My mom is 87 years old. Yow! That scares me not just because it sounds so old... it does, though... but also because it sounds like it's not so old that it couldn't happen to me. In fact, I'm so old that there are times when 87 doesn't sound quite as old as it should. But even the chills I get contemplating my personal fate and how imminent it probably is are nothing compared to the roiling in my guts that ensues when I think about what's in store for me as Mom blossoms into "old old age." See, we live so long now that they have to divide old age up into segments. There's old age, old old age, and "super-centenarians" that I'm aware of. And even in an age in which when somebody keels over at 70 or 72 people bemoan the fact that he died "so young," the consensus is that 87 is solidly in the "old old age" category.
Anyway, apparently when you enter "old old age" it's time to think about things like "independent living," "assisted living," or "the booby hatch," depending on how much you want to scale back your activities. Many senior seniors lead active lives, as witnessed by the wide, well-lit "Continence" section in most major supermarkets and the fact that they're still showing those James Whitmore commercials on late-night TV. Plus, the elderly population is growing by leaps and bounds, and even The Fonz is advertising reverse-mortgages during the "news hour." Oh yeah, and the continued existence of the "news hour" on all three major "networks" (I don't count Fox) and in fact the continued existence of the "networks" themselves, is directly attributable to the avid interest of the "Long Goodbye" set.
But not all people feel like running for president when they're 80, much less when they're 87, and my Mom has decided that it's time to "scale back." In her case this means having somebody else worry about it when a light bulb burns out or the lawn needs to be mowed. In fact, forget about the lawn entirely. Let somebody else find a reliable cleaning lady and handyman and somebody to buy the groceries, let your kids swing by to drive you to church. She worked like a mule to raise a passle of kids and tend to her husband's needs, managed on her own for 15 years after those missions were fully accomplished, and now feels like... like what?
Well, "weary" is a word that might fit, although you can never tell for sure with Mom. (What's the song say? "She may be weary..." But maybe not.) Or maybe she wants to live closer to some of her kids. Well, maybe. Or maybe she just figures that "it's time."
Dangerous phrase, "it's time." I got married once because somebody decided that "it [was] time." Remember that old Carly Simon song? "You say it's time we moved in together/ and raised a family of our own, you and me/ Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be..." A recipe for disaster if I've ever heard one.
Of course, according to The Byrds and The Bible, there is a time for everything, and if there's a time to move to a "senior living facility" I guess that Mom would be the one to know it. And it looks like she's going to be having an awful lot of help making all her decisions, as at least some of my many siblings have plunged into the project with a will. I guess I can understand the motivation for that. Once the old lady is safely installed somewhere, we can all stop worrying about the Sword of Damocles that's been hanging over our heads in the form of all the crazy scenarios that might unfold if Mom suddenly became incapacitated while running around loose. This way, you just pay a monthly maintenance fee and everything's taken care of... sort of like having a property manager or something, I guess.
But here I sit, looking at a picture of Mom in her thirties, still young and strong even though there were bags under her eyes from chasing around the four-- count 'em, four-- kids she already had at that point, and then I look at another picture of her and Dad standing in the pretty little backyard that she designed and landscaped (they were my age, then), and another one of the two of them after his first heart attack and she's in her early sixties I think and they're in the pretty living room that she furnished and decorated... and I hope that she'll be cool ceding so much control over her day-to-day environment and that she'll look before she leaps.
As for me... well, 87 isn't that far away in geologic or historical terms, but it's pretty far away and as for Mom I guess maybe she's right that "it will all work out somehow." Well, that's for sure, I guess. Wisdom of the ages, that. Or should that be "wisdom of the aged?"
Friday, April 12, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
What's Wrong With This Picture?
The paper has articles today about the "disappointing" jobs report for the month of March. Turns out that employers only added a net of 88,000 jobs last month, not even enough to keep pace with the additions to the "labor force" as the result of people newly entering the job market, much less to reduce the vast legions of the unemployed. Of course, since the officially-acknowledged "unemployment" or "jobless" rate doesn't include people who've given up looking for a job because the economy (on "Main Street," not "Wall Street") is so bad, some economists estimate that the "true" unemployment rate is 9.8% or greater, not the still-dismal-but-lower-than-last-month 7.6% that the government is touting.
To put this into perspective, as of May, 2012 there were officially 12.6 million people "unemployed." But there were another 88 million working age adults who weren't working, but were not counted as "unemployed" because they had been defined out of the "workforce" entirely. As their unemployment runs out, and they give up their job search in frustration, additional persons are dropped from the "workforce" each day.
A more revealing statistic is that the "workforce" is shrinking. At this point in time, only about 63% percent of the working-age population of the U.S. is working or seeking work. The rest are either retired, rich, on public assistance or starving. As for the stock market, which too many people put too much stock in as an indicator of the health of the overall economy, an interesting statistic is that the number of publicly-traded stocks is apparently shrinking, too. Some of that (O.K., a lot of it) is due to mergers. Some of it is due to companies being taken private. Factoring in the flight from equities by the "ordinary" individual investor in the wake of the financial upheavals of the last couple of decades, plus the insanity created by huge banks of computers processing day-trades in nanoseconds, programmed to analyze and take advantage of "trends" in trading, as opposed to fundamentals, and what do you have? Fantasyland.
The people whose economic reality is closely tied to the vicissitudes of stock prices or can derive any information of practical import from poring over indexes of stock prices are becoming fewer and fewer in number. In fact, fewer than half of all American households own equities in any form, and fewer than half of those own stocks or mutual funds outside of an employer-sponsored plan. What most people want in order to feel prosperous is a house that is worth something and a job that pays them enough to pay for it, and frankly, my dear, they don't (and probably shouldn't) give a damn about the Dow, which is what most people are referring to when they say "the market is up... or down... or flat).
The Dow is an index of only 30 stocks, anyway. Big company stocks, it is true. But only 30 of them, and these companies in the aggregate only employ a small fraction of the American "workforce." In the aggregate, much of their own "workforce" is elsewhere in the world, and they generate a lot of their revenues overseas. While it used to be true that "what is good for General Motors is good for America," that was when GM was making and selling most of the cars here and its "workforce" was making a solid middle-class living that involved a lot of spending on other American goods and services. Now Detroit is pretty much an abandoned area, and the unemployed are driving their Toyotas and Hondas over to the unemployment office to wait for their checks (or they are until their unemployment benefits run out, anyway). And some companies that are still making lots of money here, like McDonalds or the big tobacco companies, are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone with whom they come in contact.
You have to read between the lines of these statistics a little bit, but if you do you will rapidly come to an understanding of how it is that there are zillions of unemployed people, zillions of underemployed people and a stock market that's through the roof, all at the same time. If you want to take the advanced course, you'll have to do some reading and thinking. Start with "The Power Elite" from the 1950's, then stir in a little Mitt Romney and Scrooge McDuck, then a lecture by Professor Richard Wolfe to explain it all. By the time you're done, you will realize that American workers are in big trouble, partly because they're not working anymore, partly because it is no longer necessary for the financial well-being of their overlords that they work... or even consume. "Multi-national" companies now make most of their money employing cheap foreign workers to make cheap goods to sell to other cheap foreign workers in far-away places that have lax environmental standards and poor industrial and financial regulation (well, okay, we've still got poor regulation here, too) and the only real domestic market they need to maintain for the comfort of their officers, directors and principal shareholders is the one for imported luxury goods.
