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Good question.

Here’s my gut reaction: we all know that each successive generation instinctively rebels against their parents. It’s a natural part of establishing their own identities. Do you recall the stories in the ‘80’s about all the former hippies that had renounced the love generation and became “filthy capitalists”? I do.

So sometimes kids do the rebellion thing just to make a statement of independence and not as a well-reasoned, sober life-choice. Essentially they’re saying, “You’re not the boss of me”....before adopting the same yoke that we carried, and our folks carried. The yoke of responsibility, of work, and of achievement.

There has been an acceleration of this trend however, and that troubles me. When we were kids we grew our hair long and wore goofy clothes that we got from Goodwill. Guys who got tattoos were either servicemen (and their tattoos were innocuous) or 1%’rs who were outcasts from society.

Nowadays huge garish tattoos are the norm. Body piercing - often transfiguring - is rampant. It is no longer merely a protest - it is an open declaration that they don’t give a damn about you, about me, and especially about themselves. They are precluding their participation in society. What they do to themselves guarantees that, irrespective of what talents or skills they possess, they will qualify for only the bottom of the barrel of jobs.

And they don’t care.

The creeping malaise of entitlement has ensnared another generation - and to a degree even greater than the one that came before. I believe that it was taught in our Government Indoctrination centers. Kids were drilled with a constant mantra of insipid feel-good slogans like that idiot franken’s “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!”

They were taught that it was more important to feel good about themselves than to seek higher achievement. Boys were taught to be passive and compliant, and girls were taught to be assertive and brash - actions that served only to bring out the worst attributes in both. They were inculcated with passivity and indolence. If you just quietly wait in line you’ll get whatever you need.

They were fed a steady diet of dreck like The Simpsons where one learns such pearls of wisdom as, “If something is to hard to do, then it’s not worth doing.”

More than any previous generation they were handed everything on a silver platter and not even asked to take out the trash. In terms of recipes for disaster I think that we managed to concoct the perfect one. How could it not crash?

Margaret Thatcher once warned, “The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” It was true then and the principle still rings true now. I believe that we are now poised to find out exactly what Maggie was warning us about. And I wonder how (if?!) the current generation will deal with the End Of Life As We Know It?

Pardon the ramble ;-)