The End of A Golden Age
This entry was posted on 11/3/2009 1:26 PM and is filed under blather, Politics.
Some time in the mid nineties it dawned on my that we were living in a golden age.
The seventies sucked. Inflation was in double digits. Gas wasn't expensive as it is now, you just couldn't buy it at any price. By the way, kids, that's a crisis; not when a necessary commodity is expensive, but when it's unavailable. Capitalism works like this; if no one can make money selling you something, you aren't going to be able to get it, but if you have enough money, you can get anything. A socialist economy only works if everyone involved in it has the same values, goals and work ethic. Remember that distinction.
The seventies culminated in the Jimmy Carter years, where the president himself told us to quit complaining about the high price of energy and put on a sweater.
Along came Ronald Reagan, who tried to save the country in 1976 but the dumb ass Republican party was too spineless to nominate him over the never-elected Gerald Ford. The country had to wait till 1980 for Reagan.
His domestic policies constituted making government get the hell out of the way so the American people could get back to doing what they are best at; making money. With the earning potential sky high again, America went to work and in the eighties everyone began to explore their own potential. The eighties rocked.
Then came the nineties and what had been a healthy economy began to take steroids. The computer era was coming of age and backed by the healthiest capitalist economy the world had ever seen, people were suddenly in a position to make fortunes with their ideas. Bigger fortunes than the world had ever dreamed of could be had by geniuses who could make their ideas available to the masses. For a while the rest of us just hung on for the ride and it was a blast.
Technology got smaller, cheaper, faster, stronger and more fun by the day. Cell phones, laptops, flatscreens, ipods...
I can still hardly believe that in my kids' lifetime we've gone from vinyl records played on a turn table to digital downloads where you can carry your library of thousands of songs around with you in your pocket.
Tell me that's not a golden age!
But somewhere in the middle of the last decade I began to wonder how long it could last.
Technology is only one piece of the puzzle and very few of us have tried to see the whole picture. But while we were enjoying this boom in the industrialized world, other forces were growing elsewhere.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a wake up call but I'm afraid we hit the snooze button. After a brief respite, multiculturalism. environmentalism and the cult of victimhood came back stronger than ever. If you look at human history, the only real constant is that we never learn.
Just like technological advances came along at an exponential rate, so did decadence.
Folks who don't have to go to the store, buy a cd, bring it home and place it on a record player but could simply hit a few keys on their laptop to down load music seem to think that everything in life should be that easy and if it isn't, why do it?
This happened in less than a decade.
Next Tuesday we'll find out if Americans have really degraded to the point where they don't think they should be required to provide anything at all for themselves, not even taking care of themselves physically. A citizenship that allows the government to take over that responsibility has no business thinking of itself as free.
It's all much worse than this and there are more forces at work in the world than I don't have time to go into right now.
Just remember this; the Devil's greatest achievement was convincing the world he didn't exist.