Few of the luxury goods favored by the wealthy, and precious little of anything else, are made in the USA. They don't manufacture clothing in America anymore, for the most part (and what they do make is only T-shirts and socks), they don't make TV's or I-Phones, either. And wait a minute... what kind of a car do you drive?
We even import pet food... to the great misfortune of the legions of animals who have ingested the toxin-laced Chinese version, and their human companions who installed that asbestos-laden drywall. But let's get real. What alternatives to cheap, foreign-made goods do most people really have? If you want a bargain, shop at Wal-Mart-- it's cheaper than taking a slow boat to China for the same stuff. And while the stock broker whose bonus you bailed out a couple of years ago is drinking the fine wine that he purchased at the last wine auction advertised in the New York Times, and the plutocrats he serves are plotting their next two trillion dollar heist, you might want to check out the free samples at your local Costco. If you make a few laps around the store, you can ingest enough calories to make a complete meal, and you don't really want to read about the ingredients in all that stuff anyway.
To put this into perspective, as of May, 2012 there were officially 12.6 million people "unemployed." But there were another 88 million working age adults who weren't working, but were not counted as "unemployed" because they had been defined out of the "workforce" entirely. As their unemployment runs out, and they give up their job search in frustration, additional persons are dropped from the "workforce" each day.
A more revealing statistic is that the "workforce" is shrinking. At this point in time, only about 63% percent of the working-age population of the U.S. is working or seeking work. The rest are either retired, rich, on public assistance or starving. As for the stock market, which too many people put too much stock in as an indicator of the health of the overall economy, an interesting statistic is that the number of publicly-traded stocks is apparently shrinking, too. Some of that (O.K., a lot of it) is due to mergers. Some of it is due to companies being taken private. Factoring in the flight from equities by the "ordinary" individual investor in the wake of the financial upheavals of the last couple of decades, plus the insanity created by huge banks of computers processing day-trades in nanoseconds, programmed to analyze and take advantage of "trends" in trading, as opposed to fundamentals, and what do you have? Fantasyland.
The people whose economic reality is closely tied to the vicissitudes of stock prices or can derive any information of practical import from poring over indexes of stock prices are becoming fewer and fewer in number. In fact, fewer than half of all American households own equities in any form, and fewer than half of those own stocks or mutual funds outside of an employer-sponsored plan. What most people want in order to feel prosperous is a house that is worth something and a job that pays them enough to pay for it, and frankly, my dear, they don't (and probably shouldn't) give a damn about the Dow, which is what most people are referring to when they say "the market is up... or down... or flat).
The Dow is an index of only 30 stocks, anyway. Big company stocks, it is true. But only 30 of them, and these companies in the aggregate only employ a small fraction of the American "workforce." In the aggregate, much of their own "workforce" is elsewhere in the world, and they generate a lot of their revenues overseas. While it used to be true that "what is good for General Motors is good for America," that was when GM was making and selling most of the cars here and its "workforce" was making a solid middle-class living that involved a lot of spending on other American goods and services. Now Detroit is pretty much an abandoned area, and the unemployed are driving their Toyotas and Hondas over to the unemployment office to wait for their checks (or they are until their unemployment benefits run out, anyway). And some companies that are still making lots of money here, like McDonalds or the big tobacco companies, are doing so at the expense of the health and well-being of everyone with whom they come in contact.
You have to read between the lines of these statistics a little bit, but if you do you will rapidly come to an understanding of how it is that there are zillions of unemployed people, zillions of underemployed people and a stock market that's through the roof, all at the same time. If you want to take the advanced course, you'll have to do some reading and thinking. Start with "The Power Elite" from the 1950's, then stir in a little Mitt Romney and Scrooge McDuck, then a lecture by Professor Richard Wolfe to explain it all. By the time you're done, you will realize that American workers are in big trouble, partly because they're not working anymore, partly because it is no longer necessary for the financial well-being of their overlords that they work... or even consume. "Multi-national" companies now make most of their money employing cheap foreign workers to make cheap goods to sell to other cheap foreign workers in far-away places that have lax environmental standards and poor industrial and financial regulation (well, okay, we've still got poor regulation here, too) and the only real domestic market they need to maintain for the comfort of their officers, directors and principal shareholders is the one for imported luxury goods.
Few of the luxury goods favored by the wealthy, and precious little of anything else, are made in the USA. They don't manufacture clothing in America anymore, for the most part (and what they do make is only T-shirts and socks), they don't make TV's or I-Phones, either. And wait a minute... what kind of a car do you drive?
We even import pet food... to the great misfortune of the legions of animals who have ingested the toxin-laced Chinese version, and their human companions who installed that asbestos-laden drywall. But let's get real. What alternatives to cheap, foreign-made goods do most people really have? If you want a bargain, shop at Wal-Mart-- it's cheaper than taking a slow boat to China for the same stuff. And while the stock broker whose bonus you bailed out a couple of years ago is drinking the fine wine that he purchased at the last wine auction advertised in the New York Times, and the plutocrats he serves are plotting their next two trillion dollar heist, you might want to check out the free samples at your local Costco. If you make a few laps around the store, you can ingest enough calories to make a complete meal, and you don't really want to read about the ingredients in all that stuff anyway.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Infallible Popes and Other Old Poops
You know, just when you start thinking, "Hey, we're living in the future!" and get all worked up over all the fantastic technology and stuff (Ha! My computer froze for hours today after I foolishly agreed to download Internet Explorer 10) you wind up reading a story about how somebody was burned as a witch someplace or that we still have Kings, Queens and a Pope.
Interesting fact about the Pope: When he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible, according to the theologians of the Catholic Church. Well, according to them since the First Vatican Council in 1870 anyway. That's when they thought up (or "defined") the doctrine of Papal infallibility, although theologians have since "discovered" many instances of Popes being infallible before they told the people about the possibility. This, of course, involved a re-interpretation of history. I'm sure this ties in somehow to the whole child-molesting-coverup thing, but I'm not sure just how. In any event, it's nice to have a sure thing going for us, although here in Twenty-First Century America neither "faith" nor "morals" seems to be a real hot topic at the moment. Everybody in the public eye, from Jesse Jackson, Jr. to Cardinal Mahoney to Lance Armstrong to Silvio Berlusconi seems to have decided that moral relativism and expediency will do for just about any situation.
I was reading this morning that, according to the Catholic Church, the doctrine of papal infallibility didn't "just suddenly appear" in Church doctrine. It was there all along, and it's only the Church's understanding of the doctrine that's evolved to the point that it seemed like a change. Ditto with the Constitution of the United States of America. All those rights we used to discover lurking in there, like the "right to privacy," for example, really were in there all along, but we didn't know about them because we didn't know how to look for them. And all those governmental powers and taxes and things that we keep on discovering were in there all along, too.
