Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’m considered a “Boomer” because my birth date is before the arbitrary cut-off in 1964; but by the time I reached each new stage in life, the older Boomers already had been there and ravaged it, like locusts. I was about 5 years too late for everything, which makes me feel less like a Boomer and more like one of the next generation.
What’s it do to a nation when you believe your generation has no future, that the people before you squandered it?
Joe Doakes
I’m probably in the same boat as Joe. The arbitrary date cutoff is wrong, of course; “Baby Boomers” are the children of people who came home from the war and started having kids. As my parents were 9 and 5 on VJ day, that just wasn’t the case. And if I were a Baby Boomer, perhaps I’d remember more about the Beatles than hearing they’d broken up on the radio.
Anyway – what does it do for a nation, believing that the previous generation squandered your future? Good question. I’m looking at Millennials – say, at Evergreen State – and wondering if they’re going to squander my legacy.
It means, IMO, that we’re setting up one generation to screw the next, and vice versa. Could get ugly.
I have a fear that the boomers will devour everything before they leave the world. It would make literary sense.
This is mostly about LBJ forcing us off the gold window so he could have guns and butter. You have to have a hard money central bank if you aren’t going to squander resources and screw the next generation.
This is also, why I really dislike Ben Sasse’s current schtick of lecturing young people about being more responsible and delaying gratification. The Right gains NOTHING by doing this.
Yesterday, I caught a snippet on Rush Limbaugh’s show. He was talking about a recent study that polled millennials with a question of how much they would contribute to stop gloBULL warming. The majority of respondents, would contribute $10 OR LESS. One could surmise that this survey proves one or all of the following;
A. The message has been lost
B. Millennials really aren’t that concerned that we’re all doomed.
C. They’ve actually learned that it’s just a money making scheme for elites, like Al Gore, Tom Steyer and the yahoos at Goldman Sachs or
D. They didn’t understand the question.
I take option E. All of the above,
I’ll add on to option B: The millenial generation is so far removed from having to struggle to survive (in any meaningful sense of the word “struggle”), that they simply have no grasp of what it is like to be worried about your future, for any reason. Boomers heard about the great depression from their “Greatest Generation” parents, who mostly were able to pound into Boomers’ heads the necessary work ethic to avoid that catastrophe on themselves (but screw the younger generations). Gen-X’ers heard about it from their grandparents. Gen-Y’ers learned about it in school. Millenials? Public schools teach so very little necessary to survive in the real world. 95% of them are hopeless and helpless.