Chapter 5 - Boomers Suck

This is a scenario…….


Two generations of numbed down North Americans who through a process of selling the freedom given to all by our Grandfathers for a few days in Vegas is coming home to haunt. The Beverley Hills 90210 wet dream is over and all we have to show for it is wet shorts and bad hair. Slowly people are becoming aware of a reality outside of the reality given by the rectangular box which once only had a domain in the living room yet now has invaded the bedroom, the bathroom, the office, the schools and the den.



Most have been raised in North America with not only the absence of hard skills but with the very absence of a consciousness in and of that hard skills exist. A few survivalists have kept the knowledge base alive via the internet, 2nd hand stores , and Army surplus stores yet by the time most North Americans wake up to reality it may be too late.

Some young soothsayers had seen the future yet they were all but ignored.

People stand outside of their homes, no electricity, no heat or air and gather.

There is hopelessness in the air. This stands squarely in the face of the last election of Change and Hope which now seems far in the distant past.

Still some flames have not died.

There is hope.

A young father’s mouth is dry from the fear that he may not be able to feed his young family.

He has his guns, his bible and his high school sweetheart complete with a new baby boy whom he just gotten to know as he is fresh back from Afghanistan.

Three tours of duty.

Yes, three tours with a few short breaks and finally Obama got him home with a surge of troops from Iraq now in the Sheitland so he can LZ in the homeland.

The only issue at hand now is the Homeland has less chow then Sheitland. And this time he is no longer fighting for his country in a far away land as many US Marines have this time he is fighting for his country in his own back yard and having to train a bunch of lazy Gen X slackers to handle a rifle and to quit playen with their guns.




Ok..Enough drama!

But this is a scenario that has been played out in a few Ivy League Halls.

Read on.

