Living off the Fat of the Land

I'm attempting to get to somewhere useful. If I do I might publish this article. If not, I won't.

I'm a baby boomer and one of millions. We have always believed we would live forever and change the world irrevocably. We are like this because we were always told by our parents and grandparents that we could do Anything. And we did. Because we believed our parents and grandparents. But that doesn't mean that this didn't create many new problems which succeeding generations as well as ourselves are having to and will have to deal with in the course of things.

The wealthiest the U.S has ever been (in real terms spread out through the general populace) was from the 1950s through the 1960s and on the wane by the mid 1970s due to the Viet Nam War and the Arab Oil Embargo primarily. So, when the baby boomers grew up there seemed to be unlimited wealth for everyone. If you made a mistake some social program would save you(sometimes ten times in a row).
But with the advent of the 1980s and double digit unemployment those days were permanently gone. When World War II ended we were the Only major world Power still standing(so to speak) and so we sold everything and loaned money to everyone worldwide) and most of the money was paid back over the years.

So now we have gone from the greatest creditor nation that ever existed to the greatest debtor nation that has ever existed on earth. And I'm trying to get at how we arrived here.

From the point of view of baby boomers who didn't die or get mentaly or physically maimed in Viet Nam or get killed by police or soldiers while demonstrating against the war here in the U.S. or wind up buried in someone's backyard for 50 years now somewhere in the South, we baby boomers took a look around during the 1960s and said to ourselves, "This is the fattest, craziest nation that ever was."
But this is both a good realization and a bad one at the same time. It doesn't take into account the sufferings of our parents and grandparents in the Great Depression, World War I and II or anything else that had come before. So because of the unbelievable richness of the average person in the United States compared to almost any other nation on earth our generation became an "idea" generation. What this means in real terms is that if you had a really good idea and could patent it and market it you became incredibly rich and likely never had to work at a 9 to 5 job ever again. Yes. My generation had some really great ideas. We still do. Our kids have great ideas too. However, ideas alone don't make a worthwhile world to actually live in. Someone has to apply those ideas 24 hours a day or at least 8 to make a dent in the real world.

So now here we are the Greatest Debtor Nation ever known to man and what are we going to do as a nation? We have many great ideas but with the level of polarization now we might as well be having a revolution socially, at least. If you listen to CNN or MSNBC on  TV and then listen to Fox News on TV you cannot imagine that Fox News and the other two are on the same planet let alone in the same nation. How can any nation reach any kind of unified awareness if points of view are that far apart. Even though terrorism of the right(as in Osama Bin Laden and Fascism) breeds terrorism of the left in the form of communist totalitarian states) it leaves most people on earth just very confused and crazy and not knowing what to believe worldwide.

So until we can all get on more the same page somehow some way I don't think things will get much better here in the U.S. until we can unify as a nation once again. And the same is true over the rest of earth.