04-30-2019, 09:13 AM
The GI Generation, your predecessors, did not start out with a love for entrenched power, inequality, and cultural conformity. They developed these as they saw a huge improvement from the hardscrabble lives that most knew, and put the fault on the aristocratic elites that had developed in the Gilded Age under the Gilded Generation who accepted entrenched power, inequality, and conformity as the way of generating material and social progress. (The Gilded took on the Civic role due to their roles in the Civil War).
I look at Donald Trump as the exemplar of all that is wrong with the Boom Generation -- the ruthlessness, arrogance, and selfishness -- with none of the potential virtues (culture, vision, and principle) that exemplify an Idealist generation at its best. The Civic and Idealist approaches to making a better world are very different, and a Crisis Era allows success or creates failure to the extent that the very different approaches to making a better world coincide. Donald Trump's idea of a better world is one of high consumer costs, low labor costs, and the acceleration of resource extraction -- a slumlord's dream. If Trump is not a slumlord in the sense of struggling to avoid bankruptcy with destitute tenants, then his America is a slum of the soul. What can one expect of someone so soulless as he?
I have my idea -- it is experience, and not hoarding, that creates a rich life. Surely you have seen tales of hoarders who can't divest themselves of things that, now worthless, 'might be precious someday'. They have bought a bill of goods. They have no idea of what they have, and their lives may be in danger for having so much stuff that their dwellings become firetraps or that what they have can crush them. The hoarder is the optimum as a consumer for Big Business... until the oily rags spontaneously combust and cause a deadly and destructive fire.
I look at Donald Trump as the exemplar of all that is wrong with the Boom Generation -- the ruthlessness, arrogance, and selfishness -- with none of the potential virtues (culture, vision, and principle) that exemplify an Idealist generation at its best. The Civic and Idealist approaches to making a better world are very different, and a Crisis Era allows success or creates failure to the extent that the very different approaches to making a better world coincide. Donald Trump's idea of a better world is one of high consumer costs, low labor costs, and the acceleration of resource extraction -- a slumlord's dream. If Trump is not a slumlord in the sense of struggling to avoid bankruptcy with destitute tenants, then his America is a slum of the soul. What can one expect of someone so soulless as he?
I have my idea -- it is experience, and not hoarding, that creates a rich life. Surely you have seen tales of hoarders who can't divest themselves of things that, now worthless, 'might be precious someday'. They have bought a bill of goods. They have no idea of what they have, and their lives may be in danger for having so much stuff that their dwellings become firetraps or that what they have can crush them. The hoarder is the optimum as a consumer for Big Business... until the oily rags spontaneously combust and cause a deadly and destructive fire.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.