has been seared into our populace more and more with each ensuing generation; unfortunately demonstrating disproportionate effects in our nation's racial and ethnic minority communities. The chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina could be considered Exhibit A in that assertion.

The Social Security Act of 1965 - You may never have heard of this law, but you have definitely heard of two of the government programs it spawned: Medicare and Medicaid. Medicare provides taxpayer-funded health care for Americans over the age of 65. Medicaid provides taxpayer-funded health care for Americans who subsist at certain poverty levels. These programs were instituted under the belief that health care in the United States was too expensive... so how's that working out for us? A surefire economic law is that when you subsidize something, the price of it tends to increase. Once government's deep pockets began picking up the tab for millions of people's medical bills, thus distorting the incentives of the free market, costs for medical care unsurprisingly went up. Medicare/Medicaid have become so expensive, that hands are now wringing in the media and our government on how to pay for the trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities these programs are experiencing. President Obama and Congress' solution is to take the Medicare/Medicaid model and apply it to all Americans under a so-called Single Payer System. "Single Payer" is a quaint little euphemism that fails to note that the "single payer" is you, the taxpayer. That way, everyone can now be dependent on the government for our health care!

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA) - This law expanded the federal government's role in the education of our nation's children like nothing before. Although the Constitution grants no powers of regulating education to the federal government, Congress did an end-run around this obstacle by dangling ESEA money in front of the states. Once the states accepted that money, then the states had to play by the federal government's rules. As the octopus arms of this law have slipped into the classrooms of most of our nations's schools, the result has been the educational wasteland that culminated in the 1983 Nation at Risk report that said if a foreign power had imposed our lackluster educational system upon us, we would have considered it an act of war. Instead, we have done this to ourselves. The one-size-fits-all approach of the ESEA provides almost limitless federal funding for just about every ineffectual educational fad that comes down the pipe, giving parents and schools nowhere to hide but for paying taxes toward public education in addition to tuition for private school. Over the years, those fads have included Title I funding of which studies have shown no gain; Whole Language instruction, which turned a generation of children into semi-literate non-readers; block scheduling, which tried to force teachers to abandon the traditional models of instruction that have worked for thousands of years, and the list goes on. Our schools, which used to be the envy of the world have been ravaged by this law that still exists today as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

The Watts Riots - On August 11, 1965, the city of Los Angeles exploded with fire and violence, as a routine traffic stop between a white police officer and a black motorist turned into days of nihilism which ended with millions of dollars in property damage and 34 people dead. Beyond the immediate death and damage, years of misery awaited as the Watts Riots served as a catalyst for the "Black Power" movement, which announced itself less than a year later. The Civil Rights movement for blacks in the United States was a necessary and noble endeavor. For some blacks however, the non-violent, integrationist methods of Martin Luther King and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee were plodding along too slowly. The violence, intimidation, and self-segregation of the Black Power movement became an alternative method to non-violence and integration, and looking at the state of Black America today, with its self-imposed segregation, belligerence, disproportionate crime rates, and high rate of out-of-wedlock births, it is unfortunate to note that Black Power won out in the war of ideas.

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 - Back in 1924, Congress realized that the United States had been ingesting an enormous amount of immigration for the previous 30 years. In an effort to let that meal settle, immigration was brought down to practically nil between 1924 and 1965. During that forty-year period, immigrants and their offspring had the chance to assimilate into American society without having to compete economically and culturally with ever more new arrivals. Ethnic groups such as Italians and Slavs moved up the economic ladder, moved out of the cities in which they had originally arrived, and began fanning out across our great melting pot. In 1965, that all changed. Whereas the 1924 Immigration Act dictated that the nationality of immigrants should match the then-current demographic makeup of the United States, a new immigration act was passed - under the leadership of none other than Teddy Kennedy - that removed nationality quotas, meaning people from any country in the world could arrive on our shores. While only 500,000 immigrants arrived in the United States during the entire decade of the 1930s, over 1 million immigrant arrived in just the year of 1996. There is nothing wrong with immigration as long as the people who arrive here are motivated to become part of our American society, to adopt our culture, and not carve out their own "communities" where they languish in self-segregation. This is what is occurring today, and has been since 1965, as the U.S. receives millions of immigrants from third-world countries whose cultures, religions, and political philosophies are often anathema to what has made the United States a place to which people around the world are willing to risk their lives to reach in the first place.

