.Happy New Year to my Fellow Baby Boomers.
The Worst Generation we have been deemed but let's not jump to that conclusion just yet! I will not excuse our excesses as a generation which thought that it knew better or that it was better, but proved all too human.
We were a product of pent up demand. Our parents who were coming of age in their 20s and 30s delayed having babies first because of the Great Depression and then WWII. All that waiting around for a job and then invasion and kiss the army goodbye peacetime, created the boom. The troops came home and boom: babies, babies, babies. I suspect I'm not the only boomer who remembers an elementary classroom with 50 children wall to wall with one good nun for a teacher.
Oh, the real boom (when the detritus hit the fan) was in 1968 and the Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. President Johnson who trumped up a reason for bombing North Viet Nam was faced with the consequences of his ineffective strategic bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. His option (at least the one he has been criticized for not taking by the men who would bring us the Iraq War called Neo-Cons) was drafting every eligibile able body male and female baby and shipping them off to WWIII. He was estopped by the specter of nuclear armageddon.
You know that I'm right, my fellow Boomer, unless you were just not all that aware in those days. I was! I was naive, but I was well read at the time. The military industrial complex would have chopped up we the baby boomers as cannon fodder were it not for the specter of ICBMs criss-crossing the arctic and bringing on nuclear winter.
So what did we Boomers do with our economic balloon of wealth and plenty which was our parents gift to us. Did we ever have to return the favor? Well, I believe we did. The baby boomers paid the retirement social security and medicare of the Greatest Generation and paid and continues to pay for the Cold War and competed with one another for piss ant jobs and then watch those piss ant jobs go overseas for the sake of the growth of international corporations that today have about as much patriotism as a dead cock roach. And we got conservative and lost our liberal swagger and or maybe we got real down and dirty libertarian, which was not a help with the commonwealth of our country. And some of us really wallowed in our story in being self-made millionaires who had done it the hard way. Well, we had help, didn't we!
As you worry about taxes, why not worry about all the evaded taxes by these corporations and off shore accounts of CEO types who do not want to pay the fare on world peace. But it's too late to worry about those Republicans and Democrats who did not raise taxes to pay for the Gulf War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War and all those little Reaganesque wars by a real tough guy President who said he wouldn't raise taxes either? Why would a Presidential candidate say that he wouldn't raise taxes?
Because raising taxes requires the consent of the governed to pay for those [deletion] damn wars.
Do your sons and daughters a favor, my Fellow Baby Boomer, and start sticking up for we Baby Boomers. You risk being called an "Old codger," but then you are getting there. True, we were too damn much jelly for the jelly jar and vaseline just didn't make a very good contraceptive. Thanks, I feel better now.
So we thought we knew better. Used contraceptives or had our gal do it for us and with a vengeance had fewer chidlren, I guess hoping for a higher standard of living, only to learn that we were overpaid and therefore were to be overworked and bad mouthed for expecting more out of life than a fancy house and a wife that wanted what had been handed us as a male birthright.
Yes, in our generation the labor market was even more crowded than it is now. Yah, and then to make the pressure even greater women's lib was a wonderful thing (though it was a long time coming). On average our female citizens today are still cheaper labor than we males.
We are today all cave men and women. We neglected. we are told. to have maintained our bomb shelters (IRAs and 401ks) for the economic hard times brought on by Wall Street and corporate America which have held us upside down since Reagan and shaken every damn coins out of our blue jeans. So sing western duets cheek to cheek and share your weed (hopefully medicare funded weed) and enjoy your final days in bliss. Amen, brother.
And for you libertarian Baby Boomers: go Ron Paul, rugged individualist and self-made baby boomer. You can finish the job of running our democracy into the ground better than any other man alive. The reality is though once you are in office, you will look more and more look like Obama or Bush and then we will remember that Obama looked more like Bush or Clinton too, once he took office. So move to New Hampshire and vote and vote often my fellow Boomer.
