The Yuppies of today are a subset of the Baby Boomers of yesterday, the most self-important, spoiled generation in the last 2000 years of Western Civilization. It's always been interesting to me how this came about:
The parents of the Baby Boomers were the ones whose youth was shaped by privations of the Great Depression, who learned to be happy with little and who then came of age only to be thrown into a war for the very survival of the Free World. As an aside, apart from the Pearl Harbor attack, it didn't hurt the war effort that many men of military age had few job prospects and had been used to living at a level of modesty that did not contrast that greatly with military life.
When World War II ended, those young adults were perfectly happy to be able to buy an 1100 sf 3 bedroom 1 bath house, with one car in the 1-car garage in the newly sprawling suburbs. At least it had indoor plumbing, hot water, and no one was shooting at you. From that rather modest perspective, the future appeared to be unlimited, and these young couples, many of whom had put off marriage and children until after the War, were now determined to give their children the childhood they never had.
Enter the bucolic 1950's. We now know that our parents were worried about nuclear annihilation, polio, and other bad stuff of which they kept us blissfully unaware. And yes, racism was systemic and "a woman's place was in the home", but those things only appear bad in hindsight: it had always been that way prior to that. As children, tho, we had few worries. And like children from time immemorial, we also had no perspective.
Us future Yuppies were, in a word, spoiled thru the good intentions of our parents. When we became college-age and went, we were not about to have our cushy life disrupted by having to fight a war! We found all sorts of rationale to avoid military service, including simply going to college. Like all youth throughout history, lacking any life experience, we were idealistic and simply didn't understand, if we were nice to the Communist countries, why they wouldn't be nice to us. After all, this had usually worked well in our kindergarten sandbox. The Liberals of today still haven't figured that out, by the way.
So, full of ourselves, we demonstrated, disrupted our tiny corner of the world, and reveled in the self-importance generated by the fact that anyone noticed. We thought we had all the answers to solve all the world's problems created by our parents' generation, not understanding that, compared to what they had been handed, they had given us paradise, and sacrificed mightily to do it. As Socrates famously said, we "didn't know enough to know how much we didn't know".
So the Viet Nam War ended and we gnashed our teeth over the number killed (less than 1/10th of what our parents had endured from a smaller population base) and abused the returning Vets as "baby killers". And along came the '70's -- "do your own thing" and "if it feels good, do it", wife-swapping, promiscuous sex, women's lib, etc. In fact, many college-educated women put off having kids because they were told they could "have it all" -- the laws of physiology that had applied for the last, say, 100,000 years, would be repealed for them because they were so special.
So the self-indulgent '70's gave way to the self-indulgent '80's (AIDS kinda brought the whole free love thing back to earth, along with the discovery that, at some point, you had to actually earn the lifestyle your parents had provided). And in the '80's the Boomers attained an age where they began to be in charge of things and it was money, money, money.
Toward the end of the 80's an amazing thing happened: the biological clocks which the Lady Boomers figured they could medically alter, began going off. All those Yuppies who had delayed having kids in the interest of acquiring all those toys, fancy house, car, etc, were finally confronted with immutable reality. So you had a bunch 40-something parents of newborns with Baby On Board signs in the rear windows of their SUV's -- Hell hath no fury like a middle-aged Yuppie mother who feels that her incredibly precious little issue is threatened by another car that came within 20 feet of hers. I'm sure the Baby On Board signs prevented the rest of us from ramming the SUV as we would otherwise, no doubt, have done. And, of course, the little issues were incredibly precious, not just as babies have been since Day One, but because this generation had put off having them in the interest of self-aggrandizement, and they were now at an age where the well was about dry.
Wasn't it amazing how many of these progeny were either "gifted" or, if not, had some trendy diagnosis that prevented it? No kid could just "act up" or be disruptive. No, he was the victim of some disorder that absolved him and his parents of any responsibility. And just to make sure everyone's self-esteem was intact, everyone was a winner in sports or other competitions, and often no score was kept, just to make sure no one saw what a charade it was. Pardon me, but what world works that way?
And damn! When the Boomers began reaching middle age, the physical signs were showing up. Surely wrinkles, hearing loss, weight gain, arthritis, male [ahem] virility, and other age-related maladies wouldn't dare afflict this special generation. So now we've got botox on demand, breast implants, Viagra, nano hearing aids, and nearly unaffordable health care costs as we slide inexorably into our dotage.
Meanwhile, the Boomers (nee Hippies, Yuppies, and Buppies) were reaching an age where they were beginning to be in charge of things. The whole "live for today", "if it feels good, do it", "moral relativism" (there were no absolutes since this was judgemental), babies born out of wedlock (after all, having spent normal child-bearing years on self-fulfillment, at 40 there just wasn't time for the annoyance of finding a husband), was now working its way into the corporate world and into government and the culture. Since the Boomers had always had a cushy life by the standards of any period you want to choose since the whole Garden of Eden thing with the snake and the apple, any hardship was inconceivable. Gotta be able to continue to acquire everything you want, whether you can pay for it or not.
