Do you disagree with any of this?

i guess red is defending his generation against stupidity.

there are some concepts that people buy into for no reason. one is this generational thing. another is saying butthurt.

 

I'm with you on that part but even if they didn't I don't get saying an entire group is better or worse overall. Individual arguments I can get.

 

Thanks I try.. I truly feel if we don't expose oursevles to true criticism and challenge our own positions we don't grow. I try to remain consistant with my principles but reserve the right to change my position as I learn....hence my tag line about foolish consistancy being the hobgoblin of small minds.

 

Two points .. first stereotypes exist because there is a basis in reality.. There is a greatest generation , a boomer generation etc. They do leave a mark on society. Do they tell a complete story not at all. Many boomers have done fantastic things as individuals and as a group. However I believe in spite of the great things there have been fundemental failures moral and critical.

There are more measures of society than wealth and health of the individuals. To me the major measure of a society is does it lay the groundwork for the following members to build a better. For 2000 years the European society has strived to man man a better image of "god". For the last 500 years this momentum increased. Of course there are many examples where the society failed sometimes spectacularly. However the people didn't measure themselves by accepting failure but by striving to be better than their forebearers and leave a better place for their children. This trend carried to the new world and I believe has its greatest expression in the US.

Are we relatively more powerful today than 20 years ago, I say we aren't. We had the power for absolute domination in 1945 through at least 1972 (but understood it would have been wrong). There was balance gained by the USSR only with our folly in Vietnam (not nessecarily going in but how we did it). wealthier than 20 years ago yes but not relative to the rest of the world. Are weWe were the ONLY economic power from 1945-1965 at least. Frankly the rebuilding of Europe and the development of the rest of the world makes it impossible to remain as powerful as we were.

Where I feel we have failed is the moral underpinning of our generation that has changed so much . We tried to destroy the past but had no replacement but "tune in..turn on & drop out". We have raised individual gratification as a worthy goal over the betterment of the whole society. Are we wealthier than our parents? yes..but will our children be wealthier than we are? Doesn't look like it. Are we willing to sacrifice some comfort in order not to beggar the future? I haven't seen any willingness as a group to do so. We want ours now and forever. Is the structure of society...education, respect for others, respect for life, faith in istitutions, infrastructure, debt load better than we were left? I say not close.

I say it is in these last difficult to measure values the boomer generation has failed. Is it soley our fault? No but we have a large share. They are the critical foundations that allow society to survive and recover/thrive the physical shocks. They aren't the easy measureables Red and others like to use in debate. However soon their effect will be, I think is being seen and measured.

 

Ok I will make a note of it people born during one time are great and people from a slightly different but overlapping time are worse or whatever who the fuck cares its a useless analysis.

Again, it's basically a stupid historian or columnists version of astrology.

 

I cannot help but laugh at this post because you are the one who always insists that your opinions are facts amigo. I have provided my argument and I stand by it. You have yet to rebut a single assertion that I made except to list some social changes that are more attributable to your parents generation than your own. You tried to say that your generation has amassed record personal wealth but it simply isn't true. A study conducted earlier this year by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, which surveyed individuals nearing retirement (Boomers), found that only 14% of Boomers had saved enough for a "comfortable" retirement while 60% said that they had saved $25,000 or less, not including the value of their residence. You call that amassing personal wealth? I don't. In 1991 only 11% of individuals expected to work past age 65, now 37% of respondents said they will work past 65. Further, during the course of the Boomers governmental reign in Congress and the White House, the average household income has risen exactly $1937.00 over the course of the past 20 years. In that same time frame how much has the price of everything else risen? On a similar note, bankruptcies have sky rocketed for Boomers. In 2007 a report released in the ABI (American Bankruptcy Institute) journal showed that Boomers made up the vast majority of bankruptcy filings and, in fact, were on the rise among Boomers. On the contrary the group with the lowest level of bankruptcies were the generation before and after the Boomers.

America is not the sole superpower. China is a super power and a good argument could be made that they are financially more powerful than us because the Boomers have financed their reckless spending with Chinese money and we owe them our ass thanks to this. With our money they are developing a world class military that will rival ours soon enough, if not already. Worse, they have the power to cut us off from the credit card. If we went to war with China, who would we borrow money from?

Are we still the leading economy? Have you looked at our GDP compared to the Chinese lately? Have you seen how much money we owe them? By sheer size, yes, we are still the world's leading economy but this fails miserably to account for all the economic details involved in such a comparison. That said, it doesn't surprise me that you would make this assertion. Recognizing debt as a problem is not something that your generation has done very well.

Yes, the rest of the world still looks at us as that shining city on the hill, as Reagan so famously called us. That said, how much longer can we count on this if we do not right the fiscal ship?

Look, the Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression, fought and won WW2, built a state of the art infrastructure that could support a great economy for generations to come and then actually built a dynamic economy and the largest middle class the world has ever seen. In contrast the Boomers fought and something in Vietnam, never built a stitch of infrastructure and didn't do a very good job of maintaining what your parents built, outside of the 8 year tech boom you never produced a vibrant economy and you have decimated the middle class by out sourcing all their jobs. Household income has stagnated, inflation has driven prices of everything through the roof and credit cards replaced good old cold hard cash.

Tell me again how your generation improved on what their parents did?

 

You clearly have not examined all the evidence. You like to fancy yourself an intellectual so please enlighten us as to why I am incorrect. What you offered in this post sounds like a pop psychologist's poor attempt at explaining something they do not understand.

 

personal irresponsibility in your financial dealings has absolutely nothing to do with other generations.

 

I am not going to explain to you why arbitrary birthdays do not correspond with alleged shifts in human nature. It's an ancient delusion with astrologers and Chinese year signs and whatever else and if you are so primitive as to buy into it then good for you. Maybe to solve this problem we can schedule for fewer people to be born under a bad sign or not give power to people based on what generation you say they belong to.