Posted on 03/03/2019 2:51:27 PM PST by huckfillary
Accountability is an ethical issue. But it’s also a psychological one.
When you go through life never being held accountable, it impairs you psychologically. You might have otherwise been a decent, rational person. But when everyone walks around on eggshells about your feelings — never questioning or challenging you in any way — then it creates an unrealistic bubble around your mind and life.
Some people are more emotional than others. Some are more sensitive than others. We don’t really know why, but that’s how it is. Being more sensitive is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, deeper and more reflective thinkers probably FEEL more too, since feelings arise from thoughts.
However, if you create an atmosphere where people are accustomed to assuming all their feelings are valid, and must be paid attention to, merely because they have them, then you consequently create … well, look around you. It’s an aura of shallowness, superficiality, narcissism and self-centeredness that all arises from one thing: The false conviction that feelings are automatically and always valid.
Sadly, we have a real-life laboratory to provide support for my assertion. Going back to the early 1990s, I wrote about the dangers of telling children that their feelings were valid, their feelings represent who they are, and they have a RIGHT to their feelings and emotions above all else. I suggested that if you raise children to believe these things, they will turn into monsters. And isn’t that what we’re seeing today, with Generation Snowflake, the irrational turn to socialism, the whiny and unsustainable turning of everything and everyone into a victim? These are now the normal and to-be-expected cultural, psychological trends — in the younger generation more than anywhere else.
What the hell happened? I wrote about it decades ago. Nobody listened then. Today more are aware of the problem and willing to articulate it. But government schools and parents remain largely paralyzed by the problem. If your kid FEELS something, then it must be so. And if you fail to make it so, then you’re guilty of emotional abuse.
Imagine the West having been won with this attitude. Imagine the frontier of America having evolved into the utterly livable, twenty-first century place it is today if most children had been raised to believe their feelings are all that matter. Would we ever have had the automobile, the airplane, the computer technology and advanced state of medicine we know today? Highly doubtful.
So what does that mean for where we are going? Feelings and rational facts are not the same thing. Your feelings do NOT make you special, right or anything in particular. Your feelings are not an achievement. Feelings come from your underlying ideas and beliefs. Those ideas and beliefs are rational or crazy, sustainable or intolerable. It’s up to YOU to figure this out, and to allow others in your life to provide feedback.
Otherwise, you’ll end up like so many people today, especially, I’m sorry to say, so many of the younger ones: Unaccountable snowflakes.
Generation snowflake....What VDH or someone I can’t exactly remember who said last night on Fox; “We raised an entire generation that learned their rights but not their responsibilities.
Wish I could remember the exact quote but it was perfect.
“psychologically” - stimulus, response, reinforcement is still a major inescapable part of life - you make some response in the presence of certain stimuli and get some sort of reinforcement - praise or punishment in the simplest terms - that tend to strengthen or weaken the response - get the wrong response and reinforcement hooked up with each other, or maybe worse, not at all, and chaos can result.....
A clear-cut case of our chickens coming home to roost.
Modern educational theory with the insane self-esteem nonsense requiring teachers to treat students like they are fragile, creative geniuses for all their lives has consequences.
Add the insane love affair in public education with the cooperative learning method, where students always work in groups to quell competition and hide deficiencies in members of the group guarantees a generation of snowflakes.
The snowflake narcissism is reflected in the language.
It used to be when you heard an opinion, it would be, “I think that...”
Now you hear, “I feel that...”
Don’t even get me started on the incipid phrase, “Reach out to...”
Aka “generation safe space”
The below essay has helped me clarify my own thinking about those who have become the dominate individuals of my generation.
I am among the first of the Baby Boomers, graduating high school in 1964, and consider the Snowflakes a product of the feeble attempt at maturity by the most popular and influential part of my generation. The below essay explains my position.
Celebrating Woodstock highlights the worst generation this country produced until it formed breeding pairs. The Baby Boomer vision ignored those qualities which made the United States the Arsenal of Democracy. Their parents were the Greatest Generation, but too few looked to emulate the noble character traits that saw their parents through the Depression and WW II.
These same parents were responsible to the extent they applied the misguided teachings of Dr. Spock. His definition of common sense could not balance love and affection with standards for behavior, self-control, and respect. For too many parents, common sense meant providing every advantage they had missed. In the process of catering to children’s feelings and preferences, they raised defiant, narcissistic offspring who viewed gratification as a right. Rather than examples to emulate, parents were merely vending machines required to fulfill material desires during a time of unimagined plenty.
These Boomers grew up with an unprecedented focus on self. With them the divorce rate first exceeded the marriage rate, and there was first enacted a Federal Support Enforcement program to track deadbeat dads. Prior to the 60’s, syphilis and gonorrhea were the widely known venereal diseases, but the virulent strains exploded until only professionals could keep track. This generation achieved self-actualization through moral exhibitionism and militant self-absorption.
These Boomers adopted civil rights as their signature cause once the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law and expressed a popular virtue. This law was enacted just as the first Boomers graduated from high school, and therefore provided them numerous opportunities to express costless compassion. The generations which achieved maturity in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s were those that triumphed for human rights against formidable opposition.
The Vietnam War gave the Baby Boomer generation a chance to sacrifice in a noble cause. Because here a small country (including ethnic Chinese, Catholic Vietnamese and others fleeing Communism), and newly free from colonial rule, sought United States help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor (Tonkinese) bent on conquest. Instead many chose to distance themselves from those adult realities by calling this fight an immoral war, and thereby implying that they would be the first to volunteer for a moral war, which of course is an oxymoron.