Sometime in the 1980's this began to threaten the institutions that had made the US the envy of the world and, in fact, the sacrifices made by their parents that had laid the groundwork for all this self-absorption. The Boomers had now attained an average age where they had some collective cultural influence, and the moral relativism and me-ism of the '60's and '70's in which they had been steeped now began to become mainstream. Such once-unthinkable notions as legalizing drugs, excusing every child's misbehavior via some diagnosis, an extreme aversion to war and a general unfamiliarity with things military (we all avoided the draft), fertility drugs to avoid the consequences of waiting too long to have kids, abortion on demand if we changed our mind, no-fault divorce if we changed our mind, a college education for everyone, global warming caused by human activity (since we were so important and unique and influential, we must be causing it, right?) were insidiously working their way into societal acceptance.
From an historical perspective, the rise of the Religious Right was largely a reaction by those boomers who actually realized what a threat to the country the views and policies of their still-clueless peers presented. The realization that the moral relativism, moral laxity, and increasing efforts to stamp any vestige of religion out of public life were either becoming mainstream or were being snuck in the back door via the courts (all it takes is one brain-damaged, whacked out former acid-dropping hippie judge), caused an embrace by many of the institutions that represented the values that the country had always held, and which had done much to make it great. They found a lot of support for these values in Christianity, which should be no surprise.
No one studies history, so the (absolutely clueless) Lefties didn't understand that the system which had given them the greatest country in the history of mankind, and which they inherited (warts and all), was heavily dependent upon Judeo-Christian morality, which had been so ubiquitous from the founding thru the 1950's that its existence was just assumed. These clueless creatures would have been aghast if transported to any time prior to 1950 or so, at what to them would have been the institutionalism of (generally Christian) religion. Presidents regularly publicly prayed, Congress began each session with a decidedly Christian prayer, FDR announced the D-Day invasion with a prayer over the radio ("Dear God, our sons, the pride of our nation . . . "), and the Founders' writings were replete with references to a Christian god. Say what you will, it was this largely Protestant ethical framework which provided the (to borrow a few modern terms) platform and operating system on which the country functioned. Absent a study of history which, among other things, demonstrates the inter-relationship of societal values to the functioning of the country, these self-focused innocents figured they could make their lives even easier by rationalizing whatever behavior gave them instant gratification while, at least while they lasted, enjoying the benefits of a life so many had sacrificed so much to provide.
The notion that the Republican Party has "changed" or "lost its way" is held only by those unfamiliar with its history from the Civil War onward. A Republican of 1880 would feel much more at home in the Republican Party of today than in any other. It is the country that has shifted to the left with the rise and influence of the Baby Boomers. But that comparative perspective is only gained from a study of history which, as has been pointed out, no one studies. This, by the way, is how a shallow demogogue like the current President can get elected.
I have covered this elsewhere, but the mainstream media has been a major player in all this. Especially television news or news-lite shows hire their on-air "talent" for how they look and sound on air. This process tends to favor younger people who, by and large, are better looking than us wrinkley old fogies. Younger people don't, on average, know as much as older people (stop the e-mails -- I said "on average"), if for no reason other than older folks have had more time to learn and more life experience. This is the primary reason younger people tend to be more liberal in general -- they simply haven't had the time or focus to know enough to realize that all that idealistic liberal clap-trap doesn't hold water in the real world. And heaven knows journalism schools don't impart to their graduates any general knowledge. I seriously doubt that the average TV reporter could tell you who the third President of the United States was or who was the primary author of the Constitution. Does this mean that good-looking people aren't as smart as us ugly ones? Of course not, but if such frivolous criteria as looks and voice are given precedence over more substantive ones like, oh I don't know, knowing something, the resulting hirees are going to skew that way. It has always amazed me that, when a reporter needs an expert on some historical subject, say World War 2, more often than not they will interview someone like Tom Hanks, who's been in a couple of movies about it. All it does is demonstrate that the reporters don't even know who to ask, let alone know anything themselves.
It is also telling that those TV commentators most versed on history are conservatives. I'm thinking particularly of people like Michael Medved and Glenn Beck. They are at a disadvantage in trying to convert lefties mostly because lefties' views are not based upon any knowledge of history, which they generally confess to finding boring. Does anyone think that Joy Behar or Rachael Maddow could hold an historical knowledge candle to Medved or Beck? Having a little historical knowledge myself, I can assure you that they cannot. If I could hear one liberal commentator (or newsreader) demonstrate the least depth of historical knowledge, I'd have more respect for their views.
Anyway, enough on that -- their ignorance of the subjects they report on is on display every night from 5-7 pm.
So, as I began, the sooner the Baby Boomers pass from the scene, the better for the country. The bill for their excesses, in both coin and culture, will be on the books for at least the next generation.
OK, now I'm worked up again about illegal aliens, so I gotta get that off my chest
