‘You Kids are So Damn Screwed’
“Young people are screwed… Here’s how to survive,” Bryan Goldberg writes:
You kids are really screwed.
As mentioned in one of my recent articles, unemployment for young people is about double the national average. Student debt is now the single largest contributor to the nation’s credit delinquencies. And it’s one of the few debts that you can never expunge through bankruptcy. Stated differently…
You kids are so damn screwed.
Finally, young people need to understand how much their grandparents’ generation has ruined things for them. The average American retires with less than $70,000 in savings, but an elderly man and woman receive about $275,000 in medical care during that time — and you kids are paying for it by inheriting trillions upon trillions in Medicare bills that granny and grandpa never intended to pay and will be too dead to worry about soon.
“History suggests that era of entitlements is nearly over,” Michael Barone believes. As Herb Stein once said, something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Glenn Reynolds, whose taken to popularizing Stein’s Law in recent years notes in Monday’s USA Today that “As we head into the next debt-ceiling debate, it’s worth considering these words from a patriotic senator concerned with America’s future:”
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. . . . It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.”
The senator? Sen. Barack Obama, in 2006.
I wish that guy was President now.
He is — he’s the same guy who believes in nothing, and is willing to say whatever is politically expedient at the moment, until that statement reaches its expiration date, and its time for the next 180°.
Incidentally, after all of Goldberg’s rantings about entitlement statement, his bio at the end of his post states, “He founded Bleacher Report, and currently advises several startups.” Wikipedia adds, “Bleacher Report was acquired by Turner Broadcasting System (a subsidiary of Time Warner) in August 2012 for an undisclosed sum reportedly near $200 million.”
Think anybody at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO cares about reducing entitlement spending or shrinking the size of government? Nope, me neither. As the man said, you kids are so damned screwed.
(H/T: CC.)
I’m not going to go on for ever at our gracious host’s venue here, but for now I would like again to note that hats are important to a man in ways seldom considered any more, in ways paying ones bills are not so important these days, in ways remaining with a difficult spouse are not so important these days, at least for too many to allow for a life in community one can like. It’s the rotten apple problem, as I see it. I understand that it’s not my business if a man doesn’t pay his bills, deserts his wife, and doesn’t wear a hat, not to say all these things are equivalent, of course. But one, in its way, leads to another– in its way.
Al Capone was a psychopathic monster, and he wore a nice suit and had a good-looking hat, one our host’s avatar might be proud of. Capone in a nice hat was not a better man for it. But he wore a suit and a nice hat because he had to, forced by convention to do so, and in its way, silently and gently, it made even a raging, violent psychopath at least presentable in public to the public eye. If only at the most surface level, even Al Capone was elevated. But what of the marginal man, dressed up in a suit, wearing a nice hat? Perhaps he too could have been worse; but perhaps the public dress code forced him to consider that if he looks like a decent man dressed to conform to standards we don’t expect today, then maybe he followed by osmosis his better angels, in spite of himself, whereas had he lived today and dressed without a hat, in torn clothes and sporting a rat-do on his head, he might well give in to depravity that would shame Al Capone. And he, the average marginal loser, having set the tone of the town, what of the others who live around him, soaking up the publicity of the hatless, the shabby, the dirty and mean? What rebel man would stand up dressed like the figure of our host and say, “Not me. I am a rebel with a pressed suit.” That man would be, in some small and perhaps idiosyncratic sense, free, independent, and thoughtful. Maybe it takes a young man to be so daring and bold. Maybe it could spread to the point that most men would wear a suit and a nice hat, each man choosing for himself as much as any man chooses today to dress down, to dress up, the hat making the personal statement others can read.
But kids are screwed, in a bad way, sorry to say, by fashion, such as not paying ones bills, dumping ones wife, and turning ones hair into a rats’ nest. Not always, however. This past Independence Day I met a lad who bought a hat, not the one I had hoped, but one he chose and liked because he liked it. I’m proud of him for such a choice. It’s nothing much to do with the hat, but it is to do with respect for others and for oneself as rebel, free and independent. The lad bought a hat, and in doing so made a leap he was not aware of. Within days, though I say no more, he was transformed and transported, as it were, from his time and attitudes to a time and space in the mind he had never thought of much till he found himself walking a mile in another man’s hat. To make this somewhat clearer, though perhaps for others not so clear, I refer you to yet another post on hats:
http://nodhimmitude.blogspot.com/2012/07/miles-of-hats-on-fourth-of-july-in-lima.html