The WW II veterans who were their fathers and grandfathers, related to these children through reticence or stories that service can only be a duty. Instead of recognizing their turn had come, the Woodstock children sought safety by choosing to regard the war as an unjust, barbaric imposition. Jane Fonda and John Kerry were there to affirm this delusion by leading the swarm which regarded those who served as lunatic, drug addicted, baby killing, fascist pigs.
When the Woodstock generation obtained positions of power they sought policies of moral diversity/perversity and material comfort to transform the country into just another Gulag of apostasy, greed, and dependency. As they look to retirement, Boomers demand continuation of unsustainable entitlements in a manner freeing them from financial worries, from any need to care for their neighbor, and from facing the specter of national bankruptcy.
Worse than their simple existence is that they begat through multi-generational psychological incest a legacy of ideologically mutant children and grandchildren. These Woodstock offspring have become popularly known as the “Snowflakes” of present times. These descendants are contra-educated to abhor the Constitution, the virtuous and valorous founding of our country, and classical liberal principles found in values of the Enlightenment. They are perpetual children; are without essential humanity; empty, ignorant, feckless, emotional, overactive, and under challenged.
It seems to me they suffer from SISD or Self-Induced Stress Disorder.
The worst generation in American history still refuses to grow up.
https://spectator.org/278662-2/?utm_source=American+Spectator+Emails&utm_campaign=dc1d0007f3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-dc1d0007f3-104520165
Benjamin Spock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Spock
HOW DR. SPOCK DESTROYED AMERICA
http://www.wnd.com/2009/01/87179/
Your Help is Needed - Consider Sponsoring a Millennial Today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGvrmltfMrA
I totally understand that however, I’m at the very very very end of the baby boomer generation. Dad was a cop, mom did what she could. No real money but values were instilled. I worked from age 12 on, as did my siblings. Family was uber important. The boomers noted in your post were mostly the offspring of “college educated”, gimme dat, change the world” liberals. They still don’t understand how the world works and keep trying to mold the world into the false vision that’s been beat into them.
That said, millennials have taken their place. Except now, there’s no real knowledge outside of google for them.
“When the Woodstock generation...”
What about the Viet Nam War generation (occurring alongside the “Woodstock Generation”)? At the height of the Viet Nam war there were about 200 deaths a week and most of them were draftees.
All in all, the article is stupid. There had never been a generation that was all good or all bad.
Goes even deeper than that. It also forgets Gen X (that’s OK, everyone ELSE does, LOL). Gen X was kind of like the first, failed science experiment of the Boomers. Tossed aside like trash, and left to raise ourselves (hence ‘latchkey generation’), the Millennials were the second attempt to ‘get it right’. The salvation for a lot of us Gen Xers was that our Greatest Generation grandparents were mostly still alive, and were willing to teach us the things our absent, self-absorbed Boomer parents were too “busy” to.
It goes back to the ‘90’s with teachers using colors other than red to correct school work.
Everybody gets a ribbon/trophy for participating.
Can not have your peers pick or not pick you for a team, etc.
Yep. In a word: liberalism.
The response I have and use over and over is:
Everyone is responsible for their own emotional content.
No one else.
Total crap. This is another writer equating Hollywood’s image of the Woodstock/Easy Rider Boomer to a generation that has nothing in common with that image. I’m a boomer and can tell you none of siblings, relatives or friends have anything in common with what Hollywood has sold for years as the sex, drug and rock and roll boomers. Millennials’ as a group are the most self absorbed, worthless generation I’ve ever encountered and the Left needs an excuse for creating it with their progressive values and educational system, so blame it on their imaginary drug addled, America hating Boomers. The only thing I know that Boomers can be blamed for is needing both parents to work to pay the bills this leaving their kids to be raised by day care workers and the public school system
The story that Vietnam was a war in which draftees were the bulk of those killed is not true. Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers, but two thirds of those who served in WW II were drafted. Approximately 70% of those killed were volunteers. Many men volunteered for the draft so even some of the draftees were actually volunteers. The below link provides many other historical facts.
Statistics about the Vietnam War (scroll down and hit words beside History Channel logo)
http://www.vhfcn.org/
Ronald Reagan gave the best summation of the Vietnam experience when he said “ours (mine) was a noble cause. A small country (including ethnic Chinese, Catholic Vietnamese and others fleeing Communism) newly free from colonial rule sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor (Tonkinese) bent on conquest. He said that to consider it otherwise dishonored the memory of over 58,000 who died in the cause.
I never really identified with my Boomer Generation. By junior high I was playing golf with men of the Greatest Generation. I was around men who flew in the Flighting Tigers, climbed Pointe de Hoc on D-Day, landed in North Africa and Sicily, cleared surf obstacles in the Pacific with the first UDT teams, etc. They are the people I could identify with, so when my turn came, I volunteered. If they and their parents could make it through the Depression and WW II, I could certainly handle a few years of military service.
I would consider these people great, because of what they successfully endured. Now millennials are staggered by micro-aggressions like ants befuddled by a leaf falling into their path.
“Two thirds of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers, but two thirds of those who served in WW II were drafted.”
Well then, you undermine your own point. Vietnam War soldiers were more patriotic than those in WWII.
“Instead many chose to distance themselves from those adult realities by calling this fight an immoral war.”
No at all. The point of my post was directed to the popular direction of mine and subsequent generations. We who served have always been at least irrelevant, but most often have been regarded as lunatic, drug addicted, baby-killing, fascist pigs.
I think you directed your post to the wrong person.
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