I really don't care about Boomer outrage on my accusations. Zero, your generation, mine and the one after yours are left holding the bag of shit left in their wake. Why is it so atrocious for us to call them on it?
Originally Posted by: DakotaT
It isn't. And I say that as another one of those late boomers (b. 1958). Ours *was* the first me...me...me generation.
We were the children coming into the new affluence of the post-war generation. And we have rightly applauded ourselves for our activism and raising the consciousness of America regarding the war in Vietnam, environmental awareness, women's rights, and, especially, the civil rights movement.
I don't deny that my fellow boomers, as a rule, have been hard workers. They have.Boomers have by and large been hard workers and been motivated by doing good as well as by doing well. That's the good side. On the other hand, we have been an incredibly self-absorbed, arrogant and prideful group, convinced of our own righteousness and wisdom to a degree that our even more hardworking parents were not.
It is that arrogance and that pride which deserve scorn. For despite our good intentions, we have done bad. We have taken the greatest (human) system for economic and human good in human history in ways previously unimaginable, a system that has been able to harness the power of human discipline and ingenuity and converted it into a system of entitlement run by a nanny state. We have trampled on the values of the original Constitution and, especially, the Declaration of Independence, so much that they look like litter in a drunk's alley. We have so failed in our education and guidance of the generations that have followed us that they have not the intellectual skills to distinguish great ideas from the ideas of charlatans, pretenders, and know-nothings. We are the generation that has institutionalized sloppy thinking and the blame game, and we are the generation that has institutionalized political leadership that, at its best, has been distinguished by its mediocrity and, at its worst, would be better if replaced by empty offices.
You and other boomers may be offended, digsthepack, but DakotaT in his bluntness has the right of it. Our generation does have a lot to answer for. We have paved not just one road but the greatest network of roads leading to hell with our good intentions. Whether we did so out of greed or a desire to improve the world doesn't change the fact that we in our arrogance and our pride have for my entire adult lifetime approached the growing social security and other accounting tricks that allow us to ignore the problem and convert a small hill of obligation across generations into first Mount Everest and then Olympus Mons. And so corrupted are we in our arrogance and our folly, that even as we finally start to see the consequences of trillions of dollars of new debt every year, a chunk of us have taken advantage of our educational failures regarding numeracy and fiscal temperance to saddle the generations to come with the medical expenses of the largest generation in our history as we age.
While I admire him as a successful businessman, for his honey, for his family, for his compassion, and for a dozen other reasons, I have and will continue to disagree with DakotaT on many economic matters. I think he has far too much faith in the state. I think he fails to understand how markets work to temper greed. In his scorn for big business -- most of which I actually share -- I believe he fails to understand how it is markets, not the state, that has historically limited the ill effects such greed and big business can cause.
But for those shortcomings in his and his generation's economic thinking, too, we Boomers must at least share the blame. For his bad economic thinking is a product of
our school system and of
our failings as teachers. The ideas of stimulus and cradle-to-grave entitlements were not invented by our generation, but if our generation had been doing its job and paying attention to economic evidence, we would have realized the poverty of progressivist, populist, and Keynesian economics in the seventies and eighties. Dubya would have been unelectable. Obama would not have been fawned over as a great orator at the 2004 Democratic convention; he would have been laughed off the stage, with his boneheaded economic ideas in the trash bin along with the political ideas of George Wallace, George McGovern, and George III.
We have been well-meaning. And we have worked hard to pursue our visions of the good. Those things are are true.
We've had our chance. We've screwed it up. I won't be surprised if, when the implosion does come, the generations after us end up taking the franchise away from us. After all, have we really proven that we can be trusted with it?
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)