12 thoughts on “Ruining America”

  1. …but yes, my generation has been awful, compared to our parents’ generation.

    We had a tough act to follow, Rand.

      1. You realize that we’re now free to self-identify as a different age group and escape all blame?

  2. “Not me, personally, ”

    Yeah, every Boomer says that, and believes it.

    And yet here we find ourselves in a morass – social, political, economic, technological, educational, the list goes on.

    But no one is responsible.

    [though to be fair the Silent Gen has more than its fair share of responsibility for where we are, they just had to work in the shadows unrecognized, as the Boomers have been hogging the limelight basically from their diaper days to the present]

  3. My view is that the article spends too much time on blame and not enough time on the dynamics that lead to this situation. No generation has shown a propensity to act more responsibly on this matter.

    What it looks to me like is the natural human tendency to protect what we have at any cost (including losing the things we’re trying to protect). Much of the spending, the law enforcement theater, and the regulation is to protect ourselves from dangers, real and imagined.

    But why in the past half century did such pursuit of security suddenly entail so much government interference? I think it’s a combination of a huge government (due to huge expansion of the US federal government during the Second World War) suddenly available as a convenient hammer for all problems, combined with the unifying and controlling presence of TV, which was able to push the various ideologies of the elite onto everyone else.

  4. As others have noted, the Boomers (including me) didn’t emerge full blown from nothingness. Among other things, the socialist educational enterprise was under construction as we grew up, so it caught us at some point. For example, “New Math” suddenly appeared where I went to school (Prince William County, VA) when I was in the 7th grade. I’m 68 now. And then, who created the TV propaganda that filled our heads. I laughed right along with all my pals at “All in the Family” and that horrible bigot Archie Bunker. On later did I watch it again and note the horrible bigot worked two jobs (loading dock days and cab driver nights) to support a non-working wife, a non-working daughter, and her unemployed husband. Who created that propaganda? Norman Lear, born in 1922, a WW2 hero and survivor of 50 bombing raids over Germany. You could easily come up with a fairly short list of men (and a few women) who created the Boomers, with their own ends in mind. As for the blame that accrues to individual Boomers. most people are sheep, and the sheep very rarely look up.

    The other point is, when I look around the Interdweebz, most of the people I see bleating about Boomers are bitter, middle-aged GenXers (what we used to call Slackers, iirc) who think they were somehow deprived of their rightful glory by the Boomers and now the Millennials. And lets not forget a single indiotic book called “Generations” is responsible for this silliness.

    Every generation produces its own cadre of evil influencers and legions of hapless sheep.

    1. And by the sequel Archie had become a business owner. I might be giving Lear too much credit but I figure he was subtly subverting the overt narrative.

    2. Say what you will about Archie Bunker, but if he was so bad Democrats wouldn’t be letting a million more versions of him pour across the Southern border. An ADL survey of anti-Semitism found that 39% of foreign-born Hispanics buy into anti-Semitic tropes, versus 9% of whites, which is even worse than the overall US in the 1960’s. Other surveys say Hispanic views of blacks would fit right in with the views of Southern whites in the 1950’s, if not earlier.

      If it’s racist to oppose open immigration, then it’s racist to criticize Archie Bunker’s social views.

      I’ve used that basic premise in a variety of amusing ways in online debates, like “Well, you know, at the last Klan rally me and the other old coots were worried that we were going to run out of new recruits. The future leaked bleak, and there was a real prospect that America would run completely out of unrepentant racists. We can’t thank you enough for sending us an whole new supply, ensuring that we have another hundred years of overt bigotry and glorious racial violence!”

      The other day I was debating liberals over the recent “concentration camp” dust up, and I mentioned that Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador combined don’t have enough remaining Jews (their total is 250) to fill the studio audience on The Price is Right. I would bet that much of Latin America, if polled about the Spanish Inquisition, would rate it as “largely successful.”

      But the border crisis gives Democrats a momentary excuse to compare Republicans to Nazis, so I guess they’re fine with the mass importation of people who will drag the Democrat party back to the 1950’s. I’m sure they’ll turn around and blame Republicans for all of the negative ramifications of their current stance, since they’re so good at denying responsibility for anything they’ve ever done.

      “If anything bad happens because of our idiotic posturing, just remember that we’ll get to blame it on the GOP, like we do with the Civil War and Jim Crow.”

  5. I have bad news for you ‘all. Society is always in decline. Your descendants will never measure up to you. Never. The founding fathers created the greatest country in history. And we almost lost it several times. War of 1812, civil war, ww1, ww2, cold war. The wolf is always at the door. But saying boomers ruined it, (not you of course), is some self-righteous reflection of what you see today compared to what you think happened when you grew up. Prosperity never looks good in the present. It always looks better in hindsight. We are richer now than anyone has ever been. We are freer than anyone has ever been. We’re fatter too, but that is because more people can afford excess food. Will our problems destroy us? We don’t know. I hope not. But we will not lose our great experiment because we failed the next generation. That die is already cast. They quit listening to us when they realized we were full of it. They will probably do even better than we did.

    1. Mistakes were made. But you couldn’t expect the other countries not to recover from the damages of WW2. Which is basically what happened. If anything in the US the pendulum has swung too much the other way. The labor rights movement was squashed. I think that is the main reason for why the US worker on average is worse off. No I am not kidding. There is an incommensurate power differential between the average worker and the average corporation and with increased automation the concentration of capital also increased.
      While this allows people like Elon Musk to do SpaceX, much like the Robber Barons of the XIXth century built the Transcontinental Railroad you have to accept that with it comes severe inequality.

      If you do not have a middle class lifestyle then the Steve Jobs, Wozniak and the like working on their garage won’t happen.

      Wozniak did the original Apple computer back when he was working at HP on his spare time using (insignificant) company resources.

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