It's the nature of the beast that our "understanding" of everything is continually evolving-- the versions of astrophysics, biology and American history now being taught in schools are very different from those taught a few decades ago. With history in particular, it's funny how we can keep refining our understanding no matter how far away from the actual events we get. Which makes you wonder: Why bother to amend the Constitution, ever? Why not just amend our understanding of it, instead? After all, it's been a long time since there were any amendments to the Bible, but there's never been any shortage of prophets and ministers and holy rollers around to tell everybody how they've discovered the hidden truth in there that blew by everybody else for the past two-plus thousand years. Also, when the Supreme Court does find a new little twist or turn in the Constitution, that's exactly what we have to do-- amend our understanding of the document. Because that's what the Supreme Court does, apart from deciding close political elections-- it finds those little nuggets in the Constitution that were there all along, but which will change everybody's lives once the Court tells us how wrong we've been.
Pope John Paul II only spoke infallibly once, in 1994, when he announced that women were never, ever going to be ordained as priests, and that, ergo, people should just stop talking about the possibility. And there you have it, his "legacy." No more Pope Joans. Oh, and I also heard that somebody in Latin America put out a comic book based on the premise that when John Paul II died he became a costumed superhero, fighting all kinds of bad guys from Hell. But he was only the second Pope to speak infallibly since they thought up the doctrine in 1870, so he'll be remembered.
(The other time was in 1950 when Pope Pius XI decided that the Virgin Mary was assumed "body and soul" into heaven when she died.)
People often talk about the Constitution as a "living" document-- i.e., one that still works more than two centuries after it was written because it was written in vague enough terms to permit its provisions to be applied in situations that the Framers (i.e., the landed gentry who wrote the document) could never have imagined. Other people are "strict constructionists," which means that you should look at the world through Eighteenth Century eyes when interpreting the law of the land. They say that if you want to enact laws dissimilar from any already in existence, you have to amend the Constitution, which is a lengthy and difficult process-- effectively impossible when the electorate and their representatives are split down the middle as they are today.
Now, nobody has ever said that the Supreme Court is infallible, but the thing is that if they do get something wrong, it's pretty hard (even for them) to fix. The Supreme Court's decisions can only be reversed by-- you guessed it, the Supreme Court. The Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the last word. Of course, you can get around that... by amending the Constitution, but as noted above, that's not practical in most situations. So, it's almost like they're infallible, because if they get it wrong, everybody then alive might very well be dead before they can fix it.
Like Popes, Supreme Court Justices never have to retire. But, unlike Popes, they speak "infallibly" on everything under the sun, from taxes to birth control to voting rights to war powers to advertising to privacy rights to porn. Because they are a separate, co-equal branch of government, they can look the President and the Congress right in the eye and say, "You're not the boss of me." As for the voters, they have as much input into the selection of the Supreme Court Justices as they have into the selection of a new Pope in Rome. Wow.
Interesting fact about the Pope: When he speaks ex cathedra on matters of faith or morals, he is infallible, according to the theologians of the Catholic Church. Well, according to them since the First Vatican Council in 1870 anyway. That's when they thought up (or "defined") the doctrine of Papal infallibility, although theologians have since "discovered" many instances of Popes being infallible before they told the people about the possibility. This, of course, involved a re-interpretation of history. I'm sure this ties in somehow to the whole child-molesting-coverup thing, but I'm not sure just how. In any event, it's nice to have a sure thing going for us, although here in Twenty-First Century America neither "faith" nor "morals" seems to be a real hot topic at the moment. Everybody in the public eye, from Jesse Jackson, Jr. to Cardinal Mahoney to Lance Armstrong to Silvio Berlusconi seems to have decided that moral relativism and expediency will do for just about any situation.
I was reading this morning that, according to the Catholic Church, the doctrine of papal infallibility didn't "just suddenly appear" in Church doctrine. It was there all along, and it's only the Church's understanding of the doctrine that's evolved to the point that it seemed like a change. Ditto with the Constitution of the United States of America. All those rights we used to discover lurking in there, like the "right to privacy," for example, really were in there all along, but we didn't know about them because we didn't know how to look for them. And all those governmental powers and taxes and things that we keep on discovering were in there all along, too.
It's the nature of the beast that our "understanding" of everything is continually evolving-- the versions of astrophysics, biology and American history now being taught in schools are very different from those taught a few decades ago. With history in particular, it's funny how we can keep refining our understanding no matter how far away from the actual events we get. Which makes you wonder: Why bother to amend the Constitution, ever? Why not just amend our understanding of it, instead? After all, it's been a long time since there were any amendments to the Bible, but there's never been any shortage of prophets and ministers and holy rollers around to tell everybody how they've discovered the hidden truth in there that blew by everybody else for the past two-plus thousand years. Also, when the Supreme Court does find a new little twist or turn in the Constitution, that's exactly what we have to do-- amend our understanding of the document. Because that's what the Supreme Court does, apart from deciding close political elections-- it finds those little nuggets in the Constitution that were there all along, but which will change everybody's lives once the Court tells us how wrong we've been.
Pope John Paul II only spoke infallibly once, in 1994, when he announced that women were never, ever going to be ordained as priests, and that, ergo, people should just stop talking about the possibility. And there you have it, his "legacy." No more Pope Joans. Oh, and I also heard that somebody in Latin America put out a comic book based on the premise that when John Paul II died he became a costumed superhero, fighting all kinds of bad guys from Hell. But he was only the second Pope to speak infallibly since they thought up the doctrine in 1870, so he'll be remembered.
(The other time was in 1950 when Pope Pius XI decided that the Virgin Mary was assumed "body and soul" into heaven when she died.)
People often talk about the Constitution as a "living" document-- i.e., one that still works more than two centuries after it was written because it was written in vague enough terms to permit its provisions to be applied in situations that the Framers (i.e., the landed gentry who wrote the document) could never have imagined. Other people are "strict constructionists," which means that you should look at the world through Eighteenth Century eyes when interpreting the law of the land. They say that if you want to enact laws dissimilar from any already in existence, you have to amend the Constitution, which is a lengthy and difficult process-- effectively impossible when the electorate and their representatives are split down the middle as they are today.
Now, nobody has ever said that the Supreme Court is infallible, but the thing is that if they do get something wrong, it's pretty hard (even for them) to fix. The Supreme Court's decisions can only be reversed by-- you guessed it, the Supreme Court. The Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the last word. Of course, you can get around that... by amending the Constitution, but as noted above, that's not practical in most situations. So, it's almost like they're infallible, because if they get it wrong, everybody then alive might very well be dead before they can fix it.
