To the Baby Boomers:
I now understand that you aren’t at all happy with my opinion that the actual ’cause’ of the [whole worlds'] financial woes actually starts with YOU, the Boomers. And now according to the social studies – it’ll end with your grandchildren because YOU think that your time in this war-against-the-people is done … you opened the gates, you let the evil-ones in, you supped on their pocketbooks, you held hands with their delinquent values and you sucked at the teat of plenty – all on high interest and lifetime repayments.
You see, I have a problem with the Boomers and … I guess that’s my job since they’re ‘my parents’ age and most kids think their parents are idiots – at least until they get some kids of their own to re-educate that misconception right out of them. However, it’s not my job to sit back and give my parents generation a free-pass into retirement with all the frills and perks they personally pissed up the wall for the last 40 or so years – ever since they just started putting their monikers to big-interest credit and living much better than they really should of for all that time. And that’s the truth. You don’t have to like it, just hear it – at least once.
Without that equity mortgage, the credit cards, the lines of store credit, the hire purchase, the personal loans and the swag of sub-prime’ lending the Boomers let come into the peoples compound unchallenged, ‘today’ couldn’t be happening and; in fact, you wore their banners with pride and called these dastardly robes – Credit Ratings – you would of had to learn to do things differently, lived on less, learned to budget and save and sure, some of you did – that’s why you bought the quarter million dollar home-away-from-home-on-wheels [with its own wine-rack and cooler no less!] … and pissed off touring – soundly buying into the comic quip of ‘Spending the kids inheritance’ – while the other half fell down and behind in every conceivable fashion and now face the indignity of old age with less than nothing to see them through because you can’t even rely on family to take care of you anymore – because they’re stretched like drum-skins over that now empty barrel o’ plenty YOU set them up for before they were legally old enough to sign up for themselves. Like indoctrinating the babes into believing in spooky cloud beings – you also indoctrinated them into the ‘Credit is Good!’ religion.
Don’t get me wrong, I hope you all live long and … well, as long as your retirement funds last and the larder stays replenishing without that magical plastic card you don’t have anymore ’cause they took it away because you’re no longer ‘viable’ – in other words, the robber barons sucked the ‘greatest generation’ dry and now that generation thoroughly believes it’s entitled to … everything none the less. Can you explain that to me when I grew up hearing that only the lazy bums end retirement in destitution – what on earth happened to that marvelous explanation you gave the kids in those times of plenty?
When you cock-up, you gotta live with the mistakes – isn’t that what you told your kids when they made some bad choices and you thought they ought to clean up their own mess? Didn’t you hold their hands while they faced down the big-scary-challenge of ‘fixing their own mistakes, themselves?’ … so why do you want the youth and younger generations to clean up your mess while you hold our hands and cluck disapprovingly as if this is OUR FAULT?
Hey – we just kept the party going because it looked like such a lot of fun and if the oldies are doing it, why can’t we too?! Hypocrisy does not become the so called elders of society anymore than it does leaders or youth. So, let’s explain where you are the hypocrites and for once, your kids have the high ground morally in this situation.
You guys are going to die. So is everyone else. But most of you will die in the next 30 years or less. My generation will then be pushing 70 ourselves, if we live that long thanks to the other truth – you people fed us on garbage because you were too busy to remember ‘good food makes good people grow’. You literally encouraged a McDonald’s and KFC to spring up like weeds on every corner – you taught us to sing the soda jingles instead of folk songs like you were taught, you made us into consumerist junkies and dressed us up like little princes and princesses – and then you insist that we must do the same for your grand kids. We have the high moral ground because it’s YOUR generation that dumped all our asses into excessive-compulsive debt and taught the youngsters in your care that – greed is good!
You are hypocrites because yours was the last generation that was ever actually taught to read and write and think properly, who ever got true lessons in history and ethics and who were taught the ‘truths of the nation/s’. My generation got Oscar the Grouch and 27 channels of system regurgitated horseshit while yours was off working as a two income family to pay for the lifestyles YOU could not afford – and that meant we were the latch-key kids, the rising youth crime, the lost-kids who had no one at home giving a damn what they did and parents too exhausted to really give it their all when it came to homework. So therefore, when you whine about how stupid your kids are and how blind-deaf-dumb to ‘reality’ your grand kids are, coin operated little people that they truly are – you are hypocrites. You sold us out to your ‘good times on tick’ lifestyles, caught up in all the fab and flurry of your era – wearing your kids like accessories to your lifestyles.
