If you are under 40…

you have to realize something. The way you’ve learned about the world, whether in school, or through the media, or in the discourse of public culture has largely been shaped by the most selfish and self centered generation of human beings ever to breathe air, the Baby Boomers.

Coddled as the children of parents tired of depression and war your teachers, your politicians, your clergy, the cop down the street and the person who writes for TV drank deeply from the well of self centeredness and in turn stained everything they touched with the same. The hippies are now in charge and this is what they have taught you.

There is nothing right or wrong beyond your feelings. Your feelings are the only evidence you need to decipher reality. Evidence is irrelevant, tradition is meaningless, only the moment and your thoughts at the time matter. There is no truth beyond your perception.

The ultimate goal in life is freedom which is defined not as the freedom to act responsibly but rather the elimination of all restraints real or imagined. To be free means that you can do what you want, when you want, and how you want, with the only caveat being that you try not to hurt others in the process. Discipline is repression. Expression of any and all urges, emotions, thoughts, or actions is a social good.

You are the judge and jury of your own world. There is no “our” there is only “me” and people who are like “me”. What the larger world may think is irrelevant as long as “I” think it’s okay. The mantra, “You can’t judge me…”

Now you may wonder why everything seems to be coming apart at the seams these days. The economy is dismal. The culture is crude and getting worse. There are hundreds of tears in the social fabric. Our leaders are emotional and spiritual children. We are in the process of de-evolving into barbarians. Hardly anyone notices because all they live for is the next mobile device, the next “hook up”, or the next party.

Well all those things that you see, the unease that you may feel, the angst at how you are to survive in this brave new world are all because two generations, the teachers and the taught, are trying to live a philosophy of life that is simply unworkable in the real world. The free love, free drugs, free experiences, and free economy of the 60’s didn’t work even in the 60’s, just ask Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, but the illusion has remained, clung to by a group of people who have ridden it to power, economically exploited it, and left all of you with the STD’s, the addictions, and the bill.

Ever notice who has all the money these days? Ever notice the folks who protested the war but now have no problem sending you into the fight? Ever thought about the people who told you that “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with” still can’t admit they were wrong even when people die for practicing what they preach? Isn’t it strange that people who campaigned for free speech are the same ones telling you what can and cannot say, what you can and cannot eat, and how you must think about the world or the success they dangle in front of you will be taken away?

And what’s worse is that long after these people, and I’m on the tail end of the Baby Boom myself, die you will be stuck with the mess. You get the scraps. You get the illness. You and your children and probably their’s as well. You’ve been served, royally, and the only hope is that a few will wake up from this terrible dream, enough to keep the world in some sort of liveable condition.

Turn off your TV, unplug yourself from the electronic nipple, get a life and maybe you will be saved.