Like Popes, Supreme Court Justices never have to retire. But, unlike Popes, they speak "infallibly" on everything under the sun, from taxes to birth control to voting rights to war powers to advertising to privacy rights to porn. Because they are a separate, co-equal branch of government, they can look the President and the Congress right in the eye and say, "You're not the boss of me." As for the voters, they have as much input into the selection of the Supreme Court Justices as they have into the selection of a new Pope in Rome. Wow.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Marriage
The Supreme Court listened to arguments in a couple of cases about "gay marriage" last week. One case had to do with the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act," the other with the validity of California Proposition 8, enactment of which was supposed to outlaw "gay marriage" in America's most populous state. The Court will probably dispose of the California case with a procedural trick-- they'll simply discover that the people suing to reinstate Proposition 8 have no "standing" to bring the case, and avoid deciding the merits of it that way. The Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law, may present a little tougher case, but the Court will probably find a way to punt there, too. There was a lot of rigmarole about how it "might not be time yet" to decide the issue of "gay marriage" on its merits, because "it's such a recent phenomenon."
One can certainly understand why gay couples want the benefits of marriage extended to them, and why they don't want to be confirmed as second-class citizens by having it called something like a "civil union" instead. Besides, I forget who it was who was supposed to have originated the saying, but "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck." If you're going to treat people as married, they're married, and at that point it's pointless to try to make a distinction between different flavors of the same thing.
With apologies to whichever shepherd wrote the Book of Leviticus, I'd have to say it's a no-brainer that if you're going to have such a thing as marriage at all, it ought to apply to anyone who wants to assume its obligations and reap its benefits. And let's not kid ourselves, this "one man, one woman" stuff is straight out of the Bible. That's where all our "traditional values" come from in this country, whether it's politically correct to call attention to it or not. Imagine how hard it was for those anti-gay lawyers at the Supreme Court to get through their arguments without using the "B-word."
With all the furor over "gay marriage" it's easy to miss the big issue: Is there a place in the modern world for the institution of "marriage" at all? And if so, is it something that the government should encourage?
In those Supreme Court arguments, it's been hammered home again and again that there's no rationalization that provides a basis for extending special privileges to all those entering into the institution. It used to be that marriage essentially involved the transfer of ownership of a woman from one man (her father) to another man (her husband-to-be.) Women couldn't own property or even live alone, much less earn their own living (except as prostitutes or witches, and you know what the Bible had to say about them!) So they had to have a man to take care of them (and to serve, while they were being taken care of.) O.K., there's one of the big reasons that the institution of marriage was developed.
Another major justification for the institution, in addition to providing for the ownership, care and feeding of women, was to provide for the production, care and feeding of kids. You weren't supposed to have kids outside of wedlock (Catchy word, wot? Very descriptive.) If they were born out of wedlock, those kids would be "bastards," and tainted for the rest of their lives. Marriage, which was supposed to be "until Death do us part," made sure that both parents would have to be around and be responsible for raising their kids, even if they no longer cared to be together. So marriage was supposed to "promote the stability of the family."
A third justification was to promote morality generally, the idea being that to have sex was bad, unless you had it for the purpose of procreation with someone to whom you had been bound for life. If you wanted to have sex before marriage, or with someone other than your spouse after marriage, that was a sin. And if you actually did it, you were run out of town on a rail or stoned or something. And if you were a woman who did it, you were defiled for life, with one of the consequences being, ironically enough, that no "decent" man could ever marry you. Sort of like a "one strike" law. Conversely, if you were a married woman, it was your duty to have sex (and since contraception was also a sin, have children) whenever your "lawfully wedded spouse" felt like getting it on. (Marriage was, historically, basically an "arrangement" negotiated between families, sometimes when the principals were still kids, and often before the bride and groom-to-be had even seen each other, so there was a lot of "duty" involved, and the idea of romantic "love" as a pre-requisite never came into it at all.
Nowadays, of course, we're confronted with a lot of new realities. Women are supposed to have "equal rights," and they actually do, in many areas (although in many jurisdictions, like North Dakota, not with respect to having control over their own bodies.) So they don't need a man to support them or rent an apartment or any of that stuff.
As was repeatedly pointed out in the Supreme Court arguments referenced above, there's no showing that kids raised by "one man, one woman" do any better than kids raised in "alternative" circumstances, such as by single or gay parents. This is a good thing, because statistically the number of "traditional" single family households is shrinking (now fewer than half of all households, according to the Census), half of all first marriages end in divorce (the number rising to 80% for second and third marriages) and at least half of all the marriages that don't end in divorce really should (and would if the participants felt they could afford it.) One third of kids are raised by single moms, or otherwise without a father in the home.
There are such things as reliable contraceptives now, by the way. And the world has too many people, as it is. And, as Hillary says, "it takes a village" to raise kids, anyway. One way or the other, the "traditional institution of marriage" has got to go, and eventually will go, either by extending the status to any couple (or for that matter, why not any group) of adults that wants it, or by eliminating it entirely, at least as a civil institution.
One can certainly understand why gay couples want the benefits of marriage extended to them, and why they don't want to be confirmed as second-class citizens by having it called something like a "civil union" instead. Besides, I forget who it was who was supposed to have originated the saying, but "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck." If you're going to treat people as married, they're married, and at that point it's pointless to try to make a distinction between different flavors of the same thing.
With apologies to whichever shepherd wrote the Book of Leviticus, I'd have to say it's a no-brainer that if you're going to have such a thing as marriage at all, it ought to apply to anyone who wants to assume its obligations and reap its benefits. And let's not kid ourselves, this "one man, one woman" stuff is straight out of the Bible. That's where all our "traditional values" come from in this country, whether it's politically correct to call attention to it or not. Imagine how hard it was for those anti-gay lawyers at the Supreme Court to get through their arguments without using the "B-word."
With all the furor over "gay marriage" it's easy to miss the big issue: Is there a place in the modern world for the institution of "marriage" at all? And if so, is it something that the government should encourage?
In those Supreme Court arguments, it's been hammered home again and again that there's no rationalization that provides a basis for extending special privileges to all those entering into the institution. It used to be that marriage essentially involved the transfer of ownership of a woman from one man (her father) to another man (her husband-to-be.) Women couldn't own property or even live alone, much less earn their own living (except as prostitutes or witches, and you know what the Bible had to say about them!) So they had to have a man to take care of them (and to serve, while they were being taken care of.) O.K., there's one of the big reasons that the institution of marriage was developed.
Another major justification for the institution, in addition to providing for the ownership, care and feeding of women, was to provide for the production, care and feeding of kids. You weren't supposed to have kids outside of wedlock (Catchy word, wot? Very descriptive.) If they were born out of wedlock, those kids would be "bastards," and tainted for the rest of their lives. Marriage, which was supposed to be "until Death do us part," made sure that both parents would have to be around and be responsible for raising their kids, even if they no longer cared to be together. So marriage was supposed to "promote the stability of the family."
A third justification was to promote morality generally, the idea being that to have sex was bad, unless you had it for the purpose of procreation with someone to whom you had been bound for life. If you wanted to have sex before marriage, or with someone other than your spouse after marriage, that was a sin. And if you actually did it, you were run out of town on a rail or stoned or something. And if you were a woman who did it, you were defiled for life, with one of the consequences being, ironically enough, that no "decent" man could ever marry you. Sort of like a "one strike" law. Conversely, if you were a married woman, it was your duty to have sex (and since contraception was also a sin, have children) whenever your "lawfully wedded spouse" felt like getting it on. (Marriage was, historically, basically an "arrangement" negotiated between families, sometimes when the principals were still kids, and often before the bride and groom-to-be had even seen each other, so there was a lot of "duty" involved, and the idea of romantic "love" as a pre-requisite never came into it at all.
