My Generation

Back in the 2009 Butler commencement, Mitch Daniels punched all of us parents in the nose with the declaration that it's all our fault.

His point was that we're the generation that basically caused all of today's problems. It was a strange speech for a graduation ceremony, but he was telling the truth.

It is pretty much our fault.

I'm not only a member of the guilty generation, I happen to be part of the year that happened to be the peak of the baby boom. I read somewhere a long time ago that there were more people born in America in 1957 than any other year on record.

Take the trip with me down memory lane, and I'll give you my perspective of what life is like for the peak of the baby boomers.

We grew up with intact families. Our fathers tended to hold principles like honor, faith, hard work, honesty, thrift, and responsibility. Our mothers tended to stay home with the kids, teach us those values they shared with our fathers and grandparents, make sure we did our homework, made sure we ate right and got plenty of exercise, and did their best to keep us out of trouble.

Where I grew up, we never locked the house or car, and even left the keys in the car not only in our own driveway, but even in the grocery store or school parking lot.

We went to church every Sunday and every Wednesday night, and the schools made sure not to schedule anything on Wednesday evenings to accomodate that schedule for everyone.

We had close friendships with other families who had children close in age to ours. It was common to have a house full of friends on the spur of the moment, enjoying games or even doing dorky stuff like singing and playing guitar.

Then we started to rebel. The older kids in High School and College were growing out their hair, dressing in ways intended to shock our staid parents, expressing anger and opposition to the war in Viet Nam, playing around with illegal drugs and experimenting with promiscuity.

High School expected criminally little of us. I had maybe two classes in my entire high school experience that asked anything the least bit challenging of me. Even so, I contented myself with a mixture of A's and B's, when all I needed to do to turn the B's into A's was crack a book now and then.

We went to college, where professors told us things like we were just more highly evolved forms of animals, God is a superstitious invention, white males are the root of all evil, communism is really a great idea but just hasn't been implemented right by the Soviets, we Americans are unfairly rich and selfishly taking all the earth's resources by force away from poor victims of other races and nations.

College offered a bit more of a challenge, where on average one class per term required my focused attention. On the other extreme, one class per term was so worthless as to provide no positive results other than pad the coffers of the bursar's office.

We entered the workforce having invented today's most popular form of godless, self-centered, narcissistic, amoral attitudes that tolerate pretty much anything as long as it feels good.

Even though we felt unlucky. I left my overcrowded and run-down "Junior High" school shortly before it got a major facelift. My sports teams in the "Junior High" didn't even have enough locker room space, so we had to dress on the stage in the gym with the curtain drawn until we achieved the seniority to move into the real locker room. I left my decrepit, falling-apart high school shortly before it got remodeled.

I started driving just as we hit the OPEC embargo, seeing gas prices double.

I entered the workforce in the worst economy since the great depression. I'm trying to figure out how it aligns with today's repeat of eerily similar conditions.

We're in charge now. Our president it the king of self-centered narcissism, evident in everything he says and does. We don't care, as long as we get ours. They can take away freedoms from other people, as long as they don't take away ours. They can tax "rich" people as much as they want, because they're just greedy b$^&*s who deserve it. We "deserve" things like free healthcare, tax credits for everything from computers to homes to cars, and even cash handouts from the government. Who cares who is paying for it. Who cares if it bankrupts the country and throws us all into multi-generational poverty.

We don't make anything anymore. GM and Chrysler only exist because the government has absorbed them and props them up with money they don't have. The rest of us don't want to work in dirty, noisy factories anyway. We want to do creative "service" businesses that aren't dirty or noisy or physically hard.

We don't take responsibility for our children. Let the government raise them so we can go out and do what we want to do.

Our last best hope is that our children will figure it out in time to reverse course on this disaster we created.

They will blame us.

We deserve it.