Tuesday, July 10, 2012

This is where I find solice.

With the election roughly four months away, it's hard to find anything to write about with this administration that hasn't been covered before. However, I think I've reached a new phase. Acceptance. And a belief that it has to be this way for the world to get better.

No matter how painful and horrible it gets. It has to be this way.

From my own family history, I know we have a generation from the Peace and Love era who believed the way people became wealthy was from being lucky. Not from hard work. So they did the minimum possible to get by. All the while keeping their fingers crossed hoping for that elusive luck to bathe them in money. And now they are old and you can't change them. However they have fostered several generations with this core belief. Follow your bliss. Do what makes you happy. Get that sweet, sweet Internet money. And when all else fails, the government will be there to feed and house you.

The Greatest Generation Ever - spawned what I think will eventually be the worst generation ever. The Baby Boomers. And I'm sorry if you fit into this category. They spent with abandon. Saved barely anything. When they got old they believed that they shouldn't have to pay anything to extend their lives. Because they exist, they should get everything for free. Their poor choices weren't their fault. They guilted the next generation into paying for every poor choice they made. While they were having fun, they'd already made a choice that you'd take care of them so they didn't have to be responsible. They lived for the moment. They fucked up their children - Generation X. Who to a great degree rejected marriage and children because we'd all seen what divorce did to families. I believe it is their thin moral code that makes our world so completely bankrupt. And to be sure, they are a big source of the romanticism of socialism.

So here we sit in a world were trust is non existent. You can't trust the good information, you can't trust the bad information. I've been told that is how the Soviet Union was before it collapsed.

So, no matter how bad it gets - I just have to keep reminding myself that it has to be this way for them to finally realize the world doesn't work the way they think it does. It just takes a while for the world to catch up with them.

2 comments:

  1. Well, I have to say, as somebody who's about to turn 50, that while I'm technically at the tag end of the Baby Boom, I've always oathed everything to do with the '60s, and pretty much everything you've said about that generation is the diametrical opposite of what is true of me and my attitudes. But I do have to admit that I've always felt that my reincarnation from a previous life must have gotten lost in the mail or something, since my views generally seem to be those of an earlier time.

    And as for the idea that things have to get bad for people to realize the error of their ways (or at least I take it that that's what you mean), I think you're seriously overestimating the ability of people to learn from their mistakes or underestimating their unwillingness to assess their failings dispassionately. Everything I've noted in the past few years leads me to conclude that the sort of people you're talking about are completely delusional and view the world on the basis of their own preconceptions rather than forming opinions about how the world works on the basis of an objective assessment of what actually goes on.

    If you ask me, economics and demographics are going to combine for a major disaster in the next few years, and there's no stopping it. Until it's too late to fix things, those people are going to talk their way out of any admission that there even is a problem…

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  2. " I think you're seriously overestimating the ability of people to learn from their mistakes or underestimating their unwillingness to assess their failings dispassionately."

    I guess my base feeling is - the only way people learn things they don't want to is through pain. If only because humans are geared against feeling bad. It doesn't mean they learn the things you want them to.

    It's a fair assessment though. This issue is truly something I struggle with all the time. I still have family in government housing. I feel it's one of my biggest failures. That I couldn't find a way to convince them their thought belief was stopping them from having a better life. It wasn't that they didn't have opportunities - they won the lottery twice. But in
    the end, it's where they remain.

    Now that I'm older, I wonder if I wasted all that time trying to fix them. Maybe they are just happy as they are. If I gave them all my money, I bet they would eventually still wind up back in government housing.

    The thing that sucks is - they aren't malicious people. They are just simple people.

    It's always good to see you Keyser.

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