Nowadays, of course, we're confronted with a lot of new realities. Women are supposed to have "equal rights," and they actually do, in many areas (although in many jurisdictions, like North Dakota, not with respect to having control over their own bodies.) So they don't need a man to support them or rent an apartment or any of that stuff.
As was repeatedly pointed out in the Supreme Court arguments referenced above, there's no showing that kids raised by "one man, one woman" do any better than kids raised in "alternative" circumstances, such as by single or gay parents. This is a good thing, because statistically the number of "traditional" single family households is shrinking (now fewer than half of all households, according to the Census), half of all first marriages end in divorce (the number rising to 80% for second and third marriages) and at least half of all the marriages that don't end in divorce really should (and would if the participants felt they could afford it.) One third of kids are raised by single moms, or otherwise without a father in the home.
There are such things as reliable contraceptives now, by the way. And the world has too many people, as it is. And, as Hillary says, "it takes a village" to raise kids, anyway. One way or the other, the "traditional institution of marriage" has got to go, and eventually will go, either by extending the status to any couple (or for that matter, why not any group) of adults that wants it, or by eliminating it entirely, at least as a civil institution.
Monday, February 25, 2013
The Shifting Sands of Time
I never watch the Oscars, even though I do like the movies. I never go to the movie theatre any more, either, although I do like the movies. (I've got about 10 days worth of movies backed up on the DVR, a bunch of Blu-Rays and DVD's and even VHS tapes stacked in the closet, and subscribe to every movie channel known to man, so I don't feel deprived. And this is despite that I shun Netflix, too.) Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and whenever I make an exception to my "never" rule and go to the theatre anyway, I come away feeling that it wasn't really worth the hassle and the expense, and vow never to do it again. A year or so later, I'll make another exception, and go through it all again.
This year, I did go to see one of the Oscar-nominated films, the one starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field and imaginatively titled "Lincoln." Maybe because it was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment or something. Anyway, there was a lot of Civil War stuff in the news. And after the movie, which wasn't all that bad, I renewed my vow to wait 'til it came on TV the next time, for the same old reasons.
Another film with a "historical" theme, "Argo," was on the Oscar ballot this year, and according to this morning's Internet headlines, it won. Although I didn't see the movie, I did read something about it in the Sunday paper. Ben Affleck, who is now an "auteur" of cinema, apparently, was explaining to whomever was writing the article that he felt it was O.K. to take some liberties with the facts to jazz up the picture, and I heartily agree. They obviously did it in "Lincoln," too, in such stirring scenes as the one where a lawmaker virulently opposed to enacting the 13th Amendment, which abolished "involuntary servitude" in the United States (for most people, most of the time), came out onto his front porch and apologetically explained to Lincoln that he couldn't vote for the Amendment because he was a "prejudiced" man who blamed black people for his brother's death in the war. Not only would it have been better writing to show the audience that he was "prejudiced" and why, instead of having the guy just blat it out like that, the language was anachronistic. If one really to know how "folks" in this country, including Members of Congress, spoke to and about black people in the 19th Century, "Django, Unchained" would probably be a better source.
But all of this is beside the point, because when you get right down to it there is no such thing as an accurate "history," anyway. "History is written by the victors," Winston Churchill said, and that's true as far as it goes. What Churchill either forgot or chose not to mention is that the victors themselves never agree on just what happened, and moreover the "official" version of anything has a tendency to morph over time. In a society where most people get most of their information about "history" (and everything else) from television and the movies, and the distinction between "news" and "entertainment" has blurred to the extent that some people feel fully justified in getting their information about the issues of our time from "The Daily Show" or "Fox News," it's pretty clear that "history" becomes "fictionalized" almost immediately.
Add to this the research that shows that a) eyewitness testimony is unreliable; and b) people hear and see what they expect to hear and see; and c) people interpret all that they hear and see to conform to their pre-existing beliefs, and what do you get? A world where the truth of anything, from climate change to statistics to evolution to nutrition science, is simply a matter of opinion. Our world, and welcome to it!
So, what's so wrong about that? Isn't everybody's opinion as good as everybody else's? Well, most Americans would answer, "Sure, if it is based on the facts." (Translation: "Sure, if their opinion agrees with mine.") Or, more realistically, they might just say "No. I am privileged to order my own reality, and in my world there is no climate change; statistics prove that the death rate for everybody is identical to that for smokers (100%); evolution is just a 'theory,' and it's wrong because the Bible says so; and "McDonalds serves healthy, nutritious meals."
In our world, people can believe that the best way to stimulate the economy is to raise payroll taxes and cut government spending when unemployment is high. They can believe that manipulating the tax code to allow more billionaires to make and keep even more money will stimulate the economy, too. They can believe that privileged people sitting at home clipping coupons or plotting hostile takeovers and running hedgefunds and "downsizing" corporations are "job creators" who will make life better for the common man. They can believe all that, for a while, just like Marie Antoinette, sitting in her splendid palace, could believe, for a while, that if the poor had no bread, they could solve their supposed problems simply by switching to cake.
This year, I did go to see one of the Oscar-nominated films, the one starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field and imaginatively titled "Lincoln." Maybe because it was the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment or something. Anyway, there was a lot of Civil War stuff in the news. And after the movie, which wasn't all that bad, I renewed my vow to wait 'til it came on TV the next time, for the same old reasons.
Another film with a "historical" theme, "Argo," was on the Oscar ballot this year, and according to this morning's Internet headlines, it won. Although I didn't see the movie, I did read something about it in the Sunday paper. Ben Affleck, who is now an "auteur" of cinema, apparently, was explaining to whomever was writing the article that he felt it was O.K. to take some liberties with the facts to jazz up the picture, and I heartily agree. They obviously did it in "Lincoln," too, in such stirring scenes as the one where a lawmaker virulently opposed to enacting the 13th Amendment, which abolished "involuntary servitude" in the United States (for most people, most of the time), came out onto his front porch and apologetically explained to Lincoln that he couldn't vote for the Amendment because he was a "prejudiced" man who blamed black people for his brother's death in the war. Not only would it have been better writing to show the audience that he was "prejudiced" and why, instead of having the guy just blat it out like that, the language was anachronistic. If one really to know how "folks" in this country, including Members of Congress, spoke to and about black people in the 19th Century, "Django, Unchained" would probably be a better source.
But all of this is beside the point, because when you get right down to it there is no such thing as an accurate "history," anyway. "History is written by the victors," Winston Churchill said, and that's true as far as it goes. What Churchill either forgot or chose not to mention is that the victors themselves never agree on just what happened, and moreover the "official" version of anything has a tendency to morph over time. In a society where most people get most of their information about "history" (and everything else) from television and the movies, and the distinction between "news" and "entertainment" has blurred to the extent that some people feel fully justified in getting their information about the issues of our time from "The Daily Show" or "Fox News," it's pretty clear that "history" becomes "fictionalized" almost immediately.
