OK, boomer. I hate to make generalizations, but it’s time to admit it: Your generation and the generation you raised are failures.
The generation that gave birth to you sacrificed personal comfort, defeated fascism, held the line against red fascism, conquered polio, fought (and beat) Jim Crow, built the greatest economy and a broad-based prosperity unlike anything the world had ever known, and did it all to honor its (and our) forebears. For this it earned the sobriquet The Greatest Generation.
Today, our society’s leaders – cultural, political and otherwise – have forgotten about free speech and free discussion. Media barons who control discourse in our country on a scale never before imagined openly censor information they dislike without a second thought to bedrock traditional values such as free speech. Meanwhile, the majority of the minions – us – living under these barons crave nothing more than “safety” from the discomfort of confronting discordant views or having to think for ourselves.
In the name of safety, be it from disease or dis-ease, we willingly forget and forgo bedrock values of Western civilization. Fearing a virus that by all measures poses less of a risk to young people than numerous maladies endemic to society, we submit to a medical tyranny. Like the ancient worshipers of Baal and Moloch, to placate an invisible terror we sacrifice our youngest.
The “Me” generation that opposed a never-ending war in Vietnam and the COINTELPRO abuses of the national security state now feeds sons and daughters to a military industrial complex that profits from endless wars around the world, and ignores the machinations of secret intelligence operatives who subvert elected government.
The broad-based prosperity that distinguished America from other industrial societies has given way to a concentration of power and ownership previous generations would not tolerate.
That is another spectacular failure that can be chalked up to the current generation and its parents, and a crucial one.
Neither the outsourcing of American industry nor the gagging of free speech could have happened without the concentration of ownership of our country’s assets.
Small businesses have been crushed beneath big-box stores and their online equivalent, Amazon. These giants would rather hire Third World slaves than buy and hire American. Newspapers are as dead as the dodo, bled of their lifeblood – advertising revenue – by Google, Facebook and Twitter, the evil triplets who would now shape our thoughts to their liking. Independent broadcasters and studios were snuffed out by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, championed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the first boomers to reach the White House.
The boomers dreamed of a new electronic frontier where massive information power from personal computers and the internet would spawn individual freedom and direct democracy. The dreamers refuse to wake up (are they paid to sleep?) and recognize these machines have enabled totalitarianism and groupthink on a scale previously unimaginable. And it is not just in far off Communist China. The social credit score system is alive and well in American with the likes of Zuckerberg and Dorsey imposing their code on what we can read and share and who can exchange money.
The hubris of the boomers’ children, our techno overlords, is unlimited. Forsaking faith in an Unknowable Intelligence, their confidence in their own intelligence is unlimited. They actually believe the machines they invent are more perfect than the crooked timber that invented them. Are they ignorant of the old maxim Garbage In, Garbage Out? Like good progressive totalitarians who believe “experts” have made democracy obsolete, this generation places its faith in infallible technology, a Savior Machine.
The generation that railed against The Man and The Establishment is now marching in near total lockstep with its children to elect a manifestly corrupt politician. Joe Biden was the tribune of corporate conglomerates as senator from the state of Delaware, headquarters and mail drop for some of the largest corporations in the world. When his patrons wanted to buy labor in the slave market of Red China, Biden swung the auctioneer’s gavel. And for all 47 years as senator and vice president, Biden traded on his office to enrich himself and his family.
As the aging boomers shuffle off stage and their children take over, let us remember the ancient biblical curse of Isaiah 3:4: I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.
Are there no adults left in the room?
