We are. The voters. The American electorate. You and me.
And we have abandoned our collective responsibility due to avarice, greed, laziness.
I began formulating the question this past weekend. Who really is responsible for the current plight of America? I don’t mean strictly at this specific point in time; I’m thinking of, say, the past twenty, thirty years or so. Then I began to mentally step back even farther.
And here’s what I concluded:
This country will be in much better shape when my generation completely dies off: the Baby Boomers. Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, are responsible for more navel-gazing, more irresponsibility, more self-centeredness, more arrogance, more entitlement-demandation than any generation before or since. William Jefferson Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama are all Baby Boomers.
Now, most Americans most definitely want their cake and consumption. Before BBs, kids used to work through college if they could. Now, they demand college, default on loans and boast of it. Free college for illegal invaders, some now demand. And, oddly enough, those who worked their way through college discovered how the world really works much sooner than our coddled and pampered and protected kids of today.
But that’s okay because today’s kids always have a “fallback” — their parents. They know full well that their guilt-ridden parents — those who rushed their kids to soccer, to band practice, to T-ball — will take them back into the fold. It’s a great job if you can get it.
This nation used to believe that parents were responsible for their children. Fathers worked and mothers cared for the kids, as horrifyingly sexist as that sounds. “Bad kids” were ostracized from local groups. It “paid” to be good because most all the neighborhood adults watched over the actions of the juveniles. One phone call from some parent about your negligent actions resulted in serious consequences.
Then the media jumped in. Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan jumped in. Being a mother was ridiculed, demeaned and caricturized. But equal rights didn’t mean just equal rights — it meant superiority over the traditional male and his role as leader. Except, of course, when equal rights didn’t quite mean equal rights. US women didn’t fight wars, didn’t want to, weren’t drafted, never have been. Women morphed into men and men became Metrosexuals and pussies. Lazy, New Age female teachers pushed Ritalin on boys in class because boys couldn’t or wouldn’t sit calmly like little girls. Women now are bemoaning the fact that their life expectancy in the modern world is beginning to decline — directly due to stress, work, responsibility. Time to hold up your end of the log, womyn. GTFOI.
Divorce rates soared. Now, single-motherhood is a woman’s right — and to hell with the child. It isn’t about the child, it’s about the mother. Same for abortion. Except — who’s getting aborted? Why yes, statistically blacks would comprise the largest numbers. But, hey, that’s freedom, eh wot?
Speaking of blacks for a moment, we can all thank Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society. You know — the one that ripped black families asunder and PAID black women to rid themselves of black men and, essentially, create generations of black, fatherless underclasses due to welfare?
“If you wish to judge a tree — look at its fruit.”
This nation decided — made a conscious decision — to abandon love, duty, honor and self-sacrifice in order to glorify the government, the provider, the entitlements. And people became not only enamored of but completely dependent upon the “safety nets” provided by the G.
Why? Because people wanted the safety nets. They were easy. They required little thought and, moreover, even less work.
And all run with the precision and efficiency of your local DMV.
What happened to the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave?
Why are those who espouse individualism, freedom, liberty and self-sufficiency branded as radicals?
So now, this moment: where is the weak link?
I submit that it is the bulk of America:
- The America that votes for every bond measure on the ballot.
- The America, in tort cases, that thinks: “you know, if that were me at the plaintiff’s table I’d want the money.”
- The America that thinks taxation is the key to every success.
- The America that is sufficiently stupid not to realize: no money comes from Washington. Money only comes from the Mark I, Model I American Taxpayer.
- The America that shrieks for safety, for comfort, for security, for mental pablum.
- The America that disdains challenge, strife, conflict, contretemps, competition.
Someone once wrote: “We can go on singing patriotically, deluded that we’re somehow still a Superpower because of technology. But weak people and powerful technology don’t make a wholesome couple. We may not know that. But the world’s terrorists do.”
BZ
Unfortunately you are right. We are a generation that has achieved nothing.
AMEN!!
Preach it, brother!
The generation that cannot, and will not, accept responsibility for a f–king thing!
You got it right, the reason this country is failing is because of the ELECTORATE! that stubbornly refuses to give any candidate with an IQ over six any support, even in the primaries! and rushes to embrace the bastard (or bitch) who promises them the most free shit from the public wallet.
Who was it that said all experiments in democracy are doomed to fail, simply because the populace will eventually begin to vote for bigger and bigger handouts…and then become totally reliant on the government? That appears to be happening at an alarming rate.
Well said. We elected our bringers of doom.
