It is RARE that I agree with a Wall Street Journal opinion column, yet I agree with this one -- but still take issue with the commentator. He takes issue with the blame being heaped on the Baby Boomer generation for having done all sorts of terrible things.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that graduation ceremonies have become collective airings of guilt and grief. It's now chic for boomers to apologize for their generation's crimes. It's the only thing conservatives and liberals seem to agree on. Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, told Butler University grads that our generation is "just plain selfish." At Grinnell College in Iowa, author Thomas Friedman compared boomers to "hungry locusts . . . eating through just about everything." Film maker Ken Burns told this year's Boston College grads that those born between 1946 and 1960 have "squandered the legacy handed to them by the generation from World War II."
Mitchell Elias, Jr. (born April 7, 1949 in Monongahela, Pennsylvania), is a 50-year0old Republican. Tom Friedman, born in 1953, is a 55-year-old "I-know-best" hanranguer. Ken Burns is 9 days younger than Friedman, and thinks he knows everything.
The legacy of the WW II generation? Segregated armed forces, segregated cities, rampant racism, a strong KKK, McCarthyism, a President in Eisenhower afraid of the senator from Wisconsin and without the decency to defend General Marshall, Richard Nixon in all his gory glory, VietNam ... that sort of legacy.
I could go on, but you get the point. We partied like it was 1999, paid for it with Ponzi schemes and left the mess for our kids and grandkids to clean up. We're sorry -- so sorry.
Well, I'm not. I have two teenagers and an 8-year-old, and I can say firsthand that if boomer parents have anything for which to be sorry it's for rearing a generation of pampered kids who've been chauffeured around to soccer leagues since they were 6. This is a generation that has come to regard rising affluence as a basic human right, because that is all it has ever known -- until now. Today's high-school and college students think of iPods, designer cellphones and $599 lap tops as entitlements. They think their future should be as mapped out as unambiguously as the GPS system in their cars.
I'm not apologizing either. If teenagers think such luxuries are entitlements, then their parents are to blame, indeed.
How bad can the legacy of the baby boomers really be? Let's see: We're the generation that spawned Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Google, ATMs and Gatorade. We defeated the evils of communism and delivered the world from the brink of global thermonuclear war. Now youngsters are telling pollsters that they think socialism may be better than capitalism after all. Do they expect us to apologize for winning the Cold War next?
Well, Gatorade is nothing to brag about, and Google was started by post-Boomers, but he makes a very good point. No apologies necessary.
The boomers' children and their children will inherit more wealth and assets than any other in the history of the planet -- that is, unless Mr. Obama taxes it all away. So how about a little gratitude from these trust-fund babies for our multitrillion-dollar going-away gifts?
Aha, there it is: criticize the President as a tax-and-spend liberal, never mind that reagan and Bush, the supposedly fiscally prudent Republicans, got us into this mess.
My kids have never once handed back the car keys because of some moral problem with their carbon footprint -- and I think they are fairly typical.
Why not take the keys away?
Let's see what this next generation of over-educated ingrates can do.
So much anger.
Showing posts with label Values. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Values. Show all posts
Friday, June 19, 2009
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Betrayed by Madoff, Yeshiva U. Adds a Lesson
Rob Bennett for The New York Times -Students in the library.
This is a startling case which is rocking many worlds; people have lost entire fortunes, and toltal losses are in the billions.
One institution affected is Yeshiva University: Madoff was on its board, and Yeshiva has lost $110 million.
In Intermediate Accounting I, undergraduates analyzed how he seemingly tap-danced around the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Rabbi Benjamin Blech’s philosophy of Jewish law course, students pondered whether Jewish values had been distorted to reward material success.
And he did tap-dance, successfully, for decades.
“This overrides everything else,” said Rabbi Blech, who has taught at Yeshiva for 42 years. “It is an opportunity to convey to students that ritual alone is not the sole determinant of our Judaism, that it must be combined with humanity, with ethical behavior, with proper values, and most important of all, with regard to our relationship with other human beings.”
Yeshiva is home to a seminary that ordains more modern Orthodox rabbis than any other. The school, which was founded in 1886, models itself on the Hebrew phrase Torah Umadda, which articulates the interweaving of secular and Jewish studies. Students do not have to be Jewish, but undergraduates do have to spend time studying religious texts.
A surprising fact: students at Yeshiva University do not have to be Jewish.
Some on campus said in interviews last week that Mr. Madoff’s arrest showed those values were in need of realignment. Several students said they felt dual, even competing, pressures to achieve material success as well as religious devotion, and worried that some might be prone to follow immoral paths if the rewards were alluring.
Material success is defined as success all too often. Billionaires are lionized.
“There’s no such thing as wanting to be a professor in this community,” said Josh Harrison, 23, a graduate student pursuing Jewish philosophy. “All my friends who are intelligent and interesting and asking questions are pre-med and beginning law school.”He added, “This will force a whole reassessment.”
One can only hope so.
“In elevating to a level of demiworship people with big bucks, we have been destroying the values of our future generation,” he said. “We need a total rethinking of who the heroes are, who the role models are, who we should be honoring.”
This is a startling case which is rocking many worlds; people have lost entire fortunes, and toltal losses are in the billions.
One institution affected is Yeshiva University: Madoff was on its board, and Yeshiva has lost $110 million.
In Intermediate Accounting I, undergraduates analyzed how he seemingly tap-danced around the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Rabbi Benjamin Blech’s philosophy of Jewish law course, students pondered whether Jewish values had been distorted to reward material success.
And he did tap-dance, successfully, for decades.
“This overrides everything else,” said Rabbi Blech, who has taught at Yeshiva for 42 years. “It is an opportunity to convey to students that ritual alone is not the sole determinant of our Judaism, that it must be combined with humanity, with ethical behavior, with proper values, and most important of all, with regard to our relationship with other human beings.”
Yeshiva is home to a seminary that ordains more modern Orthodox rabbis than any other. The school, which was founded in 1886, models itself on the Hebrew phrase Torah Umadda, which articulates the interweaving of secular and Jewish studies. Students do not have to be Jewish, but undergraduates do have to spend time studying religious texts.
A surprising fact: students at Yeshiva University do not have to be Jewish.
Some on campus said in interviews last week that Mr. Madoff’s arrest showed those values were in need of realignment. Several students said they felt dual, even competing, pressures to achieve material success as well as religious devotion, and worried that some might be prone to follow immoral paths if the rewards were alluring.
Material success is defined as success all too often. Billionaires are lionized.
“There’s no such thing as wanting to be a professor in this community,” said Josh Harrison, 23, a graduate student pursuing Jewish philosophy. “All my friends who are intelligent and interesting and asking questions are pre-med and beginning law school.”He added, “This will force a whole reassessment.”
One can only hope so.
“In elevating to a level of demiworship people with big bucks, we have been destroying the values of our future generation,” he said. “We need a total rethinking of who the heroes are, who the role models are, who we should be honoring.”
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