There are a lot of reasons for me to be disappointed in "our" generation - in general called the "boomers". Just in sheer numbers we should have been a driving force for carrying forward the principles and sacrifices of "the Greatest Generation" that was our fathers and mothers.
But, as boomers came into power and started to run things it quickly turned into the "me" generation, and largely abandoned the principles of responsible and dependable government, raiding the Social Security Trust fund and playing increasingly creative and equally invalid accounting games to make things look like they balanced out and it was OK to "don't worry....be happy".
To mollify the worriers, Congress came up with a born-dead option called the 401K which is nothing more than an another income source for Wall Street but does nothing to assure retirement. As a result, an unprecedented percentage of retirees are planning to work even further into what should be their retirement years, depriving today's incoming young work force of jobs and opportunities.
Unfortunately, coupled with a generation of "greatest-generation-wannabes" politicians who were all too willing to stick our military into untenable and un-winnable situations (a patriot after all is defined as someone who is willing to sacrifice your children for their "ideals") we ramped up spending on the military to unsustainable heights...all the time ignoring the incontrovertible fact that the largest generational bubble yet was going to hit the Social Security and Medicare systems -- the very ones Congress had been raiding to feed the military-industrial maw.
Tom Friedman had a column on the subject recently, and I hope the young people of today take the challenge seriously (I have a daughter in this group....and I am sorry honey, but the people we put in office were not terribly bright and definitely not long-term thinkers).
I sincerely hope the new generation can come up with a formula (as a few countries of the world have done) that assures a certain minimum standard of living including fair and reasonable health care for all the people who live in ostensibly the richest country in the world.
The generation after "the Greatest Generation" has certainly failed.....
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