Chapter 5 ‐ Boomers Suck
In the last chapter I covered moving from a 3rd Turning into the 4th
Turning (Fall into Winter) and what society, as a whole, feels during this
period. Also covered were the generational age locations during a 4t h
Turning.
Furthermore, I wrote about the signs of the coming crisis and how
we ignore them. However, I shouldn’t write we. I should write Boomers.
History shows this as fact.
In the last chapter, I wrote, ʺIdealist generations are terrible at
making collective decisions. That fact is going to make or break us when
the crisis sparks. The Idealists’...history as collective thinkers when
making decisions about our future while in complete control of the
political landscape is terrible, the worst incidence being the Civil War.ʺ
For the remainder of this chapter and the next few chapters, I’ll
cover the Civil War. This era is of particular interest because this era is
an anomaly in our history. The Civil War era devastated our country, and
over 135 years later we are still trying to solve the problem. The Civil
war is exactly what we don’t want to happen during a Winter era. This
era is proof that a Winter era script is never written with a predictable
ending.
* * *
The Boomer archetype is Idealist. The Idealist generation alive
during the Civil War was the Transcendental (b.1792‐1821) and they are
personally responsible for the early arrival of the War. Furthermore, they
are responsible for the slaughter of the Gilded generation (Nomad).
Of the seven‐million Gilded men who reached combat age, ten
percent died in the War. That casualty rate is equal to eight times
WWII’s. Of the remaining Gilded men, five percent of them ended the
war in “disease‐ridden” POW camps.19
To further the story of the Civil War, some foundation must be set.
Earlier I wrote about the cycle of Turnings. Now we’ll take a look at the
cycle of generations. Let’s stick with the two generations I’ve been
writing about in this chapter: the Boomer and Transcendental generations.
Concerning the generational cycle, S&H wrote the following: ʺ...a
recurring cycle of four distinct types of peer personalities, arriving in the
same repeating sequence.ʺ20
19 Strauss and Howe, Generations 210-211.
20 Ibid 33.
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Generations are similar to Turnings in that generations also have
cycles. They too repeat patterns: human behavior, social choices, religion,
drugs, crime, schooling, how laws are written and at whom those laws
are directed. How wars are fought and who fights them. Incarceration of
certain generations by other generations. Fertility, music, books, film,
and on and on. These choices, all of them, repeat with alarming
regularity.
Let’s look at two generations, the Boomer and Transcendental.
While commenting on Ralph Emerson’s Concord crowd, [the
Transcendentalists] Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “a variety of queer,
strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon
themselves to be important agents of the world’s inner destiny.”21
I could not have said it better myself. This is the danger of the
Idealist generation. Throughout our history they have consistently shown
this type of behavior at all age locations. For example, if you were asked,
when was the worst rioting on college campuses in American history,
what would your answer be? Personally I would say, “in the 1960s”.
Actually it happened 1810‐1830. The perpetrators? The
Transcendentalists.22
When asked the question, ʺwhen was the worst rioting on college
campuses in American history?ʺ it prompts one to ask, why would we
answer the 1960s? Well, because there was major rioting in the 1960s (and
early 1970s) on college campuses. However, now we know that the rioting
in the 1960s wasn’t the largest instance. What you didn’t know is that the
generational archetype of the Transcendental generation is the same as
the Boomers; Idealist.
The Transcendentalists coined the words spiritualism, medium,
séance, clairvoyance, and holy roller.23 During the 1980s, the Boomers left
established churches and moved into New Age and Evangelical sects. The
Assembly of God saw their membership quadruple in the 1980s. Overall
church attendance rose 30 percent in the 1980s. Seven Boomers in ten
believe in psychic phenomena. First wave Boomers believe in meditation
and reincarnation and the last wavers believe in born‐again conversion,
mealtime grace, and the inherent conflict between science and religion.24
21 Ibid 195. 22 Ibid 199. 23 Ibid 199. 24 Ibid 307.
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“From the 1840s on, a large share of [the Transcendentalists]
believed in psychic phenomena, including Abraham and Mary Todd
Lincoln.”25
Lastly, Strauss and Howe wrote this about the Transcendentalists:
“...born to heroic parents, indulged as children, fiery as youths,
narcissistic as rising adults, and values‐fixated entering midlife‐‐
ultimately chose to join technology and passion to achieve the maximum
apocalypse then conceivable.”26
Everything about that paragraph is familiar except the last 14
words: “...ultimately chose to join technology and passion to achieve the
maximum apocalypse then conceivable.”
I do not want to give the Boomers the chance to repeat what they
have done so often in the past: complete apocalypse.
There’s part of me that believes the script has been written, yet
there’s a part that believes we can change a scene or two. In the next
chapter, I’ll cover some of the decisions the Idealist generation has made
in the past that led to the deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands.
One of the points of this book is to show you the commonalities
between past and present. How we, as a country, repeat mistakes over
and over again. The evidence can’t be brushed aside.
25 Ibid 199. 26 Ibid 205.
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Chapter 6 – Waging war with ruthless finality

They say, “It’s a recession if your neighbor is out of work and a
depression if you are out of work.” When enough people are affected by
economic hard times, it cascades to the point where no one is immune.
Every person is, in some way, touched by the hard times. This scenario is
Winter at its coldest. At the moment, this scenario is sitting calmly,
waiting. It rears its head now and again with warning signs.
Unfortunately, the warning signs that litter American history are
desolate in the present. Those signs are the ones that are shouted after
the spark, ʺI told ya so!ʺ, the signs that light themselves up in brilliant
neon and flash for a few nanoseconds, warning everyone. The signs that
have been written about so many times and printed in more media that I
can count. Signs that are being and will be ignored, because it is our
destiny to ignore them. History does repeat itself and in this writing, the
proof is stated. In Strauss and Howe’s writing, the proof is undeniable.


Earlier in this book the question was posed, “Why does one faction
see what is happening and one completely disregard the signs of the crisis?”www.jamesgoulding.com...