Corporate America is calling upon our sons and daughters. Yah, I mean you younger generations. Yes, you there, go help yourself by using up the social security "fund" as a way to fund Wall Street's next set of schemes to screw you, our sons and daughters who might listen with interest to the siren song of capitalism which will dash your brains out upon the rocks of economic opportunity preserved for the greedy, the well fixed, the advantaged, and the tax evaders. The ones who once screwed up the graduated income tax so bad that it is considered an abomination today and crafted the campaign to recharacterize estate taxes on millionaire estates as a "death tax" instead of a separation tax on extreme wealth before it passes into the hands of takers. Which takers? The ones who did not accumulate the wealth by their own labor or wit. The history of fair taxation in this country is the history of screw my neighbor but do not screw me because I invest in the private economy, my own. (Go, Ayn Rand!).
Trust me, Wall Street hires the cream of the crop for the next go round of screw jobs of the little guy and gal. Capitalism is never understood by the average Joe and Sally. Capitalism pools wealth and buys politicians. It pollutes the sky, the waters, and now the ground water with fracting the hell out of Mother Earth. Good God, the largest ocean has a dead zone of garbage so vast that it would fill the Gulf of Mexico. So you say, "Well that's okay isn't it, the Gulf is our American oil basin, not Arabia's?". Geez, I was making a comparison of area, not suggesting the garbage be barged into the Gulf of Mexico. Pot head! Or as Archie Bunker would say, "Meathead."
So you may well ask why I'm still a Democrat after Johnson's War and sell out of my generation to capitalism and rugged individualism (Go Ayn Rand!). Because I believe in the future, in our children, and in our immigrants, and because I want free public education for all children regardless of citizenship. Why? Because tomorrow, if our way of life gets a tomorrow, needs an educated citizenry.
Because I believe that Roe v. Wade was the result of the simple fact that criminalization of women who have an abortion has to have a limitation, a point at which state power can not be exercised to criminalize a woman or her actual medical doctor, one who is not a quack. That doesn't mean I believe abortion is ever a moral thing to do, I just know it is immoral for me to support zealots who would brutalize the woman who exercises dominion over her own body. Yah, I want her to know the error of her ways, but only when she knows the natural consequences of her conduct (if in fact her conduct had anything in the slightest to do with conception or with her economic plight or her immaturity).
The only way to legalize criminalization of abortion is to shoot one male and one female every case we send a woman to jail or fine her for having had an abortion. The one male and one female must be virgins and will be allowed to sleep together but then they have to be immediately shot before conception can be said to have occurred. Their names will be drawn out of a hat, yes a government lottery like we had for the military draft (a la Shirley Jackson and the Salem Witchcraft Trials).
This last tirade above is dedicated to those who bad mouth civil liberties which had to be forced down the throat of small government, and I mean small government (like the post-Reconstruction South and its closet felons of the KKK). Small government has its sins too. So stop the idiocy about big government.
The real issue in a democracy (even a representative republic such as ours) is the consent of the governed to policies of the duly elected leaders (or Supreme Court determined electee which I wouldn't object to if they had elected a Democrat instead of that yahoo son of privilege who ran this country like a fat ass cadilac right into the ground).
The really crass irresponsible thing that we baby boomers did is that we did not elect George Bush once; no, we had to turn around and elect him to a second term, when we could have elected a real change agent for government the first time and a real Viet Nam vet the second time (when we the Boomers really needed to honor our Nam Vets by electing one of their own to the Presidency) instead of the guy we did elect who went awol while he did stateside duty during the Viet Nam War and has never acknowledged the cover up of his conduct by friends of his father, G.H.W. Bush, also a former President, a real war hero. To think that the U.S. military actually let this particular yahoo pilot a fighter jet.
There is still time on the clock, Boomers. So what if you did sell out and the corporations you sold out to have screwed you or will screw you at the earliest convenience! You can set the record straight. You can believe in being a responsible citizen who believes in the graduated income tax without loop holes, in civil liberties for all including the gays, and in free public education of the finest quality for all children. You can provide for an educated next generation of truly American citizens. You can remember that the community needs you to be a senior citizen now, one who acts respectable, even if we took a lifetime getting there.
God bless you one and all.