Add to this the research that shows that a) eyewitness testimony is unreliable; and b) people hear and see what they expect to hear and see; and c) people interpret all that they hear and see to conform to their pre-existing beliefs, and what do you get? A world where the truth of anything, from climate change to statistics to evolution to nutrition science, is simply a matter of opinion. Our world, and welcome to it!
So, what's so wrong about that? Isn't everybody's opinion as good as everybody else's? Well, most Americans would answer, "Sure, if it is based on the facts." (Translation: "Sure, if their opinion agrees with mine.") Or, more realistically, they might just say "No. I am privileged to order my own reality, and in my world there is no climate change; statistics prove that the death rate for everybody is identical to that for smokers (100%); evolution is just a 'theory,' and it's wrong because the Bible says so; and "McDonalds serves healthy, nutritious meals."
In our world, people can believe that the best way to stimulate the economy is to raise payroll taxes and cut government spending when unemployment is high. They can believe that manipulating the tax code to allow more billionaires to make and keep even more money will stimulate the economy, too. They can believe that privileged people sitting at home clipping coupons or plotting hostile takeovers and running hedgefunds and "downsizing" corporations are "job creators" who will make life better for the common man. They can believe all that, for a while, just like Marie Antoinette, sitting in her splendid palace, could believe, for a while, that if the poor had no bread, they could solve their supposed problems simply by switching to cake.
Monday, February 18, 2013
The Meaning of Life
When I was a small kid, I used to lie awake at night sometimes and wonder what was lurking in the closet or under the bed. Sometimes the suspense would get to be too much for me, and I'd leap out of bed and slap at the light switch to flood the room with incandescent light. Of course, I never caught any creatures this way, but it wasn't until years later that I found out the scientific reason why I didn't. It seems that a dude named Heisenberg figured out that the very act of looking at something alters whatever it is that you're looking at, so there's no way to tell whether there were monsters in there before I turned on the light.
Now that I'm an adult, I still lie awake at night sometimes, and I'm still careful to shut the closet door before getting into bed. Nor do I permit my arms or legs to dangle over the side of the bed once I'm in there... just in case. But I'm nowhere near as nervous about the unknown as I used to be when I was a kid, because all the empirical evidence I amassed over those Wonder Years ultimately allowed me to internalize that it doesn't matter whether there are monsters in the dark or not-- incandescent light is fatal to them, if there are. (Although now we're supposed to be switching to fluorescent bulbs. I think that kind of light should work, too, but maybe I should do a formal study to make sure before I run out of incandescent bulbs, just in case.)
Besides, somewhere along the long, tortuous path to adulthood I developed a new set of worries. Not only are the faceless, shapeless monsters in the dark less scary than the documented wackadoos on the front page of the paper and the 6 o'clock news, I've been wondering about the Meaning of Life. In particular, I've been wondering if there is one.
I've noticed that all the truly happy people that I know adhere to the philosophy of "living in the moment." One wise woman told me that "the Meaning of Life is Life." In other words, don't worry about the "why" of it at all, because now that you are alive, it doen't matter how you got here, or where (if anywhere) you're headed after this. There's a lot of sense in that approach to the problem. In fact, I think that's pretty much how cats and dogs live.
Human beings can never seem to leave well enough alone, though, and so a few billion of us around the world have fallen, to one degree or another, under the spell of something called "religion." In Western countries, but particularly in the U.S., there is also a large and probably growing group who call themselves "spiritual, but not religious." Near as I can tell, this means "I used to go to church... or synagogue... or temple... or the mosque... when I was a kid, but not anymore." Personally, I had my childhood indoctrination in the Catholic church. But I can truthfully say, without either shame or pride, that I haven't seen the inside of one of those places, except for the occasional wedding or funeral or trip to my Mom's, for longer than some of you have been alive. I'm spiritual, though.
Getting religion can remove the uncertainty of those unanswerable questions that you might otherwise ask yourself in the middle of the night, because religion is all about providing answers to the unanswerable, even if the answers are simply made up. All you've got to do is believe, and then you're set. My Mom is a devout Catholic, and has often told me that she prays regularly that I will receive the "gift of faith." And I appreciate the thought, I really do, because if I could really believe in anything, the way she's talking about, I'd automatically have answers to all of those questions and maybe I'd finally be able to get a good night's sleep.
And it wouldn't necessarily have to be Catholicism, either. It could be Islam, or the Old Religion ("witchcraft" to you and me) or anything, even "secular humanism." Anything to turn off the wondering.
It doesn't simplify things to think that all the different religions can't possibly be right because they're fundamentally different from each other, or even internally inconsistent. What if "our thoughts create our reality," as Louise Haye might say? Maybe everything is relative, and whatever we believe is real is real. That would certainly explain how both Newton and Einstein could be right. Heck, maybe some people really did come from nowhere, and will blink out like a lightbulb when their Final Switch is flipped. Maybe others wind up floating on clouds, strumming harps and wearing choir robes and sandals. And maybe somewhere there is a giant Gentlemen's Club in the sky, too, where explosives-singed martyrs are entertained endlessly by a parade of virgins. Or maybe we just go back to the foot of the line, reincarnated as goats or chickens or chupacabras or something.
Sometimes people find faith out of the blue, when something scary or unnatural happens to them. St. Paul, for example, was a heartless tax collector until one day he fell off his ass and was struck blind. After hearing the Voice of Jesus, he received the "gift of faith" and his sight was restored and he began preaching the Gospel and... well, I can't remember whether he got himself martyred or not, but however and whenever he ultimately checked out I'm sure he never again laid awake at night wondering what would happen when he did.
Maybe something like that will happen to me one day. In the meantime, I'm going to try to think happy thoughts, be nice to goats and chickens, and live life one beer at a time.
Now that I'm an adult, I still lie awake at night sometimes, and I'm still careful to shut the closet door before getting into bed. Nor do I permit my arms or legs to dangle over the side of the bed once I'm in there... just in case. But I'm nowhere near as nervous about the unknown as I used to be when I was a kid, because all the empirical evidence I amassed over those Wonder Years ultimately allowed me to internalize that it doesn't matter whether there are monsters in the dark or not-- incandescent light is fatal to them, if there are. (Although now we're supposed to be switching to fluorescent bulbs. I think that kind of light should work, too, but maybe I should do a formal study to make sure before I run out of incandescent bulbs, just in case.)
Besides, somewhere along the long, tortuous path to adulthood I developed a new set of worries. Not only are the faceless, shapeless monsters in the dark less scary than the documented wackadoos on the front page of the paper and the 6 o'clock news, I've been wondering about the Meaning of Life. In particular, I've been wondering if there is one.
I've noticed that all the truly happy people that I know adhere to the philosophy of "living in the moment." One wise woman told me that "the Meaning of Life is Life." In other words, don't worry about the "why" of it at all, because now that you are alive, it doen't matter how you got here, or where (if anywhere) you're headed after this. There's a lot of sense in that approach to the problem. In fact, I think that's pretty much how cats and dogs live.
