Boomer changes

For those of us Americans pushing 70, it’s time to look back at the folly of things foisted upon us by a well meaning but bent adults.

1.         No longer operative:   Take care of the little things and the    big things will take care of themselves.

As a kid I agonized over learning grammar, spelling, syllabication, penmanship, and typing term papers. Using the dictionary was also slow and tedious work.  But today we use a computer for all of these things.  We use the computer so much and so efficiently that I really wonder why did I have to learn all this stuff for.  And if you throw out the long hours it took to master these small things (I use to write out checks to pay bills, but I don’t even do that anymore), I wonder what I actually learned in high school. More to the point, I wonder what kids are spending time on in school today.  If it’s the same curriculum, shame on them.

2.         When everything is free, nothing has value.

What facilitates academic activities even more (research and cut-and-paste plagiarism come to mind) is the Internet.  But if the medium is the massage, the message for today is unsettling.  It is unsettling because the Internet’s real message is that everything is free.  Books, movies, records, and academic works (I wonder who the last person to buy an encyclopedia was?) are all available for free.  The free lunch is not dead; it lives on - on the Internet.  Nothing has value, everything should be free.

3.         Since Enron, work harder has taken a turn for he worse.

I like the movie The Perfect Storm because it is not about a single character, but about work itself (sword fishing).  Unfortunately, we have shed our notion that there is something noble in work and that if you work hard you will succeed.  Now, if you work hard at school you end up with student loans that you can’t possibly pay.  Work hard in the business world and any number of things (outsourcing, the new normal, declining dollar, becoming fish food, etc.) will keep you down.  The smartest guys in the room, who once worked for Enron, are cooking up new Ponzi schemes they hope will be too big to fail.  The definition of work today is what you can get away with.

4.         The little boy in men once was something to be valued.  Now, fun has been fingered as the resident evil of our times.

Every age has its own scared cows.  The Victorians had their hang-ups, but our age will be remembered for the shedding hang-ups.  Religion has been reduced to a coffee-table book, sex to a three-minute obsession with no religious overtones, men and nationalism to something bad, social equality to a V-2 rocket gone askew and coming right for the block house the bosses live, and ghosts and spiritualism for late night documentaries.  The one hang-up that we refuse to shed is the adoration of, well, not of Mary, but the fact of being a woman.  To be a man, intended or not this is what the PC movement had in mind, is to be tainted with immaturity.  God help us, where ever she is.

FG  6 Nov. 2012