The author makes a good point. The most vocal ones of our generation reshaped our society, and not for the better. But many of them are proud to this day of their contributions.
These vocal ones rallied much of their generation to protest against the Vietnam war. They took advantage of a flaw in human nature to leverage the anti-war sentiment for the benefit of their social reengineering program. The flaw in human nature of which I speak is the tendency of people to get overcommitted to one cause (the protest against Vietnam) and to not notice that other members of the movement are manipulating the cause for the sake of other unrelated goals.
The leaders of the movement were socialists (communists) who wanted more than anything to destroy the political/economic system of the United States. To do this, they had to gain control of the educational system and destroy the moral/religious backbone of our society.
Much of the activity started on college campuses. There were protests, endless speeches in plazas, sit-ins, love-ins, riots. It was our generation against the older generation. "When we get in control, things are going to change."
There was a rejection of any moral authority. Relativism reigned supreme, as it still does today. Women burned their bras. Couples did outrageous things in public. Proclaiming "free love", every sexual moral standard was violated.
Hollywood catered to the changing morals and made trashier movies, with more explicit language and sexual scenes. Radio stations played music that badmouthed every part of our society, and broke every taboo. This has been going on for so long now, that most people think it was always like that. But it wasn't.
And then there was the rampant use of drugs. Marijuana, LSD, mescaline, uppers, downers, and heroin for the real hard-liners. References to drugs appeared in much of the music and in a lot of movies. The more that young people thought, "Hey, everybody's doing it," the more they were encouraged to try it themselves.
And behind the scenes, the socialists were cheering. Now they make up most of the faculty on college campuses and have graduated a generation of brainwashed, unthinking parrots as public school teachers. They have also taken over journalism.
Socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried. But that doesn't stop the religious fervor that these people have for Marx. In a fit of self-loathing, they want to bring down the structure of our society even though it would mean their own demise.
Maybe some of the hangers-on have had second thoughts, as the author of this article expresses. But the true believers are still pushing their agenda. They have truly sold their souls to the devil.
Remember, Satan was the first liberal/leftist.
Boomers are his creation.
The vocal ones rallied many in older generations. That is something that always gets missed in these debates. It was symbiotic - the nutso Beatnick / Communist minority from amongst the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation riled up all the kiddies on campus, who then influenced Main Street to oppose the war and to be way too tolerant of way too many things.