You are hypocrites when it comes to our health – which is increasingly degraded thanks to the fact you wouldn’t have a clue what was in the Kool-Aid, nor the hot dogs, or the buckets of candy you shovelled in us because – it shuts the kid up. Yeah, you forced veggies down our throats and called it healthy eating but you never stopped to wonder what kinds of poisons were on those veggies and then you blamed us for ‘turning feral’ when our bodies overloaded and turned us into a generation of social misfits, non-thinking button pushing dressed up apes … and since we don’t know any better than to reach for that jar or box or ‘done-for-us’ convenience food because you never bothered to care what was in the shit you poured down our throats because – the TV and society said it was – GOOD and so on – you are the hypocrite when you dare to comment on what an unruly pack of no-hopers the younger generations turned out to be. You poisoned us into thinking it’s all good …
But further to that – you’re the generation that demanded new and improved ‘magick potions’ to cure all that ails you. You couldn’t cope with even minor pain and got addicted to clinical grade sedatives. You couldn’t deal with the the fact you were aging and demanded all kinds of cure-us lotions – containing all kinds of things you can’t even pronounce but are sure are good because they cost a fortune and the label says it’s so. You’re the generation that made doctors hide out in emergency wards and not make house calls anymore because you were too busy being glitter-flies to actually stay home and tend your sick babies who didn’t have anything more than a common cold … and doctors aren’t gods, and they might perform some miracles but they aren’t magicans – and when you demanded a cure for the common cold so that it didn’t interfere in your ‘real life’ where you weren’t parents to the next generation – they stopped making house calls.
You’re the generation that pioneered plastic surgery and enabled 12 year olds to have major surgery to make them ‘look right’ … what came out of WW1 as a science to help disfigured soldiers was turned into a highly lucrative occupation to keep the Boomers blooming … to lift the natural sag, to lighten the look of earned age, to tuck and nip and fiddle – all so that when you looked in a mirror you could pretend to be 35 again and continue on your merry little way into oblivion. Now you dare suck your teeth because your daughters turn your granddaughters into little mini barbies and they want their breasts enhanced by 16 – hypocrites!
You are hypocrites every time you say: Kids today would be lost without their techno gadgets. You are the generation that introduced not one but two gas guzzlers to every suburban home … you bought into every new household gadget that hit the market. Your generation saw TV first and it hasn’t been turned off since – in every bedroom, effectively shuttering the ‘family unit’ time once spent entertaining and educating the kids in all kinds of ways – but most certainly in ‘social skills’ even down to them learning to occasionally lose a game of cards – with grace. And – your generation bought in the microwaves to every kitchen to ‘save time’ and then for some inexplicable reason you permitted electric can openers to stare threateningly at you from the dark regions of your cupboards without ever questioning why any intelligent species would actually invent such a pointless gadget let alone buy [at least] one.
You are the generation that took to VCR – and then expanded it to my generation and then your grand babies generation. You’re the same generation that could afford the first cell phones, the first home computers and of course – the first SUV’s that come with every techno mod-con going. You then handed all that to my generation as the ‘norm’ and so help me – every time you turn around, you’ve given the grand babies some other thing that whizzes, whirrs or whistles – and left us to buy the damned batteries to make it go.
And it wasn’t that you weren’t ‘raised right’ – you’re the flower children generation of ‘all things over-the-top and free’. You’re the first generation with the disposable cash to party when your own parents had been working for five years … you’re the generation that your parents sacrificed to educate and you basically pissed all that up the wall in interest bearing credit and good times galore. My generation figured since the party was still running, you must approve and man, didn’t we have a good time of it, eh?
You were the first bona fide ‘rebel generation’ that had everything going for it and like the great fall of Babylon, you partied hard and you got right into it with every single new invention, innovation and gob-smacking bit of techno-crap that hit the market – and now, you hypocritically try to make this about the grand babies? Hypocrites tell others – do what we say, not what we do! Welcome to reality, Boomers – you did it, and the babies copied your sterlingly stupid lead better.
You are hypocrites when you claim modern parents aren’t parenting the grand babies right. Your generation invented the latch-key kid – where on earth were your children going to learn about parenting when their own parents were half-way-there sometimes when they weren’t too tired from working overtime to keep up with a lifestyle they could not afford – from the TV, the same techno bastard-child YOU bought into vogue?
You claim mothers have no patience with their little ones – and that you showed more. No, you didn’t. You shoved us in front educational television shows, you handed us packet cake mixes and pasta sauces in a bottle, you made TV dinners into an international joke and you told us to shape up and ‘be good citizens’ – and so we did, we followed the lead of our elder examples. Get over it – we’re just an even more useless generation than you turned out to be in a general sense. Don’t be a hypocrite and denigrate the younger generations and forget that you weren’t the 50′s housewives generation … you were sold on that as propaganda – you were the generation that dumped your babies to rush to work to pay for a lifestyle that no one really needed but that you wanted because you wanted to be new-kings and dominate the world with your glorious selves.
