On the other hand…
28 February 2008 - 23 אדר א' 5768 by Huw
There are many reasons we’re going bottom up in the USA right now: lack of financial restraint, lack of corporate ethics, an unjustified (and some insist, unconstitutional) war draining resources from a population not being asked to sacrifice, etc. None of these is a good thing.
But they are all combining with something that amazes me: Advancing Baby-boomer Citizen Decrepitude (ABCD). Their housing crisis, insurance demands, unethical stock choices and medical problems will be the end of all the security that their parents built - and doom for their children and the rest of us.
What was seen as a good thing (the over-population boom in the postwar years) is now, clearly, a bad thing. What helped us out of our past is now destroying our future.
Oh, the irony.
Further, because there were so many of them, the rest of us have had to deal with their aging generational mood swings: caving before their drug-crazed youthful mobs, unable to out-vote their conservative middle ages and totally powerless to cut them off in their retirement (because they still vote with their greed), we have become a nation unable to let go of the generation that has us in a strangle hold.
My own generation, born too close to the Boomers, is totally overshadowed and that’s ok: what amazes me, however, is the Gen Y, Gen Z (etc) that comes up now. Committed to green, to social organisation that furthers freedom, to responsibility which limits that freedom, to ideals that are beyond our conception - and yet easily within reach, given sacrifice and community - this generation is a mark of hope. I have conversations with people “my age” and we are continually amazed at the ideas, the brains, the creativity that comes out our our youngers and our betters.
But they are a smaller and financially less stable generation. They haven’t the financial support of trust funds or social security or even wealthy parents (us) because we are trying to hold up a wall of Advancing Baby-boomer Citizen Decrepitude. They won’t be able to support us in our retirement. ABCD may condemn a lot of us Xers to an entire lifetime of work without retirement, but I think we owe it to those who come after us to give them the freedom to build the world they want - while we support, in their death throes, the passing of the elders who pretend to still be kids.
