Posted on 08/16/2007 4:00:16 PM PDT by qam1
Collapse of the subprime mortgage market reflects the "don't trust anybody over 30" mentality of the Baby Boomers.
From 1605 until the late 1960s, Americans universally subscribed to Benjamin Franklin's maxim,"A penny saved is a penny earned." Since the Baby Boomer student anarchism of the late 1960s and 1970s, we have become a nation, on balance, worshiping infantile, instant, hedonistic gratification.
Liberals’ ideas about “values” have to do with the absence of personal restraints and with material goods and services, which is what the welfare state is all about. Values for the colonists were the elements of spiritual morality, the intangible qualities that differentiated humans from other animals.
The values of 1776 preached individual self-restraint, self-reliance, and hard work for the future of one’s family. Liberal values give us what has been called a juvenocracy, a society dominated by the heedless pursuit of instant gratification that is characteristic of inexperienced youth: devil take the hindmost; eat, drink, and be merry.
The current generation are less to blame than their Baby Boomer teachers who fancied themselves so smart that they didn't need education. Their mission was to take control of universities, eradicate the classical curriculum that transmitted the values of Western civilization, and to replace it with "relevant" subjects, i.e., the ideology of socialism's revolutionary social justice.
That brand of social justice preaches that everyone is entitled, indeed has a Constitutional right, to an equal share of society's goods and services, without having first to work and save to acquire the objects of their desires.
Yes, unsophisticated home buyers failed to understand what would happen to mortgage payments when interest rates rose. But more fundamentally, they failed to grasp that jobs can be lost, and anticipated salary increases might not come to pass; that elementary prudence demands having the wherewithal to pay before your buy, as well as having a cash reserve to carry you over emergency periods. Schooled by Baby Boomer "respected educators," they believed that it is their right to indulge to any extent and rely upon the Federal government to bail them out.
What I wrote in A Divided Nation Without God applies to our economic juvenocracy. In Beyond Good and Evil (1885), speaking of the ethos prevailing in Western Europe (what we witness today in the United States as a cultural war between Judeo-Christian traditionalists and liberal-progressive, atheistic materialists), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
Anarchists in 1885 were savagely antagonistic to this [original laissez-faire] liberal faith in “progress”
...and even more to the bungling philosophasters and brotherhood-visionaries who call themselves Socialists and desire a “free society” – but in actuality the anarchists are of the same breed, of the same thorough and instinctive hostility against any social structure other than that of the “autonomous” herd (they go so far as to reject the concepts of “master” and “servant” – [Neither God nor Master] is one of the Socialist slogans)...
...they are one in their faith in the morality of commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself, as though it were the summit, the attained summit of mankind, the only hope for the future, the consolation of the living, the great deliverance from all the guilt of yore – they are all one in their faith in fellowship as that which will deliver them, their faith in the herd, in other words, in “themselves”...
Nietzsche could easily have been describing today’s “educated” young people coming out of our colleges and universities, having been thoroughly inculcated with the anti-American, atheistic, and philosophically materialistic religious views of the Vietnam War Baby-Boomers who infest academia’s professoriats.
As many other observers have noted, our short-changed young graduates have been led to believe that universal indulgence in narcotics, sexual promiscuity, and rebellion against the nation’s founding traditions constitutes individuality: Nietzsche’s herd-mentality. Conformity to the latest media-communicated fad in dress, entertainment, and social justice ideas is “individuality.” The media bombard us with images of youth, turning society into an immature juvenocracy that worships only that which is novel and consciously rejects the wisdom of experience in past ages.
Nietzsche’s “commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself” is the doctrine enunciated by our first socialist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – truth is whatever wins out in the public market, whatever viewpoint the media can create in the minds of the majority of citizens.
Conspicuously absent is any sense of personal responsibility.
Blaming mortgage brokers for the subprime collapse is like blaming alcoholism on the distillers.
tl;dr
I’m in mid-Michigan also. The only folks I know around here who come under the heading of “free love, flower children, commune living hippies that never outgrew that era” are the profs at MSU—and very, very few of them are from this area. There are plenty of GenXers and GenYers who would fit the bill, but very few Boomers.
I'm sick of this BS about the boomers being "evil narcissists" and their parents being heroes (the WWII generation had plenty of socialists and racists too, and gave us Democratic dominance from the 1950s-early 90s).
BRAVO to your comment #4. Wasn’t Richard Pryor in “Wild in the Streets” or was it the “Strawberry Statement” I’m thinking of?
Yeah, don't get me started on how they want to corrupt our "precious bodily fluids."
review
Pryor was in Wild in the Streets...big movie then, silly now.
I could see this coming during the 1980s. Today’s creaky boomers were doing coke and driving Beemers, buying espresso machines and going gaga over “The Big Chill” and “30something.” I realize this is a broad brush, only applicable to well edumacated, middle to upper class boomers, the working class ones were and are different (mostly, due to fighting in Vietnam, or, at least, having accepted the possibility of fighting overseas between ‘75 and say, ‘80, due to other issues). That yuppie mentality now reaps its bitter harvest.
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