We have to face facts; we’re the has-beens. They label us the “baby boomers’ – a reference I find utterly insulting – and prepare to pension us off with as little retirement money as they can get away with. Considering we’ve all paid enormous amounts into the system for sixty-odd years, I find that equally disgusting.
George W Bush and his predecessors have been robbing the Social Security fund for years – “borrowing”, they call it. If any of us had done that we’d have been banged up, and the key chucked in the nearest river.
But then, they have different laws for ordinary people.
Frankly, I think our generation stinks. We’ve looted the planet, stolen from each other on an international scale, filled our lives with material pleasures, polluted the atmosphere, and sold ourselves off to a God far more important – even to the preachers, who should know better – than the one most of us purport to offer allegiance to.
We sold our souls to MONEY.
Judas Iscariot did that. He set us all a fine example. We followed it, unswervingly.
We were the products of our fathers returning from the battlefields; the first thing they did on arriving home. Some say the second thing they did was take off their boots, but knowing my mother she’d never have allowed dirty boots between the sheets, so I’m quite sure that wasn’t the case in our house.
Since that time we’ve managed to virtually destroy the planet.
Our generation got its kicks out of fast cars and cold wars. Television first introduced us to the entertainment value of violent conflict. It wasn’t exactly interactive, but unlike our fathers, we didn’t have to leave our living rooms to experience it.
We marveled at the God of Finance that took us to the moon, then raised the glorious specter of expanding military might into pristine space; the wonder of the nuclear age that gave us bountiful energy, Hiroshima, Chernobyl……and Hell, we’ll bury the waste for our kid’s kids to worry about.
Now, we’re the has-beens, the ‘baby-boomers’ about to break the social security bank. It’s just something else our kids will have to fix.
So, get on with it, you younger generation. If you pull together you may just succeed where we failed.
And, boy, did we fail – en masse!
Choose a leader from your own generation. Right now, there’s only one. Don’t go for Hillary Clinton, she’s a ‘baby-boomer’ too. For God’s sake forget John McCain, he’s old enough to be grandfather to all of you.
You know that old adage: ‘the older you get the wiser you get’? Take a look at us and realize how wrong it is.
You need young leaders, not old has-beens. Barack Obama is your only choice. He can lead you to glory. Maybe, just maybe, with your help he can save the world.
On the other hand, he may let you down. He may sell you down the river as swiftly as the ‘baby-boomer’ politicians did to us. He may fall in with the corporates and poison this planet till it’s as hot, foetid, and uninhabitable as Venus.
But, if he does fail you, if he sells you down the river, you’ll only have yourselves to blame.
It’ll be the one thing you won’t be able to fault us for.
Filed under: Cocked it up