- A prosperous fool is a grievous burden.
--Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
Perhaps that is the epitaph history will scratch on the
headstone of the Baby Boomer generation. I suspect that it applies equally to all of us
at one time or another in our lives: folly seems innate to the human race.
But I wonder if there isn't something special about my particular
generation -- an attraction to folly that has caused it to so quickly
annul the marriage between humanity and history?
Only a self-absorbed and ignorant generation could imagine that the
laws of the moral and physical universe -- so painfully revealed through
experience to previous generations -- have been altered or abolished
solely for their comfort. But then, what a relief it must be to sleep
well at night because one actually believes that in the "new economy,"
fueled by technology and the Internet, gently watered by Alan
Greenspan's interest rate adjustments, the stock market can only go up.
This is believed by large numbers of people, despite the fact that
30-some millions of our potentially productive citizens were disposed of
for convenience sake, before they ever had the opportunity to produce a
single widget, or push one share of stock up one single cent. It is
believed, despite the fact that our elementary and secondary educational
systems consistently rank as mediocre against the rest of the world. Yet
we continue to elect government monopolists bent on protecting their
power and pay at the expense of our children and families -- and the
ability of future generations to become productive producers. It is
believed, despite the fact that the Internet's technology, combined with
corporate consolidation and globalization, relentlessly drives down the
price of goods and services, thus reducing the wages everywhere in the
world of those very people who are expected to buy our products and
services.
Similarly, the mega-merger of truth into falsehood, which splintered
the moral universe into a thousand points of confusion known as "your truth
and my truth," could only be accepted as fact by a generation that had
graduated from the world's most expensive and lowest common denominator
educational system.
The moral incompetence embraced by the learned experts running this
educational edifice has produced something called "zero tolerance,"
which punishes thought but denies intent. This is seen most clearly in
the drug and religious policies established by the educational
bureaucrats, wherein giving a classmate an aspirin for a headache is
punished the same as if one had passed on a syringe of heroine:
expulsion for both. It is seen in administrative rules that can
determine no difference between worshiping God and worshiping Satan, and
therefore insist upon treating both as beneficial to the student's
character development. It is seen in a generation that surveys the
carnage of Columbine, yet sees no difference between good and evil.
Finally, it is a generation that seems to have no worries about an
ever-expanding government bent upon curtailing our individual liberty to
make the invasive work of its bureaucratic army more convenient. Boomers
do not seem troubled by corruption among their leaders, the use of state
power to destroy those who disagree, or the sale of national defense
secrets to totalitarian regimes that despise the liberties we have built
our lives upon -- and who routinely deny such liberties to their own
people at the point of a gun, or under the tread of a tank. Apparently
it never occurs to them that when we have become weak enough, such tyrants
will seek to extend their rule over our lives, too.
But the laws under which we all live -- the ones that no congress or
parliament can legislate out of existence -- have not changed. The
moment the last buyer enters the stock market, the price will begin to decline.
Students who have learned political correctness instead of reading,
writing, science and mathematics will not produce tomorrow's
breakthrough products. Citizens who despise their inheritance of freedom
and elect those who agree with them, will not have long to wait to feel
the tyrant's gun pressed against their face and his heel on their throat.
And those who equate God with the devil will have an eternity stoking
the fires in the latter's company to contemplate their decision.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed: "There is but one thing
to be done, though how difficult! -- the foolish must become wise -- and
that they can never be. The value of life they never know; they see with
the outer eye but never with the mind, and praise the trivial because
the good is strange to them." And the prophet Jeremiah (17:11), writing in
the Old Testament, put it this way: "As the partridge sitteth on eggs,
and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right,
shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool."