Only our Bill of Rights makes this possible.
Posted on 09/03/2019 10:14:51 PM PDT by Windflier
"College Student: My Generation Is Blind to the Prosperity around Us”
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of political candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around. I see people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it.
Vehicles, food, technology, freedom to associate with whom we choose. These things are so ingrained in our American way of life we don’t give them a second thought. We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards.
Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, “An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.” Never saw American prosperity! Let that sink in.
When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity. I know this first hand, I went to college, let’s just say I didn’t have the popular opinion, but I digress.
Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism. Why?
The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the great depression, or live through two world wars, the Korean War, The Vietnam War or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague.
“We don’t know what it’s like to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones.”
Part of it is the fault of parents. For example, my kids, when they were growing up, didn’t have internet access or smartphones (and obviously not cars), or X-box’s or anything else other than the type of toys I grew up with. Sure, they would hang out with other kids and do those things...but that was the exception.
But they did grow up, and once they were 18 and earning their own money, they were free to do as they wished, but in now way were they harmed by this lack of access to ‘technology’. If anything, it helped keep their heads clear so that they could actually have ‘normal’ childhoods - compared to a lot of the monsters we have now.
There’s a Nokomis in SW Florida.
I met a guy that had rode motorcycles around the world. He said the happiest people he ever met were folks in the middle of Africa with barely anything.
Of course being in the middle of nowhere with nothing probably kept them out of Civil Wars and tribal warfare.
Thankfulness and Humility ..... two human characteristics of true nobility that the latest generations lack. This article merely details a new kind of ‘woke’ that previous generations understood is sorely lacking in todays world.
On the shores of Gitche Gumi
By the shining big sea waters
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis...
prosperity breeds insanity.
Re poor and fat. A few years ago I lost 40 lbs in four months. I ate black beans, rice, hamburger meat, eggs, and seasonal fruits and vegetables. My waistline shrank and my ban account grew.
One can definitely eat healthy on a budget.
It does refer to Minnecraponus.
BS. Decent healthy food is cheap. Never has it been so easy to get nutrients. They’re fat because free money and broad options give them that choice.
See @ABuckAPlate on Twitter.
Queue Monty Python, “what have the Romans ever done for us” skit.
Those things make all the difference.
Makes clear poverty is a choice.
” I know engineers and actuarial scientists who cannot afford to live without room mates into their early 30s.”
Where do these people live?
their actual living standard in general is like Eastern Europe under Communism
No, not even close. I have relatives who lived in Eastern Europe under communism. No hope, no future, no prosepects, barely enough necesities to survive. But members of the communuist party lived like kings.
They will notice when it’s gone.
It’s hard to make a living as a professional protester or whiner.
There’s more opportunity today than ever. All they have to do is work, but that is anathema to many millennials.
“Eastern Europe under Communism”
Baloney.
If they live in hideously expensive places sipping $5 lattes daily etc, yeah they may lack accumulated wealth.
But they’re far better off than Eastern Europe under Communism. They’ve bought into the lie that things cost as much as they are able to spend, and that life is barely worth living without product X. Communism had no variety, reliability, nor motive. These millennials look at a grocery aisle with >300 cereals and whine “they don’t have what I want”, where communism escapees have mental breakdowns over the astounding abundance.
They can live on healthy food for $1/meal.
They have infinite variety shipped to their door.
They can move to cheap housing easy.
They can get an education in anything for near free.
If someone is living “like Eastern Europe under Communism” it’s because they choose to.
Only our Bill of Rights makes this possible.
That’s funny, I immediately thought of Nokomis Florida, but that’s not exactly a hot bed of liberal discontent, lol.
Food can be a drug in its own right.
Nonsense. Good, nutritional food is cheaper than the food people get fat on.
Poor people get fat for the same reasons everyone else does: because they're lazy and impulsive -- lacking in self-discipline. And the very fact that anybody can become not only overweight but actually obese regardless of income is a miracle of modern, petroleum-fueled capitalism.
Blaming so-called poverty for fatness would have been laughed at by anybody living during the past 10,000 years. "Imagine that: fat poor people!"
It's a perfect example of blindness to the incredible prosperity the author writes about.
This is all obviously extremely hypothetical to you; you have zero interaction with poor people, don’t you?
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