You are hypocrites when you tell the grand babies not to fight back against bullies – it was your generation that waged the most violent protests for civil rights and to stop the unjust war … you were the generation that broke the taboos that had held nations together for generations … you are the drop out generation that had a good time in your youth but in your dotage – you want the babies to be terrified of the whole world so that you can revert to some excellent pre-conscious state of stupidity towards reality. Get with the agenda, oldies – this ain’t our fault and we certainly can’t fix it and prop you guys up at the same time ’cause we already can’t make ends meet with two and a half jobs each, let alone none at all!
You are hypocrites when you demand that the government must support you … then demand that your lazy kids get off their asses and go find a job. Give us a break – YOUR generation spawned the union leaders that said nothing of merit to stop the big-corporations off shoring our bloody jobs – so just get over that little buck passing idea, Grandpa – if you’d of paid more attention – perhaps there would still be some jobs for the kids to go to.
You are hypocrites when you demand that the government do something about climate change … and then complain about the costs of mandating change. You’re the generation of ‘great-excess’ in everything – if it wasn’t for your generation our nations wouldn’t have electric gadgets that have no reasonable place in an intelligent society. We wouldn’t run big screen TVs that chew up so much energy if you didn’t use their tiny black and white models as babysitters to my generation.
If you hadn’t of had to have the go-fast big cars, neither would we! So don’t you start whining about how the younger generations aren’t paying attention – you were told as early as 1970 that the climate was changing and that we had to start adapting but your generation poo-poohed that idea and kept on partying like there was no tomorrow. And thus – nothing ‘changed’ – and the problem got much bigger and nuclear! So – get off our cases and our asses about ‘fixing the planet’ – you’ve had at least 40 years longer than we have to do something about it and did nothing but keep making it worse. Even more so – give up about how it’s for our babies – you didn’t give a damn about their future when you had your good times rollin’ …
You are hypocrites when you whine about the rising cost of merely existing. It’s your generation that let the governments debase the gold standard and then you adopted that fast credit currency like hogs to mud! Our generation faces the unnatural challenge of attempting to figure out how to feed a family on an ever deflating currency – and you have the audacity to want anyone else but yourselves held accountable – if any of you really paid any attention whatsoever, then you’d of prevented the Government doing what it did – instead, you just sold out and kept living high on the hog none the less. So when your dollars buy less, and you can’t afford the basics – take a little trip down memory lane to the time when your generation didn’t bother to stop the cause of this ‘inflation’ from getting hold … think about what you were actually doing that fateful day.
You are hypocrites when you declare the younger generations to be political agnostics. We can see the truth you are blind to – there is no ‘two sides’ or ‘multi-parties’ – you get the same party wearing different togs no matter who you vote for – just one side uses velvet gloves while the other side openly uses a big stick and it’s really more a choice of which sadist group you want to be slave to than it is a political choice. You were on duty for at least a quarter century before us - and where were you when Watergate happened, and what were you doing when Reagan got caught double-dealing … and what exactly were you up to when Clinton was copping blow-jobs in the big office where he allegedly also ran the nation from ..? We were at school, my generation, or barely out of school, wet behind the years more or less and looking to our elders for guidance – and then you have the bare assed cheek to complain that we don’t pay attention to the reality of politics – give me a break, hypocrites!
You are hypocrites when you declare – the younger generations don’t care about the oldies anymore. How many of your aged parents did you take into your homes and look after – yourselves – until they died surrounded by their loved ones – like your spinster aunties did in their time … like your own parents did in their time … like has been done down the ages from the time we were considered sentient beings?
Not many – if the number of aged care homes and retirement villages are anything to go by. You only reap what you sow, oldies, and in your last years, you’re shoved in front of a TV while the adults around you rush around too busy to spend any time with you that matters other than to wipe your dribble and maybe change that diaper as they push bottle puree down your throat and assure you its good for you … what exactly did you expect from us when we hardly ever saw the act of love and then the unifying pain of grief when a much adored elder passed away – known to their great-grand babies and respected for the service they gave their own younger generations … did you really think that your example was going to make my generation want to stay home with the kids – and Grandma in her last years?
You are hypocrites when you say that my generation live above their means … we can thank you folks for that. From the debasing of a currency, to the endless party on someone elses pocket books, from the excessive-compulsive consumerism to the fallen state of family unity in the western nations, from the lack of real education to the end result of truly stupid citizens – we can thank you for that … right down to the prolific consumption of every drug and vice a good chemist or gardener can dream up – we can thank your generation because with out that shining example to us all – we might instead resemble societies of educated and thoughtful, responsible citizens instead of internment camps for dressed up apes. Thank you, Boomers … and please – feel free to dismiss me and continue in your delusional state of self-exoneration.
TR Clansmith
Copyright 2010 www.elequity.com