Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Pearl Brady has a stable job with good benefits and holds two degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s. But despite her best efforts, she has no savings, and worries that it will be years before she manages to start putting away money for a house, children and eventually retirement. “I’m in that extremely nervous category,” said Ms. Brady, 28, a Brooklynite who works for a union. “I know how much money I’m going to be making for the near term. I hope in my 30s and 40s to be able to save, but I have no idea how....

A generation of Americans who embraced communal living in the 1960s is again considering that concept and other ways to coexist as they near retirement. This time, they’ve traded peace signs for dollar signs. “By force of sheer volume, the (baby boomers) who in 1968 thought they would change the world by 2028 actually will,” said Andrew Carle, founding director of the Program in Senior Housing Administration at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Over the next three decades, one in five U.S. citizens will turn 65 or older, Carle said. They’ll control more than half of the discretionary income,...

Thanksgiving is the holiday that pulls families together, squeezing them around a table for a feast of turkey, tradition and togetherness. We encourage conversations meant to be personally relevant, but sometimes they turn into a horizontal Babel, with each generation speaking in a different tongue. It's a stretch to identify an entire generation by its tastes in fashion and music, but such tastes offer strong clues. You can separate boomers from Generation Xers and millenials by who prefers the Beatles, Michael Jackson or Lady Gaga. Seniors who came of age during World War II still groove on Glenn Miller and...

When asked for their John Hancock, future generations might print it in block letters or scrawl some scribbles across the page. But odds are, they won't sign their name in cursive. They might not even be able to read it. Cursive, with its graceful loops and perfectly joined letters, seems soon to join the typewriter, VCR player and flip-phone as relics of a past age. Keyboarding skills, not cursive, were included in the Common Core, a set of national academic standards adopted last year by more than 40 states, including Florida.

I have often said to my mother, who is a baby boomer and liberal, that my generation (Gen X), would have to clean up the mess that her generation left behind. As time wears on, that statement rings more and more true.

What it is ain’t exactly clear…. That’s the impression I get when I talk to people of the 20 something generation. They know something’s not right. They know they are getting screwed, they just aren’t sure how or why. Blame the media for that. Blame our education system for that. Heck, we can even blame ourselves for that. But it’s all changing now. ....

Is the Sun going to enter a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas soon? Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct,...

In the first hour, Ian Punnett welcomes Paul Sperry, co-author of Muslim Mafia. Then, Ian is joined by historian Neil Howe to discuss his latest research on the defining generations of our time, and why those born after 1981 have vastly different relationships with their families and the workplace than those born earlier.

Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed "a generation gap in cynicism." Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree. No wonder, then, that GenNext responds to President Obama's call for "public service," roughly translated as "a federal paycheck."

The Political Gap That Divides Generations Susan Fikse, Issue Number 24, July 2009 Kim is a 25-year-old Christian, a nurse who graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. She voted for President Bush in 2004 and characterizes herself as pro-life. With just that information, it would be easy to categorize Kim as a conservative Republican. But in November, she cast her vote for Barack Obama. She was not alone.Survey data shows that while fewer than a quarter of white evangelicals between 30 and 64 supported Obama, that number increased to a third for white evangelicals under 30. Kim’s reasons for...

I was asked to write a brief history of the Church of the Incarnation, in Highlands. North Carolina, for a local magazine. The piece was intended to be about the building itself, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and was built in 1896. But you cannot research the history of a church without also researching the history of the people who brought that church into being. Of the dozen people who formed the congregation for this church, one was Sarah Whiteside Norton. She was the first non-native American child born in the Highlands area, the daughter of...

We’re Not Gen-X, We’re Gen-Reagan This is for everyone who was raised to believe that our young lives would soon end in a nuclear war, of mutually assured destruction, quivering under our school desks with President Reagan to thank for making the pink and gray tile on our classroom floors the last thing we would ever see. This is for those of us raised in the post-graduate, post-doctorate suburbs where Volkswagens and Volvos taught us that we “can’t hug our children with nuclear arms” and that “war is not healthy for children and other living things.” This is for the...

During the Thanksgiving holidays this year, Riley Parker, 7, of Portland, Ore., became the fifth generation Parker family member to kill a deer with the same gun - a .222 caliber Sako. Riley brought down this 8-point whitetail buck while hunting on family land near Camp Verde.

I guess I'm not the only one wishing Boomers would just shuffle off quietly to Hippie Valhalla. The whiniest, most self-absorbed generation is apparently wearing out its welcome among others as well. And with good reason. This is the generation that brought us Viagra commercials on TV during family hours, introducing our youngsters new and interesting phrases. This is the generation that mainstreamed porn, marketed slutwear to our daughters and encouraged our boys to be pimps. I know, boomers are not the authors of our current social dysfunctions, but they were the libertines who stormed Bastille, unleashing the corrosive social...

Iowa Caucus Results Show that 'Spin' is Out, Authenticity is In, as Presidential Candidates Must Match the Generational Characteristics of the Youth Vote NEW YORK, Jan. 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The victories of Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama with a good showing for John McCain in Iowa demonstrate that spin is out and authenticity is in, as Presidential candidates address the most important voting block in the 2008 race: Generations X and Y. "Some have overlooked what Iowans told us with certainty last night - a critical factor in this election is not race, religion, or gender, but speaking the language...

Baby Boomers Owe Young People an Apology   By Dennis PragerFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, December 04, 2007 http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1E5D04AE-14DA-4920-8F6A-1DCE01801277   We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list: First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood. We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the most decent places in world history, with media that...

A Conservative Dilemma I’m looking for answers! I had an interesting discussion with a middle-aged woman today. She had immigrated to the USA a couple decades back, is now a US citizen, and thinks herself a conservative. She wants to restore the USA to what it was a couple decades ago. I’ve got my agenda aimed at a much earlier era. The discussion led me to make a presumption. That presumption is that there are generational conservatives, and they are not so much looking to conserve, but to restore a past way of life. I’m wondering if anyone else sees...

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - UN chief Ban Ki-moon, opening a landmark summit on climate change, warned world leaders Monday they face condemnation by future generations if they fail to tackle greenhouse-gas pollution. "Climate change, and what we do about it, will define us, our era, and ultimately the global legacy we leave for future generations," the secretary general said. He demanded a breakthrough at a key conference taking place in Bali, Indonesia, in December. "The time for doubt has passed," said Ban, as he noted the grim 4th assessment on climate change by the United Nations' top scientific panel this...

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del., July 6, 2007 – America’s security has always rested on the backs of men and women willing to sacrifice whatever necessary to defend it. An old Japanese quote states, “A samurai should always be prepared for death – whether his own or someone else’s.” Like the samurai, U.S. servicemembers freely give their lives, faithfully serving as America’s avenger, wielding her mighty sword, in conflicts of the past and present. In every battle the nation has seen, heroes have shone as a beacon for others to follow. Below are the stories of four American heroes....

WASHINGTON (AP) _ Generation Next is more optimistic, more tolerant and more likely a Democratic voter than its predecessor, according to a new study. The group's tilt toward the Democratic Party is far different from the previous younger generation, known as Generation X, who grew up during the Reagan administration of the 1980s and was more inclined to support Republicans. ``This portends a significant political impact as they get more engaged,'' said Scott Keeter, a researcher from the Pew Research Center. ``If they carry their party leanings with them, that will make a big difference.'' Forty-eight percent of young adults...