According to Ted Kennedy, this was not supposed to be the result of the 1965 Immigration Act. What has come to pass regarding that law was vehemently denied by Kennedy and other proponents as being even a possibility. Here is Kennedy's money quote about the bill during floor debate:

"First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix will not be upset . . . Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia...."

One only has to look at our current demographics to know that Kennedy's soothing words turned out to be a bunch of hokum. To make matters worse, take the massive levels of third-world immigration we have experienced under this law, and couple it with the Great Society-inspired welfare that is still very much available, and you begin to understand the bigger picture I am trying to illustrate for you.

Escalation of the Vietnam War and the protests the war inspired - The year 1965 was the first year that actual combat troops - as opposed to military advisors - were sent to fight in Vietnam. It was also the first year that the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and other left-wing groups began the mass protests that would define the War back home. There was nothing wrong with the United States involving itself in the Vietnam War. It was a necessary action that checked increasing Soviet designs on world domination. The tragedy was that Lyndon Johnson was not playing to win, and tens of thousands of American soldiers paid the ultimate sacrifice for Johnson's equivocation. In addition to the thousands of actual American deaths in the battlefields of Vietnam, the war also gave rise to the death of our institutions back home; institutions such as respect for authority, unabashed patriotism, and common decency. The duplicity exhibited by many of our politicians in their efforts to not win the War in Vietnam gave many an American a reason to never again trust our government to do the right thing, even if our government truly is doing the right thing. This fact was made painfully apparent during the numerous protests held on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and in other large cities around the country in which people openly supported our communist enemies and called for the United States to lose the War in Vietnam.

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If you wish to see the legacy of 1965, you only need to go right now to your television or newspaper and turn it on or open it up, or take a walk down the street or visit a local school.

President Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress have just in the last few days fired their opening salvos in their fight to force socialized health care down the throats of the American people. The seeds for that possibility can easily be traced back to the incremental imposition of Medicare and Medicaid for certain portions of our population.

I have seen with my own eyes and photographed with my own camera hundreds of modern-day anti-war protestors who call for the defeat of the United States and the death of our brave soldiers in the fight against Islamic terrorism and the Islamists' attempts to reestablish a Caliphate that would make the Soviet Union a paradise by comparison.

I teach in a school where over 30 different languages and dialects are spoken. I have driven through certain parts of downtown Los Angeles that are practically indistinguishable from Tijuana. I have sadly marveled at the sight Muslim women walking down the sidewalks of my hometown, covered from head to toe in their mysoginistic uniform of flowing clothes and hijab. Great Britain is currently flirting with the idea of allowing Sharia law to be used in its court system. How long before this horrible decision reaches our shores as well?

The school at which I teach exhibits the racial "achievement gap" in test scores which is prevalent in just about every school district in the country. Our black students bring up the back of the pack in every measurable academic category. They also lead the pack in discipline referrals, suspensions, and expulsions. The belligerence and self-defeating attitudes of the Black Power movement continue to hold back an entire generation of black students who could do so well if they just applied themselves and not worry that doing so would be abandoning their "blackness."

And tying all of the above together is the legacy of the Great Society, in which government largess personal independence, personal pride, and personal responsibility for too many people. Social pathology and dysfunction continue to be rewarded, subsidized, and multiplied.

Over forty years have come and gone since 1965, which means we are now working on our third generation that has lived in the aftermath of that seminal year. The tragedy in this fact is that for a major portion of our country's population, the American people know of no other reality than the one that was imposed upon us in 1965. How does one impress upon millions of people who don't know any better the fact that things weren't always this way, and they don't always have to be?

Good Day to You, Sir