Just John brings up what concerned our founding fathers, our system of government can only work with a Moral Majority, the people have to be law unto their own selves or the system fails. read the ten commandments, there is nothing unbearable about them, they are the only social system that will work, you trash them at not only your own peril, but society as a whole will be quite short lived without them.
You are correct. We as a country have gotten softer and softer. Not long age camping out meant sleeping on a blanket outside. Now its in a waterproof tent with a waterproof floor on a cot with a pad that automatically inflates in a sleeping bag that will go to -40 deg. Our cars are a generation or 2 from driving themselves because people cant be bothered to learn how to control them its tooooooo haaarrrd. Personal responsibility stops at taking a crap by yourself.
Regarding wmd_maker’s comment, it probably won’t be too long before we are not even “taking a crap” by ourselves. The toilet will do all the cleaning up by itself. No TP will be needed. It’s the American way!
Excellent post, BZ. Makes me glad I’m older. I was born in 41 so I’m not a baby boomer. 🙂 I do know many baby boomer’s that are conservative, but they are still spoiling there kids. I raised mine, made sure they had the skills to make it on their own and that they understood they were always welcome to come home for a visit,but that it was time for them to fly, just like the little birdies do when Mama shoves them out of their comfy nests. There was no free ride into middle age for my kids, but I see it all the time.
BZ, excellent post, and could not agree more! If you don’t know I am Canadian, moved down here, LEGALLY I might add, almost a decade ago.
When ever I visit Canada my friends and relatives amaze me. The government pays for this, the G. pays for that. And the running dialog that constantly going through my head is “No, the G. does not pay for squat, they are merely a Ponzy scheme with your money in the first place.”
I wish I had a magic answer, all I know is the American spirit is yet to be dead. For example, from stories I have read there are communities in N.O. where you can not tell Katrina came through. The neighborhood got together and helped to fix each others houses. Sadly, I believe those neighborhood where comprised of primary first and second generation Asian immigrants IIRC.
The Boomers are the icing on the cake, that cake, itself, took a couple of generations to get to the point where the icing would collapse it. How can our world get so turned around that the very basics of why Nations and governments are made is willfully forgotten? Not just slightly, but by an entire amendation of our school curricula going back not just to the 1960’s or 70’s, but going back to the 1910’s and 20’s. Those changes that started to make government ‘active’ and ‘involved’ is only in high gear by getting started at the lesser gears going on for decades. And some of the major problems date from before the Boomers and were so ill-conceived that they could not deal with the actual world as it was known at the time.
As Citizens we must admit that it was those backed by the spirit of ‘doing good’ that wanted to take control over medications that had never been the province of government before that. It wasn’t under Woodrow Wilson that the US started that, but under the Republicans Theodore Roosevelt and the Shanghai convention. It had meant something, that word Shanghai, and that is what happened to our internal discussion: for moral ‘good’ government was put to the task at restricting fellow citizens who took such things. If you want the first time the federal government would get between a citizen and their doctor, it is not under LBJ or FDR… that goes back to jailing doctors under the drug laws that came in from that early convention and were expanded by Congress and Presidents after it.
I generally admire TR, but in his autobiography he would come to acknowledge that these international grand affairs were ridiculous. How unfortunate that it was he who wanted some lovely international council to decide on things and only out of office did he realize that error. That would not come from him or Taft, but from Wilson who would build upon TR’s start. Wilson’s federal power grab during the short time in WWI would be the expansion of powers and break with long tradition where the federal government kept out of trying to regulate markets, money supply and industry. Right after WWI we did get a quick scaling back, save for Prohibition, and such a fine idea that was it gave us modern organized crime on steroids.
It is to great benefit that the Republicans did away with the most odious of things put in by Wilson, but not to such a great benefit of supporting Prohibition. Is it any wonder that FDR was able to use the ‘hope & change’ argument to start styling programs after the ‘progressive’ ones in Italy, Germany and Russia when the Great Depression rolled around? From that we would get some of the most ill-conceived social programs which still, to this day, plague us as citizens all because we wanted government to ‘do something’ about a private economic problem. And the splendid part is we, in a representative democracy, voted that IN. Those economic time bombs of demographics were already set when the Boomers were born, but the sad thing is that those poor outlooks were going to cause disaster with or without them.
As much as I thing the GI Bill was good in its heart, why did it not include trade and craft schools? Why only colleges and universities? All those lovely social ideals had to be taught by ‘someone’ and academia was already the breeding place for ‘Bohemian ideals’, which had been derided for decades by the rest of America as not too in touch with the real world. What lovely places to put lots of GIs through, no?
