Could not have said it better. I did not grow up in the 50's. I was a
late 70's teen, but some how was always conservative and then more
importantly became a Christian.Baby Boomers Need to Apologize for Fighting Freedom
Tuesday 4 December 2007, by admin
Issue: It is apparent that this upcoming generation will be worse off then
our generation.
1. We have given our children a fear of freedom, government control over
what food they eat and what they are allowed to learn.
2. This generation has made the fight against tyranny a bad thing and the
violation of our laws (immigration, tax, drugs, etc) a good thing.
3. We trust in government not people. and those who have achieved great
things, like Bill Gates, are embarrassed by what they have accomplished and
what government control. Warren Buffett is so embarrassed he made billions,
he wants the poor and middle class to pay more taxes.
4. In the fight for freedom, this generation has been on th side of
tyranny, lawlessness and government. They prefer fish to people, forest
fires to clearing brush and joblessness to honest regulations.
What do you think? do you have anything to apologize for?
Baby Boomers Owe America’s Young People an Apology
By Dennis Prager, townhall.com, 12/04/07
We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The
baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its
young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:
First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a
childhood.
We baby boomers were allowed perhaps the most innocent childhoods
known to history. We grew up without material want, in one of the
most decent places in world history, with media that preserved our
sexual and other innocence, in schools that generally taught us well,
and we were allowed childhood play from boy-girl play to rough and
tumble boy-boy play to monkey bars and ringalievio. Our generation
has deprived you of all these things. And while we were aware of the
threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, few of us believed
that we were threatened with death anywhere near the amount we have
scared you about death from secondhand smoke, global warming and
heterosexual AIDS, to mention just a few of the exaggerated death
scares we have inflicted on you.
Our generation came up with two truly foolish slogans that also ended
up robbing you of childhood.
One was, "Never trust anyone over 30." Our infantile attitude toward
adult authority has inflicted great harm on you. Because of it, many
baby boomers decided not to become adults, and this has had
disastrous consequences in your lives. It deprived you of one of the
greatest needs in your life — adults. That in turn deprived you of
something as important as love — parental and other adult authority.
With little parental authority, you were left with little personal
security, few guardrails and a diminished sense of order in life. And
we transferred this denial of authority to virtually all authority
figures, from teachers to police.
The other slogan whose awful consequences we baby boomers bequeathed
to you was, "Make love, not war." Our parents had liberated the world
from immeasurably cruel and murderous regimes in Germany and Japan —
solely thanks to waging war. But instead of concluding that war could
do great moral good, we sang ourselves silly with such inane lyrics
as "Give peace a chance," as if that deals in any way with the
world’s most monstrous evils. So we taught you to make love and not
war. And we succeeded.
We made you anti-war and almost completely sexualized your lives. We
told you that having sex was terrific or at least to be expected,
even in early teens, and that your only concerns should be avoiding
sexually transmitted diseases and getting pregnant. And if you did
get pregnant, we made sure that you could extinguish the life you
were carrying as effortlessly and guiltlessly as possible.
We started teaching you about sexuality and homosexuality in early
grade school and we taught you how to put condoms on bananas. It is
true that we did not grow up learning about these things at such
young ages — certainly our schools never taught us about these things
— but we chalked that up to the preposterous, if not reactionary,
values of the 1950s and early 1960s. We had contempt for our parents
believing that "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" and
"Superman" — with the show’s motto of "truth, justice, and the
American way" — were good things for young people to be exposed to.
So we replaced these shows with MTV’s mind-numbing parade of
three-second images and sex-drenched shows for teenagers. Sorry.
We also made you weak. We did everything possible to ensure that you
suffered no pain. Sometimes we changed game scores if a team was
winning by too large a margin; we abolished dodgeball lest anyone
suffer early removal from the game; and we gave trophies to all of
you who played on baseball teams, no matter how awfully you or your
team played so that none of you missed getting a trophy while members
of another team did. Much of this was thanks to the
self-esteem-without-having-to-earn-it movement, which in our
generation’s almost infinite lack of wisdom we inflicted upon you.
Sorry for that, too.
We also apologize for coming close to ruining so many of your schools
and universities. Despite the unprecedented sums of money we had
America spend on education, most of you got an education quite
inferior to the one we got at a fraction of the cost. But we thought
of our teachers as fools (they were, after all, over 30) who just
concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic (and history, music
and art). We were sure we knew better and we therefore concentrated
on sexual issues, and teaching you about peace, global warming and
the horrors of smoking. The fact that few high school graduates can
identify Mozart, let alone were ever exposed to his music, is far
less significant to many baby boomers than your knowledge of the
alleged perils of secondhand smoke. Most of you cannot identify
Stalin either, and we are sorry for that, too. But, hey, we did make
sure you saw Al Gore’s film.
And a real apology to those of you hooked on drugs. While your choice
to do drugs is your responsibility, it was our generation that
romanticized them and made them cool. "Mind expanding" we called
them. But it turns out that they don’t expand minds, they destroy
them. Sorry.
And, young women, we apologize especially to you. Many of us baby
boomers bought into the feminist idea that getting married and making
a family with a man were far less fulfilling than career success and
that marriage itself is "sexist" and "patriarchal." So, to those of
you women who have career success and didn’t get married, we
sincerely apologize. Turns out that most careers aren’t as fulfilling
as we promised.
So we really blew it, and what’s really amazing is that few of us
have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But
not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of
course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so
hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of
us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the ’60s
and ’70s. And we’re still fighting what we consider the real Axis of
Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.
But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did
to you, a heartfelt apology.
Dennis Prager is a radio show host, contributing columnist for
Townhall.com, and author of 4 books including Happiness Is a Serious
Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual.