The first Baby Boomer filed for social security last month, the beginning of a generational coup summed up by satirist P. J. O’Rourke as “Give us all your money.”
Fellow Baby Boomer O’Rourke is gleefully talking about my ge-generation and how it will commit youthanasia. A sample from the article, which deserves to be read completely:
[After gloating about how young taxpayers will be paying the bill for all of our white water rafting excursions, world travel, and medical bills. . .] And the expense of these will be as nothing compared to the cost of our pharmacological needs. Remember, we are a generation that knows drugs. From about 1967 until John Belushi died, we created a way of life based almost entirely on drugs. And we can do it again. Except this time, instead of us trying to figure out how to pay for the fun by selling each other nickel bags of pot, you the taxpayer will be picking up the tab. . . .
So just give us all the money in the federal, state, and local budget. Forget spending on the military, education, and infrastructure. What with Iraq, falling SAT scores, and that bridge collapse in Minneapolis, it’s not like the military, education, and infrastructure are doing very well anyway. Besides, you don’t have a choice. We are 80 million strong. That’s a number equal to almost two-thirds of the registered voters in the United States. Do what we say or we will ballot you into a socio-economic condition that will make North Korea look like the clubhouse at Pebble Beach.
And that’s the good news. Beggaring government is the least of the damage that we baby boomers intend to inflict over the next 30 or 40 years. What we’re really up to is something more diabolical. Our generation is going to do what our generation has always done best. We’re going to shape the American social fabric to our will and make the entire nation conform to our ideals, judgments, and tastes. It will be like the Clinton administration but much, much worse. (An interesting little irony since in ’08 we’re probably going to get a Clinton administration that’s much, much worse.). . . .
We have rendered mere school children as dependent upon Ritalin as we are upon Lipitor and Levitra. And watch those kids go out and play. They can’t so much as hop on a bike without being swathed in helmets, knee pads, shin guards, and elbow cushions. It’s like seeing John Kerry skateboard. Then there’s the Segway, which is nothing but a device to make an able-bodied person in the prime of life look as pathetic as if he were in a walker.
He goes on.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In