Human beings can never seem to leave well enough alone, though, and so a few billion of us around the world have fallen, to one degree or another, under the spell of something called "religion." In Western countries, but particularly in the U.S., there is also a large and probably growing group who call themselves "spiritual, but not religious." Near as I can tell, this means "I used to go to church... or synagogue... or temple... or the mosque... when I was a kid, but not anymore." Personally, I had my childhood indoctrination in the Catholic church. But I can truthfully say, without either shame or pride, that I haven't seen the inside of one of those places, except for the occasional wedding or funeral or trip to my Mom's, for longer than some of you have been alive. I'm spiritual, though.
Getting religion can remove the uncertainty of those unanswerable questions that you might otherwise ask yourself in the middle of the night, because religion is all about providing answers to the unanswerable, even if the answers are simply made up. All you've got to do is believe, and then you're set. My Mom is a devout Catholic, and has often told me that she prays regularly that I will receive the "gift of faith." And I appreciate the thought, I really do, because if I could really believe in anything, the way she's talking about, I'd automatically have answers to all of those questions and maybe I'd finally be able to get a good night's sleep.
And it wouldn't necessarily have to be Catholicism, either. It could be Islam, or the Old Religion ("witchcraft" to you and me) or anything, even "secular humanism." Anything to turn off the wondering.
It doesn't simplify things to think that all the different religions can't possibly be right because they're fundamentally different from each other, or even internally inconsistent. What if "our thoughts create our reality," as Louise Haye might say? Maybe everything is relative, and whatever we believe is real is real. That would certainly explain how both Newton and Einstein could be right. Heck, maybe some people really did come from nowhere, and will blink out like a lightbulb when their Final Switch is flipped. Maybe others wind up floating on clouds, strumming harps and wearing choir robes and sandals. And maybe somewhere there is a giant Gentlemen's Club in the sky, too, where explosives-singed martyrs are entertained endlessly by a parade of virgins. Or maybe we just go back to the foot of the line, reincarnated as goats or chickens or chupacabras or something.
Sometimes people find faith out of the blue, when something scary or unnatural happens to them. St. Paul, for example, was a heartless tax collector until one day he fell off his ass and was struck blind. After hearing the Voice of Jesus, he received the "gift of faith" and his sight was restored and he began preaching the Gospel and... well, I can't remember whether he got himself martyred or not, but however and whenever he ultimately checked out I'm sure he never again laid awake at night wondering what would happen when he did.
Maybe something like that will happen to me one day. In the meantime, I'm going to try to think happy thoughts, be nice to goats and chickens, and live life one beer at a time.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Boomer or Bust?
A friend of mine asked me to say a few words in defense of the demographic known as the Baby Boomers. Apparently, there are those who think that Boomers in general are moribund, greedy, selfish and inconsiderate, and are burning up the last of our non-renewable resources before anybody else gets a chance. Well, here goes.
With the passing of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers are left holding the bag. And I suppose it's natural for younger people to blame them for all that's wrong with the world, because there's nobody else left to blame, at least not so's you could yell at them without getting locked up for hallucinating or something. (Boomers might remember how everyone looked askance at Nixon for wandering through the halls of the White House with a cocktail in his hand, arguing with the portraits of past Presidents. But if you're younger, you'll just say, "Huh?") Anyway, the buck has got to stop somewhere, and now it's stopping in Boomerville.
Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials... everybody born since the very early 1960's has struggled to carve out an identity for themselves distinct from that of their Boomer parents (and more and more and more their Boomer grandparents now.) And, as with the Boomers themselves, and all past generations of which I have any knowledge, the succeeding generations are sure that their parents/grandparents are idiots. These days, a lot is being written about how the poor young people have a legitimate point. After all, the world is a mess, and it's projected that the children of the Boomers will be the first generation in modern American history to have a shorter life expectancy and a bleaker economic outlook than their parents did. And if you're 30 years old and still living at home because you can't find a job and have a six-figure student loan debt that will never go away, you've got to think that there's something wrong with the system, it's not just you.
On the other hand, the answers to life's mysteries are not likely to be found by staring into an ipad, even though frantically poking and swiping at the screen does make you look busy. (By the way, cutting and pasting from the Internet is only "research" if you actually read the stuff and know something about the source (and it's not "creative writing" at all.) And "staying connected" in 40 different ways with everybody you know or ever heard of is only worthwhile if there's a legitimate reason for it, like trying to line up what used to be called a "date," or planning a revolution, or (ahem) looking for a non-existent job or something. It is possible to be very "busy" all the time, without actually doing anything, you know. And how many cat videos and recipes and "likes" can you fling into cyberspace without starting to waste your time?
See, a lot of this is the fault of the Boomers. They developed the technology that has obsessed and enthralled everybody... and, coincidentally, has eliminated many of the jobs that the later generations may have been counting on to be working at when they grew up. They also failed to kick their kids off the couch and out of the house.
The later generations, of course, are great at creating "apps" to give them new ways and reasons to stare at computer (or ipad or phone or "phablet") screens so that everybody will have something to do while sitting on the couch waiting for that job. Because people are so much more "efficient" now, and machines are so much more versatile, there really isn't a lot for non-creative people to do, other than fool with their apps and stay connected to everybody else who's doing the same thing. What is Facebook except one giant streetcorner where everybody you know hangs out when there's nothing better to do? Which is a lot of the time, apparently.
Some people have been noticing lately that it doesn't necessarily make economic sense for everybody to go into debt to obtain a college degree. Of course, there are more (and better) reasons than economic ones for a person to get an education. However, to hear the politicians talk about it, every kid in America should go to a four-year university and study exclusively math and science, because that way we'll be able to compete with the Chinese. This is all B.S., of course. The Chinese have their own problems, foremost among which being the fact that there are so many Chinese. And whatever our own politicians tell us, all you have to do to figure out who's winning the "competition" is to compare the numbers of Chinese who are coming here to have "anchor babies" with the numbers of Americans going there to do likewise. Besides, if you're going to college to acquire "job skills," you're really going to trade school, and that's getting "trained," not being "educated."
The post-Boomer generations have high self-esteem, which is good in some situations but not in the abstract. Serial killers have high self-esteem. Napoleon and Hitler had high self-esteem. But, you say, Mommy and Daddy Boomer told these younger people that they're wonderful, and why should Mommy and Daddy lie? Well, the harsh truth is that not everybody is a creative genius. Of all those tens and tens of millions of bright young people out there, there may or may not be even one new Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg. Another harsh truth is that not only has technology has taken us to a place where there is little for non-creative, poorly educated people to "do," there is less and less incentive to pay them a living wage to do it. And the third harsh truth is that it's up to the younger folk to find their own way off the couch and out into the world, because Mom and Dad don't have an answer for their dilemma, and will probably soon be in dire economic straits themselves if they aren't already.
Their expectations frustrated, the kids on the couch have to lash out at somebody, so it's naturally the Boomers they blame for their sorry estate. They are frustrated, understandably enough, by their failure to get anywhere, and assume that it's because the Boomers won't get out of the way. What they fail to understand is that Boomers are in the same boat, job-wise, as they are. When Boomers are "downsized" or retired, it is unlikely that many of them will ever be going back to work, and the vacancies created by their departure won't necessarily be filled from the ranks of the underemployed youth of America, either.
As for the sorry state of the world, it might be wise to remember that the environment has been rapidly deteriorating, and the population dramatically increasing, ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. By the time the Boomers came on the scene, the environment was already polluted, and there were already too many people. Although merely by being alive the Boomers have since made their own contribution to the mess, they also either originated or gave impetus to the environmental movement, the expansion of civil rights, the Cultural Revolution, the Sexual Revolution (whoo hoo! no-- think "contraception" and women's rights in this context), the ethical treatment of animals, the peace movement, the natural/organic/local food movement, the homeopathic/alternative medicine markets, renewable energy, nuclear disarmament and let's not forget Casual Fridays (or even jeans at the office all the time) in case you do happen to have a job. All this stuff is with us today because of things that happened in the 60's and 70's, which you whippersnappers would know if you'd studied history in school. The Boomers have at least tried to change things, and in the "real" world, too, not just Second Life.
Oh, and by the way, Led Zeppelin is a Boomer band. Come on, youth of America, cut the Boomers some slack, and don't spill anything while you're hanging out on the couch! Oh, and you might think about starting on working out some solutions to all these problems, next time you take a break from whatever it is you're "doing." The baton will be passed again soon enough, even if Mom and Dad do wind up having to delay-- or even forego-- their retirement.
With the passing of the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers are left holding the bag. And I suppose it's natural for younger people to blame them for all that's wrong with the world, because there's nobody else left to blame, at least not so's you could yell at them without getting locked up for hallucinating or something. (Boomers might remember how everyone looked askance at Nixon for wandering through the halls of the White House with a cocktail in his hand, arguing with the portraits of past Presidents. But if you're younger, you'll just say, "Huh?") Anyway, the buck has got to stop somewhere, and now it's stopping in Boomerville.
Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials... everybody born since the very early 1960's has struggled to carve out an identity for themselves distinct from that of their Boomer parents (and more and more and more their Boomer grandparents now.) And, as with the Boomers themselves, and all past generations of which I have any knowledge, the succeeding generations are sure that their parents/grandparents are idiots. These days, a lot is being written about how the poor young people have a legitimate point. After all, the world is a mess, and it's projected that the children of the Boomers will be the first generation in modern American history to have a shorter life expectancy and a bleaker economic outlook than their parents did. And if you're 30 years old and still living at home because you can't find a job and have a six-figure student loan debt that will never go away, you've got to think that there's something wrong with the system, it's not just you.
On the other hand, the answers to life's mysteries are not likely to be found by staring into an ipad, even though frantically poking and swiping at the screen does make you look busy. (By the way, cutting and pasting from the Internet is only "research" if you actually read the stuff and know something about the source (and it's not "creative writing" at all.) And "staying connected" in 40 different ways with everybody you know or ever heard of is only worthwhile if there's a legitimate reason for it, like trying to line up what used to be called a "date," or planning a revolution, or (ahem) looking for a non-existent job or something. It is possible to be very "busy" all the time, without actually doing anything, you know. And how many cat videos and recipes and "likes" can you fling into cyberspace without starting to waste your time?
See, a lot of this is the fault of the Boomers. They developed the technology that has obsessed and enthralled everybody... and, coincidentally, has eliminated many of the jobs that the later generations may have been counting on to be working at when they grew up. They also failed to kick their kids off the couch and out of the house.
The later generations, of course, are great at creating "apps" to give them new ways and reasons to stare at computer (or ipad or phone or "phablet") screens so that everybody will have something to do while sitting on the couch waiting for that job. Because people are so much more "efficient" now, and machines are so much more versatile, there really isn't a lot for non-creative people to do, other than fool with their apps and stay connected to everybody else who's doing the same thing. What is Facebook except one giant streetcorner where everybody you know hangs out when there's nothing better to do? Which is a lot of the time, apparently.
Some people have been noticing lately that it doesn't necessarily make economic sense for everybody to go into debt to obtain a college degree. Of course, there are more (and better) reasons than economic ones for a person to get an education. However, to hear the politicians talk about it, every kid in America should go to a four-year university and study exclusively math and science, because that way we'll be able to compete with the Chinese. This is all B.S., of course. The Chinese have their own problems, foremost among which being the fact that there are so many Chinese. And whatever our own politicians tell us, all you have to do to figure out who's winning the "competition" is to compare the numbers of Chinese who are coming here to have "anchor babies" with the numbers of Americans going there to do likewise. Besides, if you're going to college to acquire "job skills," you're really going to trade school, and that's getting "trained," not being "educated."
The post-Boomer generations have high self-esteem, which is good in some situations but not in the abstract. Serial killers have high self-esteem. Napoleon and Hitler had high self-esteem. But, you say, Mommy and Daddy Boomer told these younger people that they're wonderful, and why should Mommy and Daddy lie? Well, the harsh truth is that not everybody is a creative genius. Of all those tens and tens of millions of bright young people out there, there may or may not be even one new Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg. Another harsh truth is that not only has technology has taken us to a place where there is little for non-creative, poorly educated people to "do," there is less and less incentive to pay them a living wage to do it. And the third harsh truth is that it's up to the younger folk to find their own way off the couch and out into the world, because Mom and Dad don't have an answer for their dilemma, and will probably soon be in dire economic straits themselves if they aren't already.
Their expectations frustrated, the kids on the couch have to lash out at somebody, so it's naturally the Boomers they blame for their sorry estate. They are frustrated, understandably enough, by their failure to get anywhere, and assume that it's because the Boomers won't get out of the way. What they fail to understand is that Boomers are in the same boat, job-wise, as they are. When Boomers are "downsized" or retired, it is unlikely that many of them will ever be going back to work, and the vacancies created by their departure won't necessarily be filled from the ranks of the underemployed youth of America, either.
As for the sorry state of the world, it might be wise to remember that the environment has been rapidly deteriorating, and the population dramatically increasing, ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. By the time the Boomers came on the scene, the environment was already polluted, and there were already too many people. Although merely by being alive the Boomers have since made their own contribution to the mess, they also either originated or gave impetus to the environmental movement, the expansion of civil rights, the Cultural Revolution, the Sexual Revolution (whoo hoo! no-- think "contraception" and women's rights in this context), the ethical treatment of animals, the peace movement, the natural/organic/local food movement, the homeopathic/alternative medicine markets, renewable energy, nuclear disarmament and let's not forget Casual Fridays (or even jeans at the office all the time) in case you do happen to have a job. All this stuff is with us today because of things that happened in the 60's and 70's, which you whippersnappers would know if you'd studied history in school. The Boomers have at least tried to change things, and in the "real" world, too, not just Second Life.
Oh, and by the way, Led Zeppelin is a Boomer band. Come on, youth of America, cut the Boomers some slack, and don't spill anything while you're hanging out on the couch! Oh, and you might think about starting on working out some solutions to all these problems, next time you take a break from whatever it is you're "doing." The baton will be passed again soon enough, even if Mom and Dad do wind up having to delay-- or even forego-- their retirement.
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