Originally posted by watchitburn
We got blue, red, and yellow ribbons. Yeah I agree though it has gotten absurd.
But, I think the problem escalated out of control when they started cracking down on bullies.
Nothing put a kid in his place and showed him how the world worked like some good old fashioned bullying.
You can thank the school massacre kids for that. Believe me, no one wanted to bother with bullies until the bullied kids started showing up with
hardware and a little bullying of their own on their minds. But then, that's what bullying, and unrestricted competition looks like in the real
world. Sooner or later it ends up with war - or at least death inflicted on the loser by the winner. It's been that way since Cain butchered Able.
You middle age armchair commandos are all the same. I get the emails about how "we didn't need bike helmets, or seatbelts, or DSS reps investigating
when our parents spin-fractured our arms, and we turned out just fine", and to tell you the truth, most of us didn't turn out just fine. I'm 56 yrs
old, and most of the people of my generation are selfish *ssholes. Not only that, but they celebrate being *ssholes, and worship the biggest *ssholes
in our society - and always have.
We're the generation that invented derivatives gambling (with other people's money), and then we invented government bailouts when we lost our
shirts and everyone else's shirts. We're the generation that took the music business and made it so toxic that our kids were forced to completely
destroy it to the point where no one's music makes any money unless it's used to sell iPods or cars or clothes on TV. We're the generation that
coined the phrase "Greed is Good" and elevated that sick animal Ayn Rand to the level of "philosopher" instead of allowing her shriveled husk to
dust away as the bitter crank she was and should've remained forever. We're the generation that confirmed the worst assumptions about how ugly
Americans can be, and shoved that realization right back into the faces of the rest of the world, as if it's something to be proud of.
But, to be fair, it's not our fault. Then again, nothing has ever been our fault. Hell, we have no faults, but I digress. Our parents were the
psychotic generation that invented carpet bombing of civilian targets, and saw the Nazi atrocities as inspiration in that regard, instead of recoiling
in horror at this new level of barbarism in war. Hell, they dropped the first two (as if one didn't make the point already) atomic bombs on civilian
targets, instead of dragging cameras and witnesses out to watch one of those bombs obliterate a nearby island, with the promise of a follow-up strike
if Japan didn't wise-up and lay down their arms. And then, they celebrated that insane war crime, and most did so to their graves. With parents like
that, how the hell were we supposed to turn out any better? The bitch is that most of us didn't, and as our bodies started failing us, we took their
selfishness and the self-centeredness that marketers and media taught us to view as our birthright, and emerged as the most pathetic and
self-righteous wave of human being to ever take the helm - and with fairly predictable results.
The entire world's economy is now flat on its back, with most of us blaming the poor for stealing all the money and opportunity that they never had
and never will have. We celebrate soulless competitiveness as if gain itself is the gas it takes to drive our souls to heaven, even though every word
that can be directly connected to any version of heaven in any manner whatsoever repudiates that sort of avarice as the root of all evil. We've even
taken the world's most overwhelming super power and completely crippled its ability to manage the basics of governance, while blaming it all on the
only people that have no influence at all on how that government is run.
So, I'm hoping that the kids that are coming up - the ones who are being brainwashed into thinking that they're okay, even if they don't beat out
everyone else - will do better than we've done. At the very least, I hope that the rest of the world won't look at them as the selfish jerks that
they see when they look at us. Hell, something has to change, or this American experiment is going to fail spectacularly and who knows what'll
replace it. Maybe teaching an entire generation to not see winning as everything (or the only thing) will give them a chance to succeed at being
human?
In the end, we all lose anyway. No one escapes losing everything in the end.