These observations apply only to those who are correctly described by them:
- We are rearing a fat and lazy generation whose members have been assured since birth that they are "awesome,"
- who have absorbed the notion that anything that requires effort should be fun or one can opt out,
- who have little capacity for delayed gratification and self-denial,
- whose educational achievements (not totally the fault of their schools) are meager compared to the Chinese (and many others) whose Confucian values have important similarities with the largely defunct Protestant ethic
- in a society transformed by globalization and communication technologies that leave those with little or the wrong kind of education and few marketable skills with low-paying jobs or none at all,
- especially if they are young, male, and black or otherwise handicapped by region or ethnicity
- in a society that lives complacently in a plutocracy that has gamed the system (consider, e. g., the health care bill) to serve the interests of the wealthy (though a large percentage of the wealthy and super-wealthy vote Democratic these days) who benefit from a compliant Congress,
- resulting in obscene economic inequalities (from many causes) and lack of opportunity that corrupt democracy,
- whose economy is too-much sustained by consumption and too little by productive investment,
- whose citizens by and large want greater government benefits, lower taxes, and deficit reduction hardly realizing that we can have any two of these but not all three,
- who accept a situation in which presidents can fight wars not paid for with volunteers who do the suffering and dying leaving the rest of us--if we have jobs--free to buy fancy cars, big houses, and all the consumer goods voracious corporations seduce us into buying by reassuring us that we are awesome and deserving of everything our money and credit cards will temporarily sustain
- while corporations invest abroad reducing jobs for Americans as our old and decaying infrastructure threatens our safety
- while terrorists plot our destruction in a world in which hundreds of millions go hungry, suffer from curable diseases, and live in fear of violence from blood-thirsty, power-hungry agents of darkness who care not for justice and are undeterred by the suffering they cause,
- while storms, earthquakes, and floods add more misery to helpless parents, children, and families the world over.
Otherwise, except for all the other things that are wrong or out of joint, things are great as another year begins in which large sections of the world are cursed with anti-humane and cruel religious and cultural practices right out of the dark ages that especially hurt women and children as we continue to pay culturally backward Saudi Arabia for oil with funds borrowed from the Chinese in order to sustain our idolatrous love affair with the automobile whose wastes poison the atmosphere and warm the global climate.
http://www.frontiernet.net/~kenc/index.shtml
