We have built up so much wealth in this society and automated so many things that we can afford to have about half the population of this country literally sit around and do nothing productive. And we've created a welfare / support system that takes care of people when they choose to sit on their asses. We have so much wealth that we can indulge idiotic ideas like political correctness and "profiling is bad" and even weave those ideas into our social fabric, all the time knowing that we're just holding our society back.
The "greatest generation" came out of WW2 and knew they had to work to make things better for themselves. And they did so. They worked hard and did so at a time when mechanization, industrialization and the concept of suburbs all came together at the right time. They started a juggernaut of progress and created the boomer generation, of which I'm one of the last of.
And we boomers took that golden opportunity and fucked it up beyond all recognition. Yeah, yeah, we did some great things. But really we squandered the unique opportunity in history that was presented to us. Future generations will judge us harshly, and they will be justified in doing so.
Posted 2/6/2012 2:47 pm
Greatest Generation nogs: knew their place and were civil. Gen Y nogs: flash mobs, riots, rapists and having a bunch of children called DeMarcus.
They got tricked into thinking the war in Europe was their business, and they allowed their leaders to create a situation in the Pacific that lead to war.
And social security was the biggest gimmiedat in the history of mankind.
Social Security was created in 1935. I doubt the "greatest generation," who would have been teenagers at the time, moaned and cried for that. The biggest gimmiedat for the post-war crowd was the GI Bill.
My dad was a doctor and paid literally millions into S.S. He gets a $1,200 check from them now. My aunt was a school principal who got to pay into a pension. She us getting like $5k a month from that.
I should have phrased that better. Until FDR, no one had the audacity to even attempt staying more than 2 terms. Washington and Jefferson even warned about it.
But stupid, gullible fucking "greatest" generation went right along like the good sheep they were.
Probably not 'millions', but your point is exactly right.
The very earliest SS recipients, on average, got out more than they put in, but that has since changed. I suppose you can argue that the poorer SS recipients are on a form of welfare if you look at the ROI. Medicare, of course, is the real deal in terms of freebies, 3/4 of it at least.
OTOH, no one can beat a government worker for gimmedats. It'll be hard to ever ratchet that down. The .gov employees are a ready made special interest group who are drawn from cohorts of the population (black women for example) that will fight tooth and nail for every penny they can steal.
Those people who get $5k/month pensions from the government, and I know quite a few who get double that, seem to have absolutely no clue how much an annuity like that is worth.
Posted 2/6/2012 3:37 pm
A lot of trends converged simultaneously. The status of blacks in the US was a cauldron that had to boil over eventually, and when it ended up happening at the same time as a deeply controversial war a lot of other social issues were able to piggy back along and we ended up having this whole cultural upheaval that in retrospect has proven to be almost entirely bad. It was basically a rout of traditional civic minded values by an entirely new self-centered value system based on essentially people doing whatever the hell they wanted.
Then there was the explosion of productivity and wealth that happened from the 1940s - 1990s. The end result of that has been, like the poster above said, that a huge portion of the population is now able to be carried along doing nothing. The young were the obvious beneficiaries of this, with childhood now extending out to anywhere from 20 or so to as late as 30, where up to WWII childhood for most people was basically over sometime around puberty.
And then there's technology. Gaming turned this generation into a generation of layabouts, while porn and social media has further eroded what little morals they already had in place.
Posted 2/6/2012 3:43 pm
You do realize that without ADOLF HITLER the so-called greatest generation would have been nothing more than Depression-era losers.
There are WWII-gen people who have been retired for the past 30 years. They've sat on their asses doing nothing productive for 30 years, and in many cases they were physically able to work into their 70s. I don't think even FDR envisioned that.
