Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations (i.e. The Baby Boomers) are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
Why buy the cow when you can milk the neighbor's cow for free?
The sexual revolution ushered in a "quick fix" for carnal desires. Add to that no fault divorce. Society is emotionally stunted.
They're waiting for their boomer parents to die so they can recoup whatever is left of what the boomers stole from them.
I think there’s more to this trend than the author’s thesis. Specifically, economic success.
Why strive so hard to pay the psychological price for adulthood if success through everlasting childhood is all but guaranteed? Isn’t this a virtual inevitability of success, that the population will find some kind of equilibrium between progress and self sacrifice? When the vast majority can drift through 12-16 years of school and a light career on into a nice home, family and leisure, I’d be surprised if most didn’t refuse to grow up.
I take it a step further and propose that most adult children know vaguely what they’re doing and seek out others that are doing the same - kind of an unspoken understanding.
Keeper.
What If There Are No Adults?
You get the Clintons.
Hope I die before I get old, talkin bout my generation...
The sooner the baby boomer generation is in the ground as worm food, the sooner the world will return to reality. Pandered to their entire lives they have done more to mess up the world than ANY generation before them.
Wild In The Streets
Never trust any one over 30
It's not just Americans who have this problem.
IMHO, many (if not all) of the homicide bombers are stunted individuals. Angry at the world, feeling "entitled" to honor & glory, and simply bored with mundane, secular reponsibility, they choose what they perceive as a glamorous exit strategy with which they can express themselves.
Arabs don't have a monopoly on these kind of people. Think of Columbine. Those kids wanted to die famous. I see suicide chic in a lot of people's futures.
A Baby Boomer calling Gen X and Gen Y immature children. This is bad comedy.
The reason for it, as several posters have commented, is economic surplus, and this cycle of it began during the Great Depression. There are, in fact, no real sharp lines of demarcation between generations (you don't find years when nobody had any children) but there are between social attitudes.
The parental drive for a better life for their children is as old as humanity, and is one principal reason why anyone bothered to come to America in the first place. It is an extremely positive social attitude. When that encounters a time of real stress such as the Great Depression (or the Civil War, or the Black Death) it becomes unrestrained by the idea that perhaps one might be making things unhealthily good for one's children - that would be impossible. But in a multigenerational period of plenty it isn't impossible at all.
There's nothing wrong with such things as excessive behaviors, loud music, or radical politics, but it is immature to submerge oneself in them, just as there's nothing wrong with tapioca pudding but if you swim in it you're likely to get fat.
This is hardly surprising. It is the primary philosophical/ideological conflict in Western civilization since the late eighteenth century: the conflict between traditionalist culture and Romantic culture. It is one of the things I highlight in my Literature course.
All ideologies or philosophies are based on assumptions. Even the most basic logical structures (the syllogism: If A=B & B=C then A=C) depend on premises for their conclusions. Go back far enough in the logical process, and the premises have to be assumed, rather than proved. This tends to be one of the bases for the evolution vs. creationism arguments... the premises that they start from makes any agreement on conclusions impossible.
For most of the history of the West, certain premises about the fundamental nature of human beings have prevailed. Traditional culture began from the basic belief that humanity is born in sin, or fundamentally flawed with the capacity for evil. Part of this assumption is based on Judeo-Christian religious values (see "original sin"). When you assume this about humanity, certain attitudes and beliefs MUST follow. If humanity is fallen, then the job of parents becomes one of training children to be proper adults (restricting their natural "evil" impulses), and the job of society is to protect its citizens from the harm that may inflict upon each other. The Founding Fathers subscribed to this view, as they based our government on the belief that no one could be trust with power... that we are all imperfect and flawed beings.
However, starting with Jean Jacques Rousseau, and finding a powerful voice through poets and philosophers in Europe, another culture grew to challenge traditionalist culture. It started from the basic assumption that man was a tabula rasa, a clean slate, and that a child represented true innocence. Once you assume this, you must then logically progress to views that hold (as did Rousseau) that it was adults (who had been unfortunately warped by their maturation) and the society that they built that robs children of their innocence (hence the "noble" savage of Romantic literature... unwarped by "modern" culture). So, unlike the traditionalist who sees the primary purpose of childhood to be to prepare the child for his life as an adult, the Romantic saw childhood as a time of innocence that every person should aspire to return to.
Or, in brief, to call a liberal (the lineal descendants of the Romantics) child-like is a compliment to them... they see children as being the purest of beings. This is why emotion is so important to them, as it is the primary decision-making tool of a child. And it is why we constantly look at liberals and want to tell them to "grow up"...
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Mark and a Mama Fred ping to my sweetie
Because the parents never grew up. Therefore, they never led by example and now their kids are permanently handicapped.
Nothing hurts like the truth!