The outcome of those decisions to have American men educated in Bohemian ideals and slowly cut off from the trades was what we have today: in theory you can build a society with that, but in practice it falls to pieces as such things as ‘pride of craft’ goes away. JFK, for all the glory after his death, was a liberal who didn’t care much about ‘social justice’ beyond working class issues and was pretty staunch on defense. It was LBJ who pulled off the greatest con-job on the planet and convinced poor, black renters in buildings owned by often negligent landlords in ghettos to move to brand-spanking new, Soviet style apartments run by the worst bureaucrats the government could find. Then the government would look to get those folks on the dole, break up the strong black traditional family that had kept communities together since emancipation, and start alienating poor men from poor women.
You couldn’t get to that without FDR’s work on social security and subsidized medical benefits, but that icing layered on by LBJ would give an entire generation a feeling that they were ‘privileged’ to get whatever they wanted from the government.
Who voted these goofballs in? The well-meaning parents of the Boomers. What was that about the GI bill isolating those taught in universities from basic American values of hard work and pride of work?
You can’t get to a generation that feels ‘entitled’ to try and fix everything without a serious amount of wrong-headed pampering to make them feel that way. Then throw in the ‘educated’ media and academics to start re-writing history and make people believe that those things we left behind were wrong-headed and actually pretty ‘mean’.
Soon it was ‘conservatives’ who were pointing out that civil liberties depended on personal responsibility and ‘liberals’ wanting to give away same to government. Yes it was the ‘liberals’ that used to argue for small and weak government and ‘conservatives’ who wanted a robust and strong government. Those who came after Goldwater tried to make a ‘grand coalition’ in the Republican Party to be an ‘umbrella’ and meet everyone’s needs. The old Rockefeller Republicans co-opted the various conservatives into the deal along with, yes, Ronald Reagan.
As an outsider watching that, the idea of a firm stance to remove federal power and get smaller government under tight fiscal restraints was an excellent move.
Great sales pitch and spokesman, too!
So, ‘where’s the beef’?
The nation was holding its breath waiting for Reagan to get out the chainsaw and start lopping off some excess limbs this creature had grown since TR. Instead it was nail clippers and fertilizer, and the economy would grow! And government? Oh, my, yes at a faster clip than ever. The last gasp of that was convincing Clinton on welfare reform, which effectively ended the grand coalition as no one was actually doing a thing they said they would.
You wonder where the Republican Party went? It didn’t keep its word. Just like the Democrats haven’t since ’68.
I just read HH’s latest on the R nominee-apparent about the ‘cap and trade’ concept, and how the nominee is ‘in the center’ and the best to rally around. Why yes! The center LEFT! Good deal!
So I can vote for a Social Democrat, a Socialist or a Communist this fall! Isn’t that a swell choice? And none of them believe in National Sovereignty, either! Hmmmm… how come I don’t get any good ‘vibes’ from this? If we can’t even figure out something like Private War that ALL of the Founders knew about and could easily put their finger on, then I would say that we are over-educated by half and under-wise completely. We have forgotten why we have nations and what they mean, and having those is necessary to survival. We don’t have them.
I’ve suggested this before but will say it again.
A Jacksonian for President!!
None of the three apparent candidates, McCain, Clinton, or Obama are worthy of that post.
Mark: correct.
Just John: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world?s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to Complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.” — Alexander Tyler, 1770, Cycle of Democracy
USA Admiral: thank you for visiting, thank you for commenting and I very much like your avatar.
Thomas: thanks for your comment and no, I was unaware of your being Canadian, welcome aboard again and please continue to visit and comment. Unfortunately, when I click on your “clickable” name Blogger indicates your profile (and I’m guessing your blog) is unavailable.
Mark: I’m with you. If I had the HTML abilities I’d simply create an “A.J. FOR PRESIDENT” website and reference his blog for his platform and stance.
BZ
Actually, Alexander Tyler didn’t really say those words… at least not that anyone can actually verify. Doesn’t mean they aren’t true, he just didn’t say them.
That was such a great post. I get so sick and tired of hearing people whining for more govnerment handouts. They just don’t get it. And if you disagree, they won’t even listen to you. They go into a rant of what an evil hate monger you are. You don’t care about the plight of the poor blah blah blah. Uh no, handouts hurt the poor. Though, you know what I have been noticing? Since my generation (I’m 27) was spoiled by the baby boomers many are selfish and not willing to spoil their kids because it takes away from what they can have. So that may turn things around because those kids will have to actually work for stuff. Who knows? One can only hope. Though a lot of times they just give into their kids so they don’t have to deal with them. Especially since parents don’t have time with